Such as? Name what you think they have that is so great for analyzing why people unsub. They mostly have the same very imprecise proxies that we all have in the armory, they just have it more readily. They can measure for specific things via instrumentation, but that does not help in big and open-ended questions like this one bit.
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How???
Illustrate pulling "I have less time to play now". If someone starts playing less and less week after week, is that because he got a job / wife / whatever, or because he plays a different game now?
Illustrate pulling "my friends don't play anymore". Analyzing chat / groups is fickle because friends might have stopped playing half a year ago, you are looking for a needle in a haystack.
All you can do is make very vague attempts at gauging this. With absolutely no conclusive results.
Well, they can do what I said a few posts up. Indeed, I suspect that is exactly where GC's comment about those two causes comes from.
You can properly complain this is correlation, not causation, and also shows proximate causes. You may quit after playing less, but why were you playing less? You may quit after your raid group broke up, but why did it break up?
It's pretty clear that their insight into why players have left is imperfect, since they keep making changes that don't work that well. Some of these changes they will even admit (in the NY Times, before shareholders) were fundamentally misconceived.
"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?"
Are you referring to this:
"BTW, they should be able to tell from in-game stats who your "friends" are: they are the other players you tend to group up with and exchange messages with. Extracting clusters like this should be straightforward from their server logs. They should be able to see that these clusters tend to leave the game together, or that someone is at increased risk of leaving if their cluster falls apart. This, not exit questions, may be the source of his observation about people quitting because their friends left."
?
I said why this is not going to work already - you are looking for a needle in a haystack. You will have to work with thin thresholds to filter out the data trying to get the signal and in the end the signal will be weaker than the heuristics you will use to filter.
I don't even need to go into correlation vs causation and other soundbites which are popular on the forums. You just won't have anything to analyze.
Remember 4.3?
I don't want to explain, what terrible things happened with playerbase due to this hard heroics... 30 minutes queues, elitism, kicking players for no reason, tanks/healers refusing to continue doing dungeon, quitting dungeon immediately/for no reason, intentional wiping, ninja-looting, extremely toxic atmosphere. No wonder, that so many players quit forever after that. Remember, when deserter and kick imun systems were implemented? Game has never recovered from this disaster. Dungeons have never became as great, as they were back in WotLK, again. Even Blizzard admitted it: random groups and hard content - two mutually exclusive things.
LFD was implemented with one purpose only - more experienced players should have helped to new ones to gear up, cuz back in WotLK interest to 5ppls started to drop at some point and new players still were coming to game and still needed to gear up for raids. In exchange Blizzard implemented several privileges, such as being able to get reward more, than once a day. Remember, that premade group could do 5ppl just once a day? M? But hardcores forgot about it. And started to treat LFD, as granted - i.e. as "their" content. That caused GC's "Heroics are not for you" mentality. Why would organized premade/friend/guild groups need LFD? They didn't need it. Don't carry other players? There is no reason for you to be able to port to dungeon, do it as many times a day, as you want, and get extra gold/badge rewards.
Last edited by WowIsDead64; 2017-02-14 at 01:58 PM.
I don't care about Wow 11.0, if it's not solo-MMO. No half-measures - just perfect xpack.
"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?"
I don't have details now, cuz it happened long time ago. But it isn't just assumption - Blizzard themselves admitted it. Admitted officially - i.e. on forums. Even in GC's dev watercoolers, if I remember it correctly. They even opened scary truth to us - that majority of playerbase are casuals, who don't even raid. Remember? No?
P.S. It seems to me, that Blizzard make the same mistake again and again. Try to revert change, when there is no way back, cuz two years of xpack - isn't so short period to just say "Sorry guys, we changed our minds. You were happy to play our game in the past, so we assume, that you will be happy to play old version again." Something like to make casual-friendly WotLK and then all of a sudden to change mind and to try to make it hardcore again. Or to have flying for 8 years, except short periods of leveling and then all of a sudden to decide to say "You were happy without flying in Vanilla". And then wonder "Ahh. Half of our playerbase is new players, who've never seen previous xpacks and don't know how it was and used to new game? Crap." Yeah...
Last edited by WowIsDead64; 2017-02-14 at 02:15 PM.
I don't care about Wow 11.0, if it's not solo-MMO. No half-measures - just perfect xpack.
Since maybe 1% of players post on forums, if that, how can you think a comment about a "majority of playerbase" is the result of forum comments?
No, when they say most players are casuals, they can easily figure that out by looking at the server stats of what players actually do.
If anything, forums are strongly biased toward the hardcore side, and are a very unrepresentative sample of the player population.
"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?"
Yeah, but 5 whys stop when you get to the core. To use the example of friends not playing anymore, if you start to investigate why the friends don't play, you're now asking a different question.
As for people who have less time, those people typically want time back (this is the boat I find myself in, I just haven't acted on it). It's possible to yield more stuff out of 5 why analysis, but usefulness is debatable for something like this.
Speaking from experience, back in vanilla I stopped playing because my friends stopped playing. Why did they stop playing? They had no money. Nothing to do there.
Do you mean GC's realization that random groups and difficult content don't match / that most players react to raised difficulty of a particular activity by stopping doing it?
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All this means is that in your case Blizzard could do nothing to keep you playing (short of giving your friends money, but we are talking about realistic things).
In other cases unwinding "because my friends stopped playing" further would have uncovered that they didn't like changes to raid formats or lore or whatever else.
That's assuming "because my friends stopped playing" was used as a real reason, not as a substitute for, say, "too many things are wrong and I am not in the mood of writing a page of text, so I'll just say one of the things gg wp bb".
That is not necessarily the case, people unsubscribing due to the lack of money may mean that the product/service is too expensive and the price needs adjusting.
Before someone jumps on me I am not saying this is applicable in WoW's case, only that events seemingly outside of the business' control can, once you scratch the surface, be influenced and turned into (more) profitable position.
If it was the most fun period for you, than you most likely were doing this dungeons with static/guild/friends? In this case, as I've already said - LFD wasn't for you. You should have done them, as intended - via walking there via your own feet and doing them only once a day. I really wished Blizzard to disable group queueing in LFD, as they've done it for BGs. Then we would have seen, how "fun" it would have been.
I don't care about Wow 11.0, if it's not solo-MMO. No half-measures - just perfect xpack.
You do understand what anecdotal evidence is? While things are connected there is so many factors that cause people to quit the game. Game design is among many therefor w/o any accurate data you can't really claim how big influence it has on subs. Getting bored of something doesn't even mean that something has to be bad.
Well, the same 3 people are in the thread with an obvious agenda to debunk what GC said.
What else is new.
I think it's insightful and more realistic than people are realizing, but that's just me.
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I mean but it is applicable. It's applicable to virtually anything that's time consuming.
Also this long post isn't in some sort of opposition--more-so elaborating upon it, or rather "piggy backing" off your point.
I've always attributed it to the fact that time is a bigger factor than most people realize. IE, what could happen over 10+ years to you isn't the same as what could happen to another person. Even more-so, the time is needed to play the game during a certain iteration of itself. Perspective is something that a lot of people, at least the vocal ones on the forums, don't take into account.
Perfect example: "Well, I can fit in the Artifact Power grind into my schedule. If you can't and you're quitting cuz of that that's dumb and stupid!!!!"
Coming from someone currently raiding Mythic, that's just one of several examples you could cite. In this specific case, for someone like me who's in his 20s now vs when I was in Middle School first starting to play the game, I really don't have as much time to play the game.
I come home from work, I get other things done, and then I play for a bit. But then I also need to get other things done before the Real Life grind starts again the next day.
Meanwhile there's people who after 10+ years have started families, had their priorities rearranged, gotten more time consuming jobs, maybe even lost jobs/taken a cut in pay that can't devote to the game.
There's just a lot of factors that don't come up. That's why whenever "new" content, especially an expansion, is released for WoW, people flock back for a bit. They still enjoy the game deep down, but it can't mesh into their schedules or lives as much anymore so they fiddle with it for a bit of time.
I just think anyone trying to attribute it to one singular thing, where everyone has their own definition of it, is wrong.
You can't say Flying is why. You can't say LFD is why. You can't say LFR is why. You can't say Class Changes are why. You can't say Real Life is why.
It comes down to a blend of all these things, some bigger than others. I think Real Life is the most prevalent reason coming from someone who still remembers how much time he used to play vs. now, which I'm more than open to admit.
But everyone has their own justifications.
So an individual can't simply have one specific reason for no longer playing? Call them anecdotes or whatever you will, but I'm very certain there are people who can and will name one particular feature, whatever it may be, as for why they no longer play. Just because someone stops playing WoW and cites a reason why that seems ludicrous to another person doesn't make that person wrong, or a liar, as other posts have suggested. Hell, I had a friend quit in MoP when they disabled Void Shift or whatever it was for shadow priests in ranked pvp. Silly as that may seem, the guy definitely quit over it.
Course, someone is free to think I'm a liar about it, even though the guy's armory no longer shows up due to inactivity, but whatever.
I never said that. My main topic was that it's a blend of reasons, primarily being Real Life from my point of view, that people seem to take for granted.
I mean, I quit after the first month of WoD because I couldn't see the reasoning behind Garrisons and not wanting to devote the time to developing it.
Counter argument: "Well, why would you come back for Legion? Isn't it more grindy?"
I feel like I have an actual choice in Legion as to how I can develop my character, along with the fact unless you're a Top 100 guild you can go at your own pace. That isn't to say Paragon Points aren't dumb--I think they're stupid. But that's why. I like WQs, my main spec's current design and the expansion's overall direction, but other elements such as what I cited (and more specifically the Legendary System) I can easily see people quitting over, especially if you Raid or play the game for "meaningful" character progression that's gated behind a Hamster Wheel Grind+RNG.
You citing "one of your friends" doesn't raise your point any higher, because I can cite the many friends I've made over the past 10 years no longer playing because their lives have developed since then. I've kept contact with them outside the game, and I've asked every time a new expansion comes out "Hey, you coming back?" normally to a resounding "No." because their priorities have rearranged.
Everyone has their justifications and reasonings, but my main point was that it can't be one singular thing. From my perspective, it seems to be more of "Real Life" than design decisions, similarly to what GC is citing. That's all.
Feel free to argue it--I'd love more perspective on the matter since it's completely subject to debate for anyone outside of Data Analysts for Blizzard.
However, don't completely denounce my point because you're choosing not to actually read my post since you cherry picked what you were responding to.
Your point that it can (and often is) a combination of points is completely fair. Your point that it can't be "just one reason" is where I'm throwing the flag.
Sure, you could interrogate the crap out of anyone stating one single reason and probably get them to eek out something else that would qualify as another reason, but what's the point? They've quit, they've stated why. Simply take it at face value and deal with it, no matter how stupid it may seem.