How blizzard could get players to come back

[connor778]

two words, its quite simple.

Legacy Servers.

WoW is a different game now, people came back with WoD and realized that fact, so they quit. Only way to get them back is actually give them the game that they liked playing.

[Thetruth1400]

Getting players back is the easy part. They'll be flooding back in once the prepatch/legion drops.

There's absolutely nothing to confirm that players are going to return for the pre-patch, let alone come back with Legion. WoD was supposed to be something that it ended up not being and a lot of customers aren't willing to trust Blizzard on their word alone again.

It's getting them to stay that's the hard part.

Getting players to stay didn't used to be a problem, it's when they made everything overly easy to access that players started leaving because there was nothing to do. With how little Blizzard currently offers, it's not a surprise that people play for a month, finish the content, quit until their next patch hits in 6 months, play for another month, quit, then Blizzard announces the next expansion so people just don't come back until the next expansion because there's so little incentive to stay.

Depending on how the final product is, we'll see the subscribers stay high or drop low.

We'll see if they ever get high again is more like it. Blizzard lost 45% of their player base, then decided to just up and stop reporting their sub numbers. Anyone with any economic sense can tell you that it stopped getting reported because it was bad. Couple that with the fact they rolled all their earnings into one lump sum instead of the usual break down by game, and it reinforces the fact that WoW has nowhere near as many subs as they used to. Again, this means it isn't about the subs staying high, because they aren't, but instead getting those disheartened people back, and then from there, retaining them.


All that aside, I think Blizzard needs to start throwing as much content as they can at the players and hope that there's always something of interest for them. They need to go back to a Vanilla like model of content every two months, be it a battleground, dungeon, or raid. Frankly, they need to have all of those on a rotating schedule for the entirety of the expansion. Legion can launch with it's nine dungeons and two raids, but after that it needs to add in at least one dungeon and raid every 4 months. I don't care if it's both at once, or a dungeon two months out then the raid two after that, followed by another dungeon two after that, etc. but it needs to happen.

Along with that, yes, all old expansions need to exist as time locked realms. If people want to play on those realms, there shouldn't be anything stopping them. If I feel like going back and playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare, I can because Activision is smart enough to see that there is still demand for a game they made back in 2007. Considering Blizzard is partnered with them, you'd think Blizzard could take a hint and do something similar. So what if only 500 people play on that realm that is going to only be getting bug fixes? That's still $7,500 in their pocket for the active sub that they currently don't have by not offering that kind of service. Anything Blizzard can do for an extra sub, they should be, at least, trying out.

[Crimewave]

for WoD they seemed to listen to only the 5% of heroic raiders in MoP

That's why raiders got lesser content than ever with horrendous class design and split run chores.
Stop with "raiding expansion" fallacy please, it makes you people look like children.

[Verraad]

Get rid of the LFG tools and bring back the server pride and community feeling of World of Warcraft.

[Avaddon]

Hire a group of the best scientists in the world, try to build a time machine to rewind time to the moment some guy sat in the blizzard meeting and proposed WoD, shoot him in the head.

or

Hire MiB to go around erasing everyones memories of WoD.

[RickJamesLich]

Content is only half the issue, the other half is the content has to have a shelf life. Anything that is beatable on the first try, with zero knowledge of the encounters, will end up getting extremely boring extremely fast.

[Artelia]

Best and most rewarding content is for elitist. So others just leave. And you know what? Legion is again about this same bullshit. Elitist get better gear and more rewarding content. Legion is now doomed same as wod.

You just can't make game where only 0.5% players get best rewards. Just you can't or you fail.

[Eon Drache]

WoD has seen the steepest decline ever in subscription numbers, and even very shortly after release. They are obviously not doing what the fans want.


I always hear that its the age, but good games that are continuously updated don't really age in eyes of the fanbase, CS being a prime example. It's been renewed in several iterations, but its basically the same 18 year old game: and as popular as ever. Same with LoL and DOTA..

WoD did everything wrong (i know it's cliche) but removing talent trees, professions (they're barely there anymore), introducing farmville (uhm garrison), the major patch which only updated the garrison was an outrage (back in WoTLK, the first major patch had Ulduar.. enough said). So when people say content, they're right. Content is needed, MoP did a much better job than WoD (which is also why it stayed more popular).

Anyways, for the first time, I actually doubt I will play the next expansion. Legendary wep doesn't appeal to me, and neither does the lore-changes. I know some that will join, so if they "like" it after a month, I might give it a shot.. but standards have dropped and the subscription number tells the story (which they stopped publisning if I recall).
In the meanwhile, servers like nost and Kronos surged in popularity. Nost got so big Blitz felt the need to shut it down.. doubt it was because Nost was free. Vanilla WoW is only free if ones time has no value...

That drop followed the largest increase in subs, too. Almost point for point people came and left in about the same numbers. One could argue very easily the 3 million~ subs that were gained and lost weren't people that were actually talking to blizzard or part of their current base so there was nothing to listen to. On the Beta garrisons were fairly well received. The beta was pretty liked. Turned out though, those features weren't liked so much in 4-5 months.

[Dartz1979]

Content is king.

Yes i agree with you contest yes and also they need to remove CRZ from the game theres many reasons why i moved my toons to a LOW pop server i don't want other players on another server stealing my quest stuff and rare spawns.

[Spotnick]

Make guilds and server communities relevant again is the key. If people don't have friends to log on to, they will obviously stop logging on at some point.. WOW is really boring when played solo. And it goes without saying, quanlity content (so, no more useless selfie patch, more dungeons, quest hubs and battlegrounds)

I could also say more depth to our characters, they wanted to do class identity in Legion but I don't think they are going far enough. We need more customisation and more class AND race identity. And by that I mean unique talents and talent trees, bring back race specialisation, make professions relevant.

The matchmaking should always prioritize people from same realms. probably more realm connection needs to happen and they need to rename those to a unique server name for more identity... could keep the legacy server name as last name, idk, but the key is still building better communities.

What hooked me to the game was being recruited in Desolace by a friendly guild who helped me learning about the end game and I logged on night after night to do interesting activities, dungeon runs, helping others in group quests, etc... that was in Burning Crusade, farming badges of justice in hard heroics was probably the best end game I could have asked with guildees, we were not good, but doing 1 or 2 dungeons per night was a blast, and then out weely Karazhan.

[HuxNeva]

You are vastly over estimating the reason people loved pirate realms. Main reason it was free.

No, you are wrong. People can play WoD for free if they want, I know I did before I quit, garrisons provide so much gold I still have tokens sitting on my account. People play private servers because legacy wow was a better game in some important aspects. Manny have stated they wouldn't mind paying a subscription to Blizzard for it if that is what it takes to get legit/stable servers.

[Dartz1979]

Get rid of the LFG tools and bring back the server pride and community feeling of World of Warcraft.

LFG tool is never gonna get removed it helps get groups made faster besides if there was no LFG tool how would ashran even be possible cause not everyone pays attention to channels, we all venture out and play and have fun with the game and what not.

[Crimewave]

You still got a hellva lot more content then anyone else. one less raid teir whoa. But everyone got fucked in WoD. some got fucked less.

This whole expansion was based on casual non raiding content aka garrisons\mission table\followers.
Did it worked out? Of course not, but it's not our fault. We are got shit on too, but due to more stable nature of raiding content it looked prettier.
I just do not understand why people acting like raiders were having a good time when you suffered. This expansion was not good for anyone.

[HuxNeva]

Hire a group of the best scientists in the world, try to build a time machine to rewind time to the moment some guy sat in the blizzard meeting and proposed WoD

If you're going to build a time machine, you might as well go back further to the meeting where they went 'Right, this game has attracted 12 Million players, but how do we get to 100 Million? We'll have to make it more accessible!'

- - - Updated - - -

100 Blood Elf Priest
Embers
10830
/2 lfg heroic dungeon no hunters
/2 lfg heroic dungeon no hunters
/2 lfg heroic dungeon no hunters need heals
/2 lfg heroic dungeon no hunters need tank
30 min later
/p OMW to stone

get to stone

/p no one is here
[random guy] where is UP again
[tank] I gtg
/p sigh

/2 lfg heroic dungeon no hunters

fuck that.

You forget the part where [random guy] and [tank] get a bad rep and nobody want to group with them anymore. Or the part where your GM will talk to their GM and they get a good scalding for trashing their guilds reputation.

[Spotnick]

No, you are wrong. People can play WoD for free if they want, I know I did before I quit, garrisons provide so much gold I still have tokens sitting on my account. People play private servers because legacy wow was a better game in some important aspects. Manny have stated they wouldn't mind paying a subscription to Blizzard for it if that is what it takes to get legit/stable servers.

I did play on a legacy server, WOTLK one. I gave up at some point because it reminded me how painful leveling was back then and I didn't want to invest again that amount of time to level characters when I have done it in the past. We were 20 doing that and we all gave up at some point even though we were excited about it.

So I have a feeling this would be what would happen if they did legacy servers.. eventually with time, it would only attract a very small percentage of the people.

I'm quite sure however they could do something very interesting with Caverns of Time, so they could add back all they removed from the game in there, like the old Azeroth, the old dungeons and Zul'aman/Zul'gurub.

[Jerichofr]

You forget the part where [random guy] and [tank] get a bad rep and nobody want to group with them anymore. Or the part where your GM will talk to their GM and they get a good scalding for trashing their guilds reputation.

You forget where that didn't happen nearly as much as the nostalgia critics like to make everyone think it did.

[HuxNeva]

That drop followed the largest increase in subs, too. Almost point for point people came and left in about the same numbers. One could argue very easily the 3 million~ subs that were gained and lost weren't people that were actually talking to blizzard or part of their current base so there was nothing to listen to. On the Beta garrisons were fairly well received. The beta was pretty liked. Turned out though, those features weren't liked so much in 4-5 months.

Marketing: We realized our mistakes. We're going back to TBC!
Fans: Hell yes! I'm coming! (+3 M)
Game releases: WTF is this? This is not TBC style. I'm outta here! (-5M)

So garrisons were liked as long as you didn't have to play them?

[Verraad]

LFG tool is never gonna get removed it helps get groups made faster besides if there was no LFG tool how would ashran even be possible cause not everyone pays attention to channels, we all venture out and play and have fun with the game and what not.

I understand it's probably never going to get removed but this game wasn't always about doing things the fastest. Forging a sense of community and making connections was what kept a lot of people coming back day after day. I don't PvP, last I heard people were frustrated with Ashran, do people want things like Ashran in the game? I can't comment on that. Without the LFG tools, if you wanted to run a dungeon you did pay attention to the channels though, if you didnt want a dungeon, you didn't.

[Spotnick]

Garrisons were fine. Warspear and Stormshield weren't.

The huge mistake of Legion was probably to cut Karabor and Bladespire in Capitals, give us the worst hub possible and put everything you need instead in your garrison so you'd have no reason to even leave it.

There is a reason why so many people have their hearthstone in Shrine still.. they gave us completely useless cities on Ashran where you had zero impression you were linked to the Draenor story.

Pretty sure nobody will complain about going back in Dalaran.

[MasterHamster]

By not removing everything that takes time, so that endgame after the joke we call leveling, people don't get geared for heroic HFC in 2 days /played