Earnings Call: PR talk for WoW translated

[Teri]

Legion is going to be a massive failure on the same level as WOD, and the data corollaries we have seem to agree.

If Legion were successful, Blizzard would be proud to actually release sub numbers again.

IMO, the current devs are both extremely egotistical and clueless, a dangerous combination.

It looks like it will be, despite being optimistic for the first 3 months.

People will quit due to various reasons, and I think one reason that's often overlooked is, especially by blizzard, theres just way too many low pop/unbalanced servers again, sure you can say "go transfer off", but I think even with the gold to bnet balance, people with multiple characters are still screwed.

Not everyone played WoD garrison you know (I didn't playy WoD at all , I play way more then average, and made 1.5m gold since Legion), but really not everyone has the same playtime/RL money to afford multiple transfers and/or faction changes.

Especially if you don't have much choice to where to go, there's only 1 large english pve server for each faction, if you don't want to go PvP or RP the next server is about 5-6x smaller. That does not solve the problem, that big server will only get bigger, and queues won't help.

[rda]

Turn this around for a second and pretend Blizzard just said all of their games lost 20% of the players they had relative to last year. How, in all honesty, does this impact you? Is there some other game you're going to migrate to? I don't know about you, but I've tried pretty much every alternative out there. The majority of them are steaming piles of garbage.

Look, this - "why do you care about subs?" - is a recurring theme, so I am going to write several lines as an answer.

We are looking not at a random dip down, but rather at a continuous decline. WoW already lost half of the players it had at its peak and Legion continues to lose them. Things like activity graphs and armory scans suggest that Legion continues to lose players about as fast as WoD did - which is, as we know, pretty fast.

So, why that matters? OK, we are losing subs, we've been losing them for years, so what, right?

Well, it matters because when you have a big lasting decline like that, at some point it starts changing the game. And it is changing the game to the worse, I guarantee that - we saw it happen tons of times before. What happens is that devs on the one hand try to cut their losses, reducing the amount of effort they put into the game, and on the other hand they are desperately trying to stop the bleeding and as a result come with things that aren't good at gameplay but are good at tying you up to the game and making you sub mindlessly out of fear of losing the "investment", etc (tons of tricks to pull here for the devs).

We are already seeing this. They are doing less new content and reuse more content. You think four difficulty modes for the same raids is a coincidence? And the gated open that drags for months? And three difficulty modes for the same instances? Plus like ten-fifteen-whatever is the ceiling for mythic+ modes on top of that? You think it is a coincidence that a new capital city is reworked Dalaran? That a new great-super-interesting mini-raid is reworked Karazhan? That the biggest bullet point of the expansion - artifact - has no gameplay of its own whatsoever, and has just levels which you can grind by doing other things = same twenty difficulty modes for instances and four difficulty modes for raids? And so forth and so on.

Same for keeping flying disabled. Same for selling gold for real money - and now the other way around as well, that's an incentive for people to be in the game they don't really enjoy in order because there is a carrot = no content, no gameplay, nothing, but a carrot. That's what the devs are putting efforts into.

It is already quite dire. It gets ridiculous sometimes already, ie, PVP had its own set of problems and when these problems combined with the overall decline in Legion, it turned out that the number of people who did rated BGs was so small, that the original formula for the highest rank (went to highest 0.1%) gave the highest rank to *less* than the number of people in a single BG team. They fixed that since, but that's the kind of thing that is awaiting us.

Hopefully that answers why we should care about what the subs are. If they are healthy, that's good, fluctuations aren't a big deal. But if there's a big, continuous decline, that's bad, because it will soon hit you. (Chances are, it already hit you, ie, you might want to raid, but your server has no raiding guilds anymore, so you have to migrate, same for PVP. You just didn't think about it like that.)

[SunspotAnims]

I have quitted WoW for like 6 months due personal reasons but man this community is still quite pathetic and keeps making
silly threads -_-.

It's getting sad and miserably predictable. Though I'm beginning to think it has always been that way and I'm just getting bored of the endless circle of personal rhetoric about who's opinion on a game is the "most correct."

I understand the point of discussion among people who play the game about its various intricacies, but to this point I still can't comprehend how some people spend literally years on a WoW fan forum with the sole goal of trying to convince others about how bad they think the game is.

[alturic]

Look, this - "why do you care about subs?" - is a recurring theme, so I am going to write several lines as an answer.

We are looking not at a random dip down, but rather at a continuous decline. WoW already lost half of the players it had at its peak and Legion continues to lose them. Things like activity graphs and armory scans suggest that Legion continues to lose players about as fast as WoD did - which is, as we know, pretty fast.

So, why that matters? OK, we are losing subs, we've been losing them for years, so what, right?

Well, it matters because when you have a big lasting decline like that, at some point it starts changing the game. And it is changing the game to the worse, I guarantee that - we saw it happen tons of times before. What happens is that devs on the one hand try to cut their losses, reducing the amount of effort they put into the game, and on the other hand they are desperately trying to stop the bleeding and as a result come with things that aren't good at gameplay but are good at tying you up to the game and making you sub mindlessly out of fear of losing the "investment", etc (tons of tricks to pull here for the devs).

We are already seeing this. They are doing less new content and reuse more content. You think four difficulty modes for the same raids is a coincidence? And the gated open that drags for months? And three difficulty modes for the same instances? Plus like ten-fifteen-whatever is the ceiling for mythic+ modes on top of that? You think it is a coincidence that a new capital city is reworked Dalaran? That a new great-super-interesting mini-raid is reworked Karazhan? That the biggest bullet point of the expansion - artifact - has no gameplay of its own whatsoever, and has just levels which you can grind by doing other things = same twenty difficulty modes for instances and four difficulty modes for raids? And so forth and so on.

Same for keeping flying disabled. Same for selling gold for real money - and now the other way around as well, that's an incentive for people to be in the game they don't really enjoy in order because there is a carrot = no content, no gameplay, nothing, but a carrot. That's what the devs are putting efforts into.

It is already quite dire. It gets ridiculous sometimes already, ie, PVP had its own set of problems and when these problems combined with the overall decline in Legion, it turned out that the number of people who did rated BGs was so small, that the original formula for the highest rank (went to highest 0.1%) gave the highest rank to *less* than the number of people in a single BG team. They fixed that since, but that's the kind of thing that is awaiting us.

Hopefully that answers why we should care about what the subs are. If they are healthy, that's good, fluctuations aren't a big deal. But if there's a big, continuous decline, that's bad, because it will soon hit you. (Chances are, it already hit you, ie, you might want to raid, but your server has no raiding guilds anymore, so you have to migrate, same for PVP. You just didn't think about it like that.)

I just don't get what you're trying to say? I personally don't think (for the amount of people they have/had working on it) WoW was releasing some massive content on a frequent basis. It's quite dire? Is WoW the first MMO you ever played? Because again, other studios would kill to have even 20% of CURRENT WoW subscribers. I guess my argument is more of 'WoW is a beast, no other game has ever come close to matching it's success and it's STILL successful in relation to other games on the market'.

As to your other points, um, obviously? As less money comes in, more people get let go in order to keep profits acceptable. That's business, that's it. Again, I really just don't see what you're trying to say, there's games out there that have long past their expiration date yet still continue to be worked on, and paid for. If you're simply trying to say people who have been around at WoWs peak will start feeling the people being let go, and less content being put out, then sure. No one can disagree with that statement, but there's too many words for that to simply be all you mean.

Now, what's always intrigued me, is how other studios can seemingly publish on a much more frequent basis, with seemingly more content than Blizzard did, can and does.

[rda]

Again, I really just don't see what you're trying to say, ...

The post you quoted was an answer to the guy asking "why care about subs". I explained why - because big continuous losses of subs make the game change to the worse.

[sosleapy]

It looks like it will be, despite being optimistic for the first 3 months.

hmmm....i havent seen my friends list this full since early MoP...I love legion i hate wod worst than any other expansion and stopped playing 3 months in. Legion is not grindy at all. People make it grindy on themselves. i raid 3 nights a week get on for maybe an 1-2 hours to do wq and talk to friends and i have 2 toons with 35+ artifact traits.

Hell i have never seen my three connected servers this full even since they connected back in MoP.

This expansion for me and numerous other ppl i know ranks in top 3...i am not a fanboi either i am just stating the fact

oh and i did have about 3-4 ppl stop playing but because they are bored of ANY mmo.

[rda]

How is is a weird comparison? You're saying less playing players would = less effort into update. Sure? So when WoW gets to sub-1million subscribers updates won't be as polished. When they get to sub 150k paying users (they would probably be smart enough to take it F2P before that happened) they would just "put much less effort into updates". So I'm confused how it's a weird comparison.

It used the word 'weird' because updates that Ultima Online gets can not compare to updates that WoW gets. It's different leagues in terms of effort.

There is a bigger point that 150k is fine when you always live that way, but once you get to 10 mil, it is very hard to scale back down. You'll just break your bones trying and crush.

[Teri]

Going by "subs" alone is not very accurate statistic at all , people that have a 6 month sub could play 1 week and still be subbed for the other 5.75 months.

Also I keep seeing how people used tokens to sub for the next Years? does that mean stockpiled tokens , or used tokens.

Then there's things like bots (if they aren't compromised accounts), multiboxers, shared accounts etc etc skewing numbers a little bit more.

Going by "server population" statistics (either on wow progress or realmpop or similar) also is one of those statistics that just dont work in it's raw form as we can have 50 characters per account, 12 per server.

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hmmm....i havent seen my friends list this full since early MoP...I love legion i hate wod worst than any other expansion and stopped playing 3 months in. Legion is not grindy at all. People make it grindy on themselves. i raid 3 nights a week get on for maybe an 1-2 hours to do wq and talk to friends and i have 2 toons with 35+ artifact traits.

Hell i have never seen my three connected servers this full even since they connected back in MoP.
ANY mmo.

Well everyones situation is different, I came back after 3 years, my server was pretty much completely shifted to low overall population (EU doomhammer/turalyon), which is about 70% opposite faction, yet I see more CRZ people from non-connected realms every day now compared to the first 3 months.

Right now my guild activity is dying out hard, and hardly anyone talks, and there's pretty much no server recruitment going on aside from a sporadic mythic raid guild. General/Trade chat are pretty much dead as well.

Mind you I don't raid in legion , I came in late and would have loved like a Normal-mode/ maybe heroic raid guild that raids weekdays, just haven't been able to actively find one on my server.

Yes I just bought €130 worth of bnet balance with gold so I could move off anytime but Blizz was supposed to announce something on server connections/mergers since blizzcon but it's remaining silent.

[rda]

hmmm....i havent seen my friends list this full since early MoP...

Well everyones situation is different, I came back after 3 years, my server was pretty much completely shifted to low overall population (EU doomhammer/turalyon), which is about 70% opposite faction, yet I see more CRZ people from non-connected realms every day now compared to the first 3 months.

Yeah, everyone's situation is different.

But here's something objective:

Legion enabled cross-realm for latest zones right at launch. All previous expansions only enabled cross-realm for latest zones in a prepatch for the next expansion. (The rationale was some usual BS about "server communities" - there's always some kind of BS from CMs whatever the decision. Guess server communities didn't matter much in the end.)

Did they do that because they had / anticipated too many or too few players? Obvious answer.

[Zenfoldor]

"Blizzard had record levels of quarterly and full-year in-game revenues, driven by World of Warcraft in-game content and continued strength of Overwatch customization items."

Doesn't matter how many millions of people are playing, or how sub losses in Asia change day to day. The game is making loads more money than ever thanks to micro-transactions. They will invest more into the game, not less.

Legion is also the best xpak so far, so I'm not sure why all the hate? Seems obsessive to guess at things like this in an effort to diss a game you pretend not to play and subscribe too. Must be a hunter main.

[Zenfoldor]

Yeah, everyone's situation is different.

But here's something objective:

Legion enabled cross-realm for latest zones right at launch. All previous expansions only enabled cross-realm for latest zones in a prepatch for the next expansion. (The rationale was some usual BS about "server communities" - there's always some kind of BS from CMs whatever the decision. Guess server communities didn't matter much in the end.)

Did they do that because they had / anticipated too many or too few players? Obvious answer.

Shard technology was created to prevent launch issues that plagued WoD, not to cover up low population for certain realms(though it does both tasks rather nicely).

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Legion is going to be a massive failure on the same level as WOD, and the data corollaries we have seem to agree.

If Legion were successful, Blizzard would be proud to actually release sub numbers again.

IMO, the current devs are both extremely egotistical and clueless, a dangerous combination.

My data corollaries disagree. Can you post yours.

[meheez]

Think with your own head. Legion is easily one of the best expansions.

[IceMan1763]

"Blizzard had record levels of quarterly and full-year in-game revenues, driven by World of Warcraft in-game content and continued strength of Overwatch customization items."

Doesn't matter how many millions of people are playing, or how sub losses in Asia change day to day. The game is making loads more money than ever thanks to micro-transactions. They will invest more into the game, not less.

Legion is also the best xpak so far, so I'm not sure why all the hate? Seems obsessive to guess at things like this in an effort to diss a game you pretend not to play and subscribe too. Must be a hunter main.

Legion the best xpac? What drugs are you on and can you send me some? Every poll I've seen ranks it 4th at best and those were taken soon after launch before the grindiness of it had time to set in.

Also they would make WAY MORE money from micro transactions and overall if they actually had a popular xpac that retained subs. Just because they can make up some lost revenue now with micro transactions doesn't make the xpac good or mean they are releasing good content.

Micro transactions are actually dangerous that way in that they mask what a bad job the dev team is doing in satisfying the potential player base as a whole.

[rda]

Shard technology was created to prevent launch issues that plagued WoD, not to cover up low population for certain realms(though it does both tasks rather nicely).

To prevent launch issues you allow sharding the same server. Allowing cross-realm in addition to that you do for a different purpose - to solve the issue of having too few people.

[Teri]

Legion is also the best xpak so far, so I'm not sure why all the hate? Seems obsessive to guess at things like this in an effort to diss a game you pretend not to play and subscribe too. Must be a hunter main.

Oh it definately has the potential to be if you are in an established group of people to run the content with, content isn't the issue this time around, it's the big servers or established guilds that seem fare well. As a returning player I don't have any such thing.

Not everyone is super socially gifted to manage their guild or group of people, I basicly know nobody in the game anymore, and CRZ doesn't make it better, pugging is not the same at all, some may be succesful at it, but not everyone wants to deal with it.

[Nosdrone]

In other news, ATVI stock is up 15.76% this morning.

[Zenfoldor]

Legion the best xpac? What drugs are you on and can you send me some? Every poll I've seen ranks it 4th at best and those were taken soon after launch before the grindiness of it had time to set in.

Also they would make WAY MORE money from micro transactions and overall if they actually had a popular xpac that retained subs. Just because they can make up some lost revenue now with micro transactions doesn't make the xpac good or mean they are releasing good content.

Micro transactions are actually dangerous that way in that they mask what a bad job the dev team is doing in satisfying the potential player base as a whole.

Many people agree this is the best xpak. Particularly on this forum.

As far as your argument of opportunity cost, I don't think any positive changes in the game would affect revenue much. Haters gonna hate, afterall. Anyone who could be won over by quality content, already has been.

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To prevent launch issues you allow sharding the same server. Allowing cross-realm in addition to that you do for a different purpose - to solve the issue of having too few people.

That's fair, perhaps I was confusing the two.

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Oh it definately has the potential to be if you are in an established group of people to run the content with, content isn't the issue this time around, it's the big servers or established guilds that seem fare well. As a returning player I don't have any such thing.

Not everyone is super socially gifted to manage their guild or group of people, I basicly know nobody in the game anymore, and CRZ doesn't make it better, pugging is not the same at all, some may be succesful at it, but not everyone wants to deal with it.

Yeah, I have a dedicated group, so that also may be one reason this particular xpak has been so engaging.

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In other news, ATVI stock is up 15.76% this morning.

Awesome, well deserved.

[IceMan1763]

Many people agree this is the best xpak. Particularly on this forum.

As far as your argument of opportunity cost, I don't think any positive changes in the game would affect revenue much. Haters gonna hate, afterall. Anyone who could be won over by quality content, already has been.

Many people who are still playing and on this forum, true. The majority disagree strongly.

You're right, and those that were won over by quality content in the past have quit the game over the last few years while Blizzard grasped at straws trying to figure out what made their game popular in the first place and made unbelievably poor design decisions with the game.

[jdbond592]

Unfortunately Blizzard doesn't care. WoW is still profitable and that is that.


Instead of making their own game, they started catering to "people". That killed it. Now no one is happy.

[Nosdrone]

It's really gotta suck to pour your heart into 12000+ negative World of Warcraft posts over a 3 and a half year period... all the while Activision Blizzard stock continues to rise and rise. Just think, when you first started your negative Blizzard posting... ATVI stock was trading at $16.97 a share. It's currently at $46.31 this morning and rising.

Talk about a waste of breath. The negative posts have influenced nothing. 3 and a half years of wasted time and energy.

World of Warcraft is going nowhere. Your PR spins are helping nothing. WoW continues to make profit, Blizzard continues to grow, and your tears continue to saturate MMO Champion.

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The majority disagree strongly.

The 'majority' are currently doing pet battles, running LFR, and playing with their transmogs.

You're the minority.