How will flight be handled the next expac?

[Dhrizzle]

Look at the Subs in WOD Launch. Then look at the subs decline in WOD till they stopped reporting subs alltogether. Compare the two.

Come back and say "sorry"

MoP ended with 6.8m subs. 15 months later (the last report) WoD was down to 5.5m, losing 1.3m over that time.

Cata ended with 9.1m subs. 15 months later (same period as above) MoP was down to 7.6m, losing 1.5m over that time.

[Wolfrick]

it ruins the game???You must be one of those people that ganks lowbies huh?I don't see any reason as to why it ruins the game.

I will try to explain my self, I am not a Lowbie ganker "Usualy I am the one who get Ganked".

But Flying Ruins the general feel to the game, try to see this situation: you are getting skins from Mobs around the world between each kill you mount up and fly to the next one... this makes it feel like a Hellicopter game... (I dont do this, but many do since it speeds up the Killing). but if you see this as a true Adventure game and you want to figuer it out as a Real world, no one would use a flying mount for suce a job..

[Harbour]

Id say this - topic of flying is the most annoying and unnecessary thing to talk about in wow-community.
Aren't you tired to create the same "WTF with flying" threads every years, every add-on, every patch? This is insane.
Is your gameplay that much affected by flying?
Do you spend 90% of your time flying?
Srsy, flying is one of the most irrelevant but discussed WoW topic of all time. Get over it, geez.

[Drusin]

I find that not having flight at max level doesn't make the game more immersive or engaging it just adds to the tedium.

Riding through a zone for the 20th time no different then the previous 19, dealing with WoWs horrible collision mechanics, and trash mobs so tightly packed you have little choice but to engage them even though they offer no threat challenge or reward is not engaging game play it is tedious.

^this.

I'm not immersed on alt #12 lol I'm just going through the motions.

- - - Updated - - -

Do you spend 90% of your time flying?

Yep I'd say I do lol.

[caervek]

The sub loss was bigger

Lol.

The sub loss from WotLK to MoP was 2.9m (12m-9.1m) the sub loss from MoP to Legion was >4.5m (10m to <5.5m).

And before you say "ermagerd teh subs rose at launch", "spikes" etc, what that crap is actually saying is that players who unsubbed during MoP because of the content drought, then resubbed for new content, then left because they didn't like it shouldn't be counted, which is stupid. If you refuse to count them leaving in WoD then you should refuse to count them leaving in MoP too.

The fact remains that the WoD exodus was the largest and fastest loss of subs in the game's history, coinciding with the largest/fastest decrease in high end raiding participation (or put simply WoD SUCKED).

[Fabinas]

MoP ended with 6.8m subs. 15 months later (the last report) WoD was down to 5.5m, losing 1.3m over that time.

Cata ended with 9.1m subs. 15 months later (same period as above) MoP was down to 7.6m, losing 1.5m over that time.

Must be blind or idiot. I mentioned WoD launch and WoD last sub count.

Also: Answer is in the post above me.

[Kragragh]

I will try to explain my self, I am not a Lowbie ganker "Usualy I am the one who get Ganked".

But Flying Ruins the general feel to the game, try to see this situation: you are getting skins from Mobs around the world between each kill you mount up and fly to the next one... this makes it feel like a Hellicopter game... (I dont do this, but many do since it speeds up the Killing). but if you see this as a true Adventure game and you want to figuer it out as a Real world, no one would use a flying mount for suce a job..

I see you want flying removed from the game...something tells me you won't be too popular with the wow community.

[Pendragon]

I'm praying that if they allow flying right away, they limit the duration. Have the flying mounts get tired or something and have a cooldown.

[Dhrizzle]

Must be blind or idiot. I mentioned WoD launch and WoD last sub count.

Also: Answer is in the post above me.

Yeah, because you were cherry picking the numbers that best illustrated your prejudices. If you miss out the obvious spike (as the post you quoted mentioned, I'll leave you to pick which word describes you) then there's a very clear trend of WoW losing ~100k subs a month for a sustained period with spikes from "cyclical" players when new content comes about. It isn't a coincidence that the largest, fastest loss of subs in the game's history came just after the largest, fastest increase in subs in the game's history.

[Fabinas]

Yeah, because you were cherry picking the numbers that best illustrated your prejudices. If you miss out the obvious spike (as the post you quoted mentioned, I'll leave you to pick which word describes you) then there's a very clear trend of WoW losing ~100k subs a month for a sustained period with spikes from "cyclical" players when new content comes about. It isn't a coincidence that the largest, fastest loss of subs in the game's history came just after the largest, fastest increase in subs in the game's history.

Actually you did the cherry picking that best illustrated your prejudices. Blizzard doesn't release new expansions in order to "spike" their sub numbers. They do so to raise them and hopefully keep them. Legion was much hyped, promised a lot and underdelivered. Heavily. It's not just the cyclical players that left back then. It was almost half of the player base that purchased WoD and found out how shitty gameplay was delivered.

[huth]

Actually you did the cherry picking that best illustrated your prejudices.

Actually you did the cherry picking that best illustrated your prejudices. Blizzard does release new expansions in order to "spike" their sub numbers and has in fact explicitly told us that people playing on and off is the norm, not the exception. They don't do so to raise and keep them, and are aware that it wouldn't work. Legion was hyped a lot, but delivered most of it, cyclical players are merely more common than you think, and do make up more than half the playerbase.

[Dhrizzle]

Actually you did the cherry picking that best illustrated your prejudices. Blizzard doesn't release new expansions in order to "spike" their sub numbers. They do so to raise them and hopefully keep them. Legion was much hyped, promised a lot and underdelivered. Heavily. It's not just the cyclical players that left back then. It was almost half of the player base that purchased WoD and found out how shitty gameplay was delivered.

And like I said, the vast majority of that "half the player base" were part of the spike that came for the expansion. Ignoring the spikes you'll notice a fairly constant loss of subs, with Cata-MoP showing a slightly higher net loss than MoP-WoD.

Blizz aren't stupid, they will have seen the way other MMOs (and other products) have a life cycle of growth, steadiness then decline. It's highly unlikely that they expect to find some sort of magic formula that will turn the clock back a decade to the glory days of WoW.

[Blamblam41]

Knowing Blizzard it will be par for the course on what we have now, annoying and stupid.

Maybe if they grew a brain and did it like FFXIV, maybe I'd actually play Legion beyond loitering in Goldshire.

[Totemslap]

They're petulant children about flying. So they'll lock it behind bullshit achievements and reps. They're still mad at players for disagreeing with them about flying. Don't expect them to change.

Funny how the only ones I've ever seen behave in a a petulant manner on this topic are forum posters such as yourself and OP. Blizzard has never been anything but calm and rational in presenting their basis for disallowing flight, regardless of whether or not you agree. To call them petulant because they don't agree with your argument - well, that makes you the child, friend.

[Blamblam41]

Actually you did the cherry picking that best illustrated your prejudices. Blizzard does release new expansions in order to "spike" their sub numbers and has in fact explicitly told us that people playing on and off is the norm, not the exception. They don't do so to raise and keep them, and are aware that it wouldn't work. Legion was hyped a lot, but delivered most of it, cyclical players are merely more common than you think, and do make up more than half the playerbase.

Players playing on and off is the norm because of Blizzard's own highly cyclical content release schedule, you could literally see quarter by quarter how each raid/filler patch was affecting subscriber numbers during that era. Subscribers are cyclical because Blizzard's release cycle is cyclical, which makes them releasing an expansion to boost subscriber numbers up not only plausible, but frankly one of the only ways for them to properly advertise their game.

[Fabinas]

Actually you did the cherry picking that best illustrated your prejudices. Blizzard does release new expansions in order to "spike" their sub numbers and has in fact explicitly told us that people playing on and off is the norm, not the exception. They don't do so to raise and keep them, and are aware that it wouldn't work. Legion was hyped a lot, but delivered most of it, cyclical players are merely more common than you think, and do make up more than half the playerbase.

Players playing on and off was a dev argument that was presented after the massive WoD exodus of subscribers. They had to justify their immense failure of an expac and now you just parrot them. GG.

[Blamblam41]

Funny how the only ones I've ever seen behave in a a petulant manner on this topic are forum posters such as yourself and OP. Blizzard has never been anything but calm and rational in presenting their basis for disallowing flight, regardless of whether or not you agree. To call them petulant because they don't agree with your argument - well, that makes you the child, friend.

It's not that I don't agree with them, it's that every reason they ever gave for not allowing flying has been disproven. Every excuse, every "makes the world feel empty" narrative, every strawman about quest design philosophy and every whataboutism involving the ability to just teleport anywhere in the world.

Blizzard is just plain wrong about their excuses around flight. It's a matter of their opinion and their design philosophy for their game and that's fucking it.

[Fabinas]

And like I said, the vast majority of that "half the player base" were part of the spike that came for the expansion. Ignoring the spikes you'll notice a fairly constant loss of subs, with Cata-MoP showing a slightly higher net loss than MoP-WoD.

Blizz aren't stupid, they will have seen the way other MMOs (and other products) have a life cycle of growth, steadiness then decline. It's highly unlikely that they expect to find some sort of magic formula that will turn the clock back a decade to the glory days of WoW.

Again: Calling the mass purchase of a new expansion a "spike" in subs is not doing Blizzard a favor. If the expansion was actually capable of hooking people they'd stay. Seems like you forget the mass problems with garrison servers, the bugs, the lack of meaningful max level content, the gutting of the remaining max level content when they re-inforced the raid restriction in apexis quests etc. WoW is the exception between MMOs, as proven by its longetivity on a subscription model.

[Dhrizzle]

Again: Calling the mass purchase of a new expansion a "spike" in subs is not doing Blizzard a favor. If the expansion was actually capable of hooking people they'd stay.

It's not about doing Blizz a favour, it's just explaining the very obvious trend and just as obvious spikes. Don't forget Vanilla, TBC and Wrath also lost lots of players (by the end of WotLK 100m people had tried WoW with 90m leaving again, but no-one says that those expansions sucked despite losing 90% of their players.)

Seems like you forget the mass problems with garrison servers, the bugs, the lack of meaningful max level content, the gutting of the remaining max level content when they re-inforced the raid restriction in apexis quests etc.

I haven't forgotten, but it's just another expansion with a list of features that some people liked, others hated and a few bugs that add up to "World of Warcraft dying." It's hardly a new story since the introduction of BGs, epics for tokens and massive server queues killed the game back in Vanilla.

WoW is the exception between MMOs, as proven by its longetivity on a subscription model.

Yet it's still showing the same growth/steady/decline pattern, just on a larger scale.

[Fabinas]

It's not about doing Blizz a favour, it's just explaining the very obvious trend and just as obvious spikes. Don't forget Vanilla, TBC and Wrath also lost lots of players (by the end of WotLK 100m people had tried WoW with 90m leaving again, but no-one says that those expansions sucked despite losing 90% of their players.)



I haven't forgotten, but it's just another expansion with a list of features that some people liked, others hated and a few bugs that add up to "World of Warcraft dying." It's hardly a new story since the introduction of BGs, epics for tokens and massive server queues killed the game back in Vanilla.



Yet it's still showing the same growth/steady/decline pattern, just on a larger scale.

100m accounts, not people. I, for one, had 3 different WoW accounts, 2nd one started in WotLK and 3rd started in Cata. Equalising accounts with people playing is just plainly wrong.

Noone said WoW was dying. I was explaning why 10 mill subs at start of WoD became 5.5 so fast. And i still stand by my belief it wasn't the cyclical player nature that caused the huge sub drop. I just won't accept that all those 3-4 mill subs (that was the "new subs" from MoP end to WoD Launch right? correct my numbers if wrong) were just ppl who paid 50 (or 60, cant remember) euros to play WoD for 2-3 months and then unsubbed to play something else, because of the "cycle".