"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?"
There is so much conjecture in this thread that the opinions expressed will always spark an outburst of comments. I haven't played World of Warcraft in a very long time, but this game sure has had massive changes involving the direction it went. I play random games with my friends from vanilla days and I posed the question as to why even increase level cap at all and develop 'level' content. The leveling is short lived, but once you hit cap... we expect a lot. It's an opinion, but I just find it an issue of wasted resources.
"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?"
You do here something that Blizzard tends to do too. Comparing the numbers of how many players have cleared the raids during each expansion. That number is not equal to the amount of players who had fun doing that. Counting those numbers might be quite misleading. I had more fun in the first boss of Black temple (one that we never downed) than I had in 6 bosses in (nerfed version of) Firelands. Why? Black temple felt dangerous place where one should watch out and focus on everything around him. How about Firelands then. We downed 6/7 bosses in one night with only one wipe. I was so dissapointed that I never cared enough to see Ragnaros. The atmosphere is COMPLETELY different. In Black Temple the atmosphere actually matched with the lore, things are evil there, you actually feel bit scared in a good way when you move there. In Firelands it felt like we were somekind of overpowered superheroes who kill everything they see.
If you just look at the numbers YOU don't know what people really think. My account is counted as one that didn't see anything in tier 11. Blizzard count's it as one who found the tier too hard, even tho the reason was that I had lost my faith in raiding after rewamped naxx in WoTLK.
I really hope Blizzard used polls and such to see what people find fun and what they find boring/frustrating.
The answer to this is relatively simple. Blizzard believes that players want or need to feel a sense that their characters progress over the long run. Moving from 80 to 85 and then to 90 while your power increases (bigger numbers) satisfies that purely psychological need. In fact, this has created something of a problem for the designers because the size of the damage/healing/health numbers are getting out of hand and that will need to be addressed (search for the technical term 'squish'). Now, I think that 'must progress' is something of an arguable proposition but only arguable. Several years of everyone being at the same level may feel somewhat stagnant to the casual gamer in which case they might say, "Thanks and adios."
So we get patches for end game and expansions to progress to the next thing. Moving sideways is not apparently an option and I can't say that I think it's viable for a mass-market game. Once you stop progressing, the game can more easily appear to be *over*. That's death for an MMO.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
Because being stuck in the "gear up new player - see him poached by more progressive guild - recruit - gear him up" was great fun. As always, some people liked running Kara or whatever...but other got sick to the hind teeth of it because of the continuing need to gear up new members of their guilds.
They are off. By about a factor of 10 in the first two. Not sure about the clearance of ICC myself though.In Vanilla I believe it was less than 10% of the population cleared Naxx, then about 16% cleared Sunwell in BC, and it was somewhere around 40% cleared ICC in WotLK. (These are stats I am trying to remember from past articles I can't find through google, so I'm sorry if they are off).
EJL
For anyone following this poster who confuses his post with a truthful statement (it isn't), know that this post is completely and totally false and can be easily verified as such on the activision IR page's filings.
---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 01:29 AM ----------
get this from the blizzard 2008 10k
they did 320m in q4 2008, with NO box sales in that number. They later changed things to include box sales in the mmo number.We consider the World of Warcraft boxed product including expansion packs and other
ancillary revenues as a single deliverable with the total arrangement consideration combined and
recognized ratably as revenue over the estimated product life beginning upon activation of the
software and delivery of the services. Revenues attributed to the sale of World of Warcraft boxed
software and related expansion packs are classified as product sales and revenues attributable to
subscription and other ancillary services are classified as subscription, licensing and other
revenues.
This number (and the revenue for 2008 in general for wow, all without box sales included) is a big part of the basis of my assertion that the western sub peak was in early 2009 (vivendi ceo's 12m sub comment). In fact, wow without boxes never matched that revenue number again, not even q1 2009. It is gaap, but not sure how much stuff in it would have been deferred anyway without boxes.Subscription,
licensing and
other revenues 320
Tangentially of interest, came across a comment in a filing from this time period that release of bc in 2007 was a part of why they sold more Classic wow boxes in 2007 than in 2006.
Last edited by Deficineiron; 2012-09-26 at 01:56 AM.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
I would just like it if instead of having to do "normal" dungeons and raids to acess the "heroic" versions which makes it a boring grind for the people who think normal is too easy and is just more gear grinding, that it was made so that you could somehow choose to "skip" normal stuff and go straight to the harder heroic dungeons + raids without having to go through normal just to get the gear required to start heroic raiding. It's like in diablo where you have to go through multiple "easier" difficulties doing the same content over and over again to get to the content that is at your skill level/considered challenging, whereas in TL2 straight from the start you CHOOSE what difficulty you start on and it will be hard from the start rather than hard after you beat the content once or more. Now as to balancing/implementing something along these lines is a different problem entirely. But something similar to this could solve a lot of problems people have with raiding since heroic content came out.
If my memory doesnt fail me, the actual numbers where that less than 2% of the population cleared Naxx 60 and less than 5 cleared Sunwell.
That was a big problem and a big reason why the system failed.
---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 08:17 AM ----------
At least the first 3 times in Cata that they announce a sub dropped in Cataclysm they also said that whiloe the subs dropped, the Blizzard revenue went up, mostly because of side services.
---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 08:23 AM ----------
Because more people enjoy leveling than raiding.
Raiders are a huge minority, even considering LFR raiding, there are still more people that HAVENT raided than the ones that did.
The game had massive changes, but oonly at the start of Cata Blizzard changed the DIRECTION. The direction of the game has been the same from Vanilla untill the very end of Wrath, make the most casual fiendly MMO in the markets. Only at the start of Cata that direction changed to try to cater for a vocal minority of hardcores qqing about Wrath.
We know how that ended.
Blizzard greates advantage is its greatest problem. The GUHE playerbase Blizzard has means that a lot of their players want different things from each other, so they have to develop for all of them.
That means leveling, lore, casual things to do, dailies, casual dungeoning, nono casual dungeoning, casual raiding, non casual raiding, casual PVP, non casual PVP etc, etc, etc
---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 08:39 AM ----------
What i say its not false, you might first want to check your facts before treating me as a lier
"Activision Blizzard on Tuesday announced better-than-expected Q3 2011 net revenues and earnings, reporting that the company delivered GAAP net revenues of $754 million, as compared with $745 million for the third quarter of 2010. This gain was achieved via digital channels, accounting for more than 57-percent of the company's total net revenues. "
Look at how much subs Blizzard lost in Q3 2011, while they earned 10 more million in revenue than the previous year.
So please, before calling other posters as liers, investigate a little and dont talk of things you dont have a clue about, thanks.
They may have said GAAP revenue went up from the previous year. This happens at the start of an expansion, since GAAP revenue includes deferred box sales revenue, and the year-ago quarter (at the end of an expansion) didn't have many box sales.
If you just want to look at what they actually made in a quarter, and not have things confused by deferred revenue, you look at the non-GAAP numbers. After the initial surge (when these included lots of box sales) non-GAAP numbers began to be lower than the previous year (before Cataclysm). Quarter-on-quarter, both GAAP and non-GAAP numbers also declined over the expansion.
Overall, they have not been saying WoW revenue has been going up, since it most definitely has not. Go look at the tables in the earnings reports; Deficineiron and I have been all through the expansion.
"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 just gave ane xample of Q3 2011. That is not because of box sales.
There is a reason why FTP games work, the revenue from secondary sources is Great.
Again, Q3 2011, (long after game launched, so not many box sales included) earned 10 millon more than Q3 2010.
tehir subs went down, their revenues went UP.
I dont know why you are trying to argue this, numbers dont lie.
Last edited by Crashdummy; 2012-09-26 at 12:21 PM.
Oh good grief. You gave numbers for all of Activision-Blizzard, a company that sells a number of other products than WoW. You've heard of the Call of Duty franchise, for example?
The earnings reports give numbers broken down more finely. In particular, there are numbers in the reports for just WoW revenue. If you look at these numbers, WoW revenue is definitely declining.
Let's look at Q3 2011, for example. Reports are available from http://investor.activision.com/index.cfm (and more specifically, http://files.shareholder.com/downloa...CY11_Final.pdf ):
Under "Non-GAAP Net Revenues by Segment/Platform Mix", "Online subscriptions" (definition: "Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties, and value-added services. "), we have:
Q3 2010 $282 M
Q3 2011 $274 M
This is particularly damning because Q3 2010 was the last full quarter of the Wrath expansion (outside China). And yet, non-GAAP net revenue had already fallen below that mark.
"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?"
Sigh. You are arguing something other than mmorpg/licensing/sub/other revenue and trying to pass it off as only Wow-revenue, then intermixing revenue and income. Furthermore, the profit numbers of wow are not released separately ANYWHERE, and product development isn't broken down by title. Not sure if you are arguing the blizzard revenue number as a whole (sounds like it), but you certainly aren't talking the category which, until q4 2011, included wow only. Wow's q3 2011 revenue (non-gaap) declined both sequentially and, if memory serves, year over year, and was roughly around 274m.
numbers don't, but posters can misrepresent what the numbers they post actually are. Why not post the column from the 10q your numbers come from?I dont know why you are trying to argue this, numbers dont lie.
---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 12:36 PM ----------
You know this of course but others may not - from q4 2011 forward, this category also includes call of duty elite, which as far as I can figure was maybe worth 30m for ths category in q2 2012. Wow revenue, even with annual pass and the one-time in q2, is shockingly low, like 75% of late bc/early wotlk levels (ignoring q4 2008, which I still haven't figured out what made it so much higher than even q1 2009, when subs hit or nearly hit 12m.)
Last edited by Deficineiron; 2012-09-26 at 12:43 PM.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
Those numbers you gave are for subscriptions only, of course when subs drops subs revenue will go down, but WoW generates money from other sources too.
Even then, taking your own chart, and taking nine months, non-gaap online subs its 877M in 2010 and 905M in 2011. In those nine months, WoW lost subs.
Did you even bother to read what I posted?
"Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties, and value-added services."
Pets and mounts are part of "value added services", btw, as are faction/server/name changes.
Last edited by Osmeric; 2012-09-26 at 01:48 PM.
"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?"
Yes i read it, and its wrong, for example, that quote you are giving says it includes boxed products, which we know non-gaap doesnt include them, as well as expansion packs.
Pets, mounts and faction/server/name changes are not included.
Do you even bother to read your own quotes?
Non-GAAP includes box sales in that quarter. What it doesn't include is deferred revenue from box sales (and certain other things) in previous quarters. To put it another way: the difference between GAAP and non-GAAP is not what they count, but when they count it.
Also, what part of "all World of Warcraft products" did you not understand? Pets, mounts, etc. are WoW products.
At this point you are just running on ego and cluelessness. Stop digging your hole deeper.
Last edited by Osmeric; 2012-09-28 at 11:30 AM.
"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?"