10.3 million subscribers

[Wildmoon]

I think Blizzard stick with WoW long enough. The WoW team may have lose some motivation. I think Blizzard is ready to move on to something new. WoW may not be their 1st priority anymore.

[Deleo]

I wonder what x-pac would have they made if it was in europe all those losses ^^ Now we get pandas :/ Imagine it was in Egypt... x-pac based around camels and sand all over the place....

New Race: Camelaen?
New Class: Pharaoh!!

[Deleted]

I do not care.. Even if we were 200k players only.. I would still play aslong as I have people to play with =) I do not play this game with the 10 mil. anyway.. Does not affect my gameplay at all

[Thetruth1400]

I thought they'd lose some subs but 800k surprises even me.

That's how I feel too. I expected maybe another 300K loss, but 800K honestly worries me.

It basically comes down to the numbers and the worth of the company. Checking the stock numbers, it's fairly sad that the stock dropped today considering it was also the release of Call of Duty.

The reason for the loss? Too many to name. Yes, players left because the game is so old now and they've been playing for 6+ years. At the same time, they also quit because the content isn't up to their expectations.

[Deleted]

...
a) the current developers are not as skilled as the ones that originally developed wow.

b) activision trying to reduce cost by having less programmers and less money budgeted to such things, and hiding behind the excuse of 'technical limitations'

You know this is also a very big reason that the content is not that good in Cata because Blizz has moved their best developers to other games in the past and the new ones ofc don´t know certan things that the ones before them knew.

[Deleted]

There's a lot of hype about Rift, yet it has like half a million to a million subscribers, and it's doing just fine. Why can't WoW have a million subscribers and do just fine? Of course it can. Yet it has ten times that.

One realm can support something like ten, maybe twenty thousand people? 10 million people still can't fit on a realm. I think those of us who play can still play on an active realm for a long time to come.

[Mif]

How can people posting on a WoW forums who actively play the game want it to die

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia

[Jaxi]

1) DMF = 1 week every month, you can do all the new DMF stuff in an hour
2) An 8 boss raid, that so far has received very little praise on the PTR
3) Transmog is fine, but it's not really gonna help subs, people aren't gonna sub to wow to play barbie with orcs
4) 3 new heroics to carry bad players through and wait 40 minutes to get into, hooray!
5) Raid finder is going to be a disaster, no vent, no real raid leader, 5 mans can barely complete dungeons, raids are going to be just impossible

#1 One hour seems pretty fast. I could be wrong though, but I guess we won't know till it goes live.
#2 Oh I've heard quite the opposite. Probably just who you talk to.
#3 You don't know that till it goes live.
#4 By that logic the most kick ass dungeon ever invented would still suck.
#5 Stop passing off your speculations as fact. We won't know until it goes live.

[Bytes]

#1 One hour seems pretty fast. I could be wrong though, but I guess we won't know till it goes live.
#2 Oh I've heard quite the opposite. Probably just who you talk to.
#3 You don't know that till it goes live.
#4 By that logic the most kick ass dungeon ever invented would still suck.
#5 Stop passing off your speculations as fact. We won't know until it goes live.

Your argument is completely smashed by the PTR.

Content just doesn't magically appear once a patch is done on the PTR, what you see is what you get for the most part.

[Azivalla]

1) DMF = 1 week every month, you can do all the new DMF stuff in an hour
2) An 8 boss raid, that so far has received very little praise on the PTR
3) Transmog is fine, but it's not really gonna help subs, people aren't gonna sub to wow to play barbie with orcs
4) 3 new heroics to carry bad players through and wait 40 minutes to get into, hooray!
5) Raid finder is going to be a disaster, no vent, no real raid leader, 5 mans can barely complete dungeons, raids are going to be just impossible

1) I see people doing the games for fun, staying in because the area is bloody awesome. DMF is more than dailies. It is a new environment that is just so inviting.
2) What? People like Dragon Soul. What server are you playing on?
3) It..never was suppose to? It was a small feature added in for the players. No one is going to be bought over dress up.
4) Stop playing on a shitty server then. Or stop being a bad player.
5) LFR is so easy that you don't really need vent or a raid leader. But people can still offer to set up a vent and one person is going to take lead anyways. LFR is for people to get better at raids, not to be taken into a serious manner.

[Deleted]

Your argument is completely smashed by the PTR.

Content just doesn't magically appear once a patch is done on the PTR, what you see is what you get for the most part.

This is true! I was on the PTR and tested most of the stuff there (incl DS Bosses) and I can only say: I share the same opinion!

[Wildmoon]

There's a lot of hype about Rift, yet it has like half a million to a million subscribers, and it's doing just fine. Why can't WoW have a million subscribers and do just fine? Of course it can. Yet it has ten times that.

One realm can support something like ten, maybe twenty thousand people? 10 million people still can't fit on a realm. I think those of us who play can still play on an active realm for a long time to come.

I don't think 1 million will be fine with Blizzard because they have like 5 projects in work that need to be funded. People say that Blizzard is greedy but the fact is they need more money than before because most of their projects are in development and WoW is what keep those projects going.

[Azidonis]

New DMF, final raid with the main antagonist of the expansion and 3 new heroics maybe?

Sounds similar to the ICC patch.

Forge of Souls 2.0 anyone?

Here's one... how much longer is Ghostcrawler going to be able to keep his job?

[PACOX]

I do not care.. Even if we were 200k players only.. I would still play aslong as I have people to play with =) I do not play this game with the 10 mil. anyway.. Does not affect my gameplay at all

Good attitude. I don't play WoW but people I follow a lot of criticism that comes in and out of the game. A lot of the criticism coming out is from number Nazi's, if x game doesn't have the same number of players as WoW it is a failure. If society ran like that civilization would crumble. Remember that even though a game like WoW has 10 million players you only see 0.5% and play with 0.1% of them (math might be wrong but you get the point). If you like WoW, then play it, if you don't then don't. I no longer find enjoyment in WoW but if others do than power to them and that goes with any other MMORPG out there. For some reason a good chunk gamesr (and I have to say WoW is part of the problem) feel like if you aren't playing the game they play then you are lame. If you prefer a directed at a more specific audience thant a general demographic, you fail. The same games wonder why the industry has become full of clones, the same gamers also shun any innovation in the market unless it comes to their game. Why do gamers hope and pray games fail and "kill" other games is ridiculous. The only game I am glad that didn't do well is Vanguard because it just wasn't ready.

[Deleted]

I don't think 1 million will be fine with Blizzard because they have like 5 projects in work that need to be funded. People say that Blizzard is greedy but the fact is they need more money than before because most of their projects are in development and WoW is what keep those projects going.

Plus a very BIG company building and lots of Devs and servers around the world. You know ppl who work for blizz want their paycheck too ...

[Deleted]

2) An 8 boss raid, that so far has received very little praise on the PTR

Funny, Fatboss are a top end raiding guild and they think 4.3s raids are shaping up to be great, if undertuned on some fights. Likewise criticizing things by putting a negative slant on them and ignoring any pros is about as effective a criticism as reading it in a childish voice.

1) DMF - a bunch of fun dailies that won't feel like they take forever to do like molten front due to only being there for 1 week a month, you can buy transmog gear of some of the old sets many people would love to own, plus a variety of mounts and pets - there's a pvp arena for the pvpers, a host of achievements and dailies that can be used to increase professions.

2) An 8 boss raid that has received praise from a top end guild, but promises normals that are undertuned enough for the casual masses.

3) Transmogrification, a feature the playerbase has been asking for for years, saying this isn't going to help subscriptions is idiocy. It's little quality of life things like this that help make people happier all round, I'd much rather play cataclysm than vanilla simply because the game was so poorly designed back then, it's the small quality of life improvements that have made the difference.

4) Three new heroics to mix things up a little for those VP capping, not only this, but heroics will be selected from the entire pool, not limiting you to selecting these three or the two troll ones for maximum VP, I've not ran heroics in months since I raid and don't need VP enough to put up with going to the same two 5mans over and over again, running from the entire pool and with three new ones will certainly get me back in every now and again.

5) Raid finder will be what the playerbase makes of it, if you go in there expecting to wipe the floor with bosses, no - that's not going to happen. If you form a PUG raid just like you would normally on your server, something my low pop realm has had NO problem doing on a regular basis each week on normal difficulty, not the much easier raid difficulty, then use the raid finder to flesh out spots, that should work a charm.

But God forbid we look at a blizzard product in anything but the most negative of lights, we might not be all cool and edgy then.

[ihyln]

Blizzard is in rare company. One of the few entities where the lead designer was responsible for the loss of 20% of the subscribers yet still has a job. The next closest company to match that kind of incompetence is Mythic. They fumbled DAOC which was the best Fantasy PVP MMO ever to exist, and then completely went derp on Warhammer online.

Congrats blizzard!

[Deleted]

I don't think 1 million will be fine with Blizzard because they have like 5 projects in work that need to be funded. People say that Blizzard is greedy but the fact is they need more money than before because most of their projects are in development and WoW is what keep those projects going.

I'm pretty sure they've got enough funding to do 207 games with 10 expansions each. I don't think it is, has ever been, nor will it ever be, a question about money. When WoW went live, Blizzard didn't expect it to become such a success. They didn't expect it to have a couple million subscribers, and that means they were expecting to make expansions for quite a small number of people.

If WoW's subscribers dropped to a million, they'd simply consolidate the players to fewer realms and use the excess hardware on Titan or something else. Then they'd lay off the extra employees, or transfer them to Titan or whatever. They could still continue making content patches and even expansions, seeing as though that's the scale they were always expecting.

[Bytes]

1) I see people doing the games for fun, staying in because the area is bloody awesome. DMF is more than dailies. It is a new environment that is just so inviting.
2) What? People like Dragon Soul. What server are you playing on?
3) It..never was suppose to? It was a small feature added in for the players. No one is going to be bought over dress up.
4) Stop playing on a shitty server then. Or stop being a bad player.
5) LFR is so easy that you don't really need vent or a raid leader. But people can still offer to set up a vent and one person is going to take lead anyways. LFR is for people to get better at raids, not to be taken into a serious manner.

1) Do you really think people are going to resub to WoW just to go to some "inviting environment" and do a handful of dailies?
2) I'm talking about on the PTR, genius, people that have actually played the damn raid.
4) Bad players don't carry people, when is the last time you've even done a heroic zg/za?, and how good you are at the game has no affect on your queue time.
5) Talk to people that have actually used the LFR tool, only a handful of LFR raids actually downed a boss, they would have to nerf the bosses into oblivion to be killed by the average player.

[Deleted]

I am fairly surprised. I mean I don't think anyone seriously expected an increase but not many expected loss this big either (I was thinking maybe 200-300k).

At least Q4 will definitaly be an increase because Blizz paid people off with free copy of DIII. Then Blizz fanbois will finally have something to cheer about (obviously ignoring the fact that it's actually Diablo, not WoW that got those people back).