"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
If there is even a sub loss. Dont be so definitive. You'll just look silly if it's a sub gain. But I have gone with 100-500k. I really dont feel it has dropped too much.
Well, virtual realms are proof enough that they *expected* losses (long-term, not this quarter), so I guess losses are more likely than gains.
reverse merger. activision bought blizzard from vivendi with stock, but because they paid vivendi with a majority f ownership of the combined companies, this is referred to as a reverse merger. In my experience where you see the 'seller' of assets (vivendi here) walk away with outright majority ownership of the publicly traded entity, its usually with otcbb shells as a short-cut to get exchange listing, rather than two real entities with actual assets, revenue, etc.. maybe I trade the wrong class of things, though.
- - - Updated - - -
no idea on this stock today nor earnings, but leaks, accidental posting, embargo breaks, html invisible-=visible coding errors, etc., happen, and earnings often are public before the co. releases them. Google had a fairly high-profile example of this happen to them earlier this year. Don't recall seeing them be fined yet. I would say I run into an example of some type of accidental release (usually within 24 hours of scheduled release) at least once a month. Often its by third party error where third party has access to the release and doesn't handle it right, puts somewhere on a public searchable website, etc.
As an aside, there are news trawler programs that specifically will go searching for erroneous early postings of eps docs for just this reason. a basic example of how one might do this is just get the right text string atvi always uses in their pre-amble on their release pr's that doesn't pull non-eps pr releases , make it right for q3 13, and quote search it on google. odds are very very low against it ever happening of course, but some search algos are finding all these embargo'ed docs on obscure website directories.
- - - Updated - - -
I don't have to buy shares and wait for t+3 to go look at this? no way, ur kidding!
Last edited by Deficineiron; 2013-11-06 at 04:08 PM.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
Mine was interesting in that once, we were High pop - during LK we had a super busy server. We lost a lot of players during Cata but as of February 2013, we still had quite a lot of raiding guilds, including 25 man raiding guilds.
Between February and May, many of those guilds did two things:
1) transferred to new servers (recruitment problems with the shrinking realm pop)
2) were led by people who decided to quit the game, and the newly orphaned players transferred to higher pop realms to find new raiding guilds, or quit (I knew people of each type)
The half price server transfers in early summer killed what was left of the server. People who had been hesitating due to cost moved off in droves. Others who still couldn't afford to move or didn't want to give Blizzard any more money have quit because there's nobody for them to play with. To my knowledge there are only two 10 man raiding guilds left. At this point, 95% of my logged-in friends list in the evening is BattleTag friends on other servers, the locals in the list are gone/unsubbed. I spend almost all my time in cross realm groups.
From what used to be a High pop server during Classic through LK, and fell to Med/Hi during Cata, it is now very Low. It is not uncommon to only see 2-3 people in the Shrine in the evening. It's honestly kind of shocking that everyone is gone.
I think maybe if I had always been on a low pop server, it would not feel as shocking. But I've been playing since release day in 2004 and spent a lot of time on High pop servers with queues, so this desertion feels like a big deal.
2 hours left for the call, right?
Yep.
Personally, I'll be very surprised if it's under half a million lost. I'd venture to say it's actually closer to over a million lost, but 5.4 coming out less than a week before the end of their cutoff date is going to pad those numbers by those people that return for a month, beat the content, then quit again. Q4 is going to hurt since they'll have no new content, but Christmas sales will pad that a bit as well. Q1 of 2014 is where the real deal shows. They're going to have nothing new except maybe a minor content patch to carry them through. That's when I expect to see WoW dip down to the 5 million subs range of characters.
They come for the bonfires and marshmallows
The server merges reflect the sub loss. NA forums look eerily like the Korea forums did when they started merging a couple years ago with players begging and pleading for their server to be merged. Korea is down to 9 servers now from 34 during T15.
Did you think we had forgotten? Did you think we had forgiven?
Many people played this game for 5+ years, 5+ years is a huge part of your life time, specially if you are under 30.
I have been playing for almost 6 years. Since last year i only pay like half of the months in a year. I check MMO-Champion everyday to see when it's worth to come back. Normally it's on major patches.
I predict an increase of 10 million subs! I love you Blizzard.
The call is at 1:30 PST / 4:30 EST, after the stock market closes. Earnings calls never take place during trading floor hours.
- - - Updated - - -
The other thing that could help them 4th quarter is giving away a good anniversary gift at the end of November. You have to pay for a month to log in and get it. It'd have to be something awesome like the enchanted fey drake, though, not just a "logged in during the anniversary" achieve, to get people to pony up.
ETA: I also had forgotten this, but there's a new greench mini pet in the pet journal that I assume will either be a gift or a drop from the greench event at Winter Veil. I don't know that a mini pet would be enough to encourage someone to resub for a month tho.
Last edited by goblingirl; 2013-11-06 at 08:30 PM.