the REAL reason why WoW has shifted so much (for the worse)

[Deleted]

Your opinion. Nothing more, nothing less.

---------- Post added 2012-07-17 at 03:21 PM ----------

I think MoP is going to do well in the US, but in EU all the talk is about GW2 at the moment, my friend works for the biggest gaming sales company in Sweden and not 1 pre order for MoP yet , for GW2 they are sold out with pre orders.

It could also be peeps maybe going the digital route this time as opposed to owning a hardcopy but even 6 months before cata had a release date they had over a 1000 pre orders so MoP in sweden at least doesn't seem to be taking.

My friend works for the biggest gaming sales company in the whole of Europe and he says that nobody is talking about GW2 and they have sold out of MoP pre-orders. See, I can lie too!

But anyway, I doubt GW2 is "all the talk", nor is MoP "all the talk".

[Tharkkun]

I think MoP is going to do well in the US, but in EU all the talk is about GW2 at the moment, my friend works for the biggest gaming sales company in Sweden and not 1 pre order for MoP yet , for GW2 they are sold out with pre orders.

It could also be peeps maybe going the digital route this time as opposed to owning a hardcopy but even 6 months before cata had a release date they had over a 1000 pre orders so MoP in sweden at least doesn't seem to be taking.

GW2 is also no subscription fee so you can easily play both. Many of my friends also are talking about GW2 but I refuse to fall into the hype that has been behind every single mmo since Wow. I will probably check it out though.

The best thing that could happen is GW2 is successful and gives Wow more competition.

[Orwell]

GW2 is also no subscription fee so you can easily play both. Many of my friends also are talking about GW2 but I refuse to fall into the hype that has been behind every single mmo since Wow. I will probably check it out though.

The best thing that could happen is GW2 is successful and gives Wow more competition.

Well since guild wars was quite successful despite wow and also showed some really well thought design decisions (not to mention hours of fun) I expect GW2 to be a good game.

[Deficineiron]

I see your 11 million milestone and raise you an extra 1 million players.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/10/07/wo...llion-players/

Announced about a week before the Cata pre-patch.

So that obviously means that WotLK was a resounding success and months of Icecrown Citadel swelled the player base.

wow had been at 12m in early 2009 already once, stated the (former) chairman of activision-blizzard/ceo of vivendi, who is by definition an insider and would have known.

wow then bled western subs for most of wotlk. china hit new sub highs in dec 2009 and continued to grow through 2010. There were less western players at the end of wotlk when that 12m was hit again than 20 months before.

also not sure if you are being obtuse intentionally, but it is a discernible pattern to see former subs return at the end of an expansion/during the launch of a new one. At this point is anyone going to contend otherwise?

[Deleted]

considering this is all opinion based there's no way you can proclaim this as the real reason, everyone's is different.

Nice try...

[Flaks]

Wanna know the real reason?

The community. First they said things were too hard, then it was too grindy, then it was too fast and too easy and too casual. Then suddenly it was too hard again, then it became too easy again..... This constant storm of bickering and complaining is what is making "shift".

I'll extend that very sound reasoning out a bit and say the real reason is: Blizzard listened to their playerbase. There's no reason for them to have. No reason for them to follow some bullshit data trends that have obviously ended up shitting on their parade instead (like "EVERYONE LOVES HARD CONTENT LOL NVM EVERYONE LOVES EASY CONTENT).

The game really was drastically gaining players throughout vanilla and tbc. Why they ever began to shift from how the game was then I'll never understand. Things needed changing/evolving obviously but they had a damn good formula that worked. They just happened to break something while trying to fix what wasn't broken.

[Deficineiron]

Alex Afrasiabi was a quest designer in WoW, he had nothing to do at all with the raid endgame.
Jeff Kaplan had, but considering how his last raid in WoW was Naxx 2.0 and that was considered the biggest failure by the hardcore raid community i´m not sure if you should praise him so high...

Did jeff Kaplan decide how to tune naxx25? There is specific reason to think the tuning wasn't as blizzard preferred - the reason being that blue says so, in plain english. Unfortunately, the blue poster isn't identified. If anyone knows who wrote the post this is from, I would be interested.

http://www.wowhead.com/news=185561/b...o-inaccessible

Raid bosses aren't designed with pick up raids in mind, but the bosses should get more challenging as a raid progresses through the instance. Naxxramas is perhaps not a good benchmark to set raiding expectations against for a couple of reasons. It was content that a number of players were already familiar with, and it was also tuned to a difficulty that was a bit lower than we would have preferred.

I personally think blizzard was told to make all the content in wotlk release 'accessible' and that is why both heroics and naxx were released at a very, very low difficulty vs. comparable bc content. My general suspicion is that the content was done and mostly tuned, and they just went in and % descreased enemy dmg across the board. It would certainly explain why heroic instance wrath mobs had little if any discernable dmg increase from bc heroic instance mobs.