It's startling how fast game activity is falling

[Joeygiggles]

I cant understand why conversations like these continue. The same ol stuff all the time. All I know is many games come out while MOP came out no reason to not play multiple...and maybe people are taking the pandarens advice...low Down

[tohyatvc]

Let's say game activity is indeed falling and there is merit to the OP's claims. Is there a point being made here?

Some people just deeply enjoy watching trends, and their chosen bandwagon is WoW dying. Simple as that, really.

To be honest, Blizzard doesn't deserve all the money they receive for WoW, so there's that.

[BenBos]

Some people just deeply enjoy watching trends, and their chosen bandwagon is WoW dying. Simple as that, really.

To be honest, Blizzard doesn't deserve all the money they receive for WoW, so there's that.

Yes but when actually the OP is countered by the latest facts ... WOW ... grows against it competitors:
http://www.xfire.com/genre/mmo/massi...player_online/

and is doing better than last year Dec 2011.
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyfactionactivity.php

The thread has no longer a cause , except to say: as always: the bandwagon didn't move...

You know when a 4 year hyped up NEW game like GW2 after just a few months drops massively against a 8 year old warhorse like WOW, there is something telling us that perhaps Blizzard isn't even paid enough...

You see on one hand you have a subscription based game costing 180 dollars per year just to keep playing it and on the other hand you have ALL the others which cost nothing to keep playing ... and the Blizzard game still owns the market by a HUGE factor.

You know you are fighting a wrong cause (like the OP)... They are grasping at straws actually: create a thread and then being countered by the time everyone sees the trends going UP is ... quite embarassing.


For 8 years already ...

And the future doesn't look bright either for these WOW haters... CRContent will make this game last forever in populations. I think they need to find a new hobby soon.

[tohyatvc]

Yes but when actually the OP is countered by the latest facts ... WOW ... grows against it competitors:
http://www.xfire.com/genre/mmo/massi...player_online/

and is doing better than last year Dec 2011.
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyfactionactivity.php

The thread has no longer a cause , except to say: as always: the bandwagon didn't move...

You know when a 4 year hyped up NEW game like GW2 after just a few months drops massively against a 8 year old warhorse like WOW, there is something telling us that perhaps Blizzard isn't even paid enough...

You see on one hand you have a subscription based game costing 180 dollars per year just to keep playing it and on the other hand you have ALL the others which cost nothing to keep playing ... and the Blizzard game still owns the market by a HUGE factor.

You know you are fighting a wrong cause (like the OP)... They are grasping at straws actually: create a thread and then being countered by the time everyone sees the trends going UP is ... quite embarassing.


For 8 years already ...

And the future doesn't look bright either for these WOW haters... CRContent will make this game last forever in populations. I think they need to find a new hobby soon.

People pay for it so they feel the need to play, I'd say - also, they'll keep playing if their friends do - and WoW has a hell of a lot of inertia: it's famous, and people are attached to their characters that are many years old.

I'm not criticising the game as such - but people aren't necessarily sticking with WoW because it is a better game than others (MMO or otherwise), the reasons they stick with it could be far more in depth. It can be to do with loyalty, tribalism and indeed many other reasons.

Either way it doesn't matter. Just play what you want, as long as you enjoy it, that's what matters. But people are always looking for reassurance that they've made the right choice within a group, hence threads like this.

My point about Blizzard not deserving the piles of money is more that they react incredibly slowly to feedback, and put out content at an often glacial pace, which some subscribers feel is insulting.

[Deleted]

I expect excuses unless you want to be reported for spreading FALSE information and trolling.

Hahaha you're taking this waaayyy too seriously

[Osmeric]

I heard ES:O had a really poor reveal at E3...something about poor responsiveness/UI design.

That seems to be a very common reason these days for MMOs to fail to gain traction. SWTOR had this problem, as did Rift (responsiveness/graphical speed, at least). WoW does very well in this aspect of game design. It's one of Blizzard's huge and insufficiently heralded advantages.

[babele]

yes i agree totally

[Osmeric]

Since WOW is growing against both GW2 and SW TOR on a DAILY basis now on Xfire .

This thread wasn't about relative performance of those games vs. WoW on XFire. It was about the decline of WoW numbers in absolute terms, and the comparison of that rate of decline to the rate after the release of previous expansions.

In no way does a growing ratio of WoW/SWTOR or WoW/GW2 time invalidate the observations made in the first post.

[DeadmanWalking]

This entire thread is one guy in a sports arena trying to start a wave and then arguing with everyone in the seats around them for 66 pages. Its getting pathetic.

[Shrouded]

This entire thread is one guy in a sports arena trying to start a wave and then arguing with everyone in the seats around them for 66 pages. Its getting pathetic.

You must not have read it particularily well, then. A fair suggestion if you have no interest in reading the thread is to not dismiss it - or the OP - as pathetic. It does not for a nice forum climate make.

[Lilija]

Too bad there is no progress anymore. Enjoy wasting the time clearing LFR / Normal and then Heroic of the same exact content every patch. And when the patch ends all your efforts are wasted, nobody needs to do the previous content anymore. The entire game is screwed up since TBC.

LFR, normal and heroic are different enough from each other for anyone who actually cares about how they play. Textures are not content - encounter design and the playstyle it enforces is the key of PvE content. Everything else is nothing more than but a shiny addition. So I will keep enjoying the different gameplay experience that come from 3 difficulty levels that WoW PvE has to offer. LFR is for when I want to chill out, normal is a raid prelude and heroic is the proper raid experience - for me this model is perfect and never got me bored as much as some of TBC raids which were litteraly months of doing the same - especially that you were forced to come back to them even tho you didn't want to step into them ever again. Old content should be 100% optional and should be NEVER required in order to do the most current content. Forcing people into doing old stuff that hardly anyone cares about is bad design.

[DeadmanWalking]

You must not have read it particularily well, then. A fair suggestion if you have no interest in reading the thread is to not dismiss it - or the OP - as pathetic. It does not for a nice forum climate make.

I never said the OP was pathetic, I said ITS (IT IS , NOT HE) getting pathetic. You need to learn what the difference between an object and a person is.

[Shrouded]

I never said the OP was pathetic, I said ITS (IT IS , NOT HE) getting pathetic. You need to learn what the difference between an object and a person is.

Which is also what I said. Another suggestion is that if you have nothing to contribute to the thread except hostility, perhaps it's better not to contribute at all?

[Lilija]

And raids would wipe in Wrath on Felmyst because of the mind control. Heroic LK was not some mystical holy grail of an encounter, it just has a few unforgiving mechanics. Going back an expansion later to it and you can almost skip certain phases because of dps output. Just like going back to Black temple and missing the demonic phase of Illidan. Measuring the difficulty of an encounter by what difficulty it presents to people that outgear/outlevel it is a poor standard of comparison since content only really matters when it is current. By this standard LK is still a very good fight, but so were Vashj, Kael, Illidan, all of Sunwell . . . Wrath had some of the best fights the game has seen (LK, Alganon, Yogg, Mimiron, OS3D10) but it also had a lot of chaff. TBC was a better overall raid experience for anyone that managed to do the raiding.

I never said that TBC had none of interesting, skill requiring fights - Vashji and Kael are good examples. In fact start of TBC raiding was quite promissing difficulty wise. However, the further into expantion it wasn't the fight difficulty that blocked you but all other crap like lack of gear on new guild memebrs or lack of certain classes which forced your guild to do content most of your guild members was sick of. The problem I had with pre Wrath design is how it forced raiders into doing things that were plain boring. Ok, mmo will always at some point force you into some boring activities if you want your toon to be most effective, however in Vanilla and TBC it was a never ending story. Yes, MoP has dailies which you had to do for some time but you knew you will eventually reach a point when you don't need to do them anymore. Plus it's easier to cope with doing boring stuff on your own when it suits you rather than making whole guild to do boring old raids instead of progressing thru newer stuff.

There were also a ton of people that cleared all the Wrath content and didn't get to clear most of the TBC content. Trying to say that the content was more or less difficult based on how many people cleared how much at what time doesn't carryover very well.

Sure, it doesn't describe the difficulty fully, however, people tend to think that in Vanilla and TBC you couldn't carry people. From my experience it was easier to carry people in older expantions than some encounters from post TBC raid design. Encounters are begining to be progressivly more demanding for particular raid members. Ofc, there will over will some faceroll fights in every expantion, however, it's raids like Ulduar, low% ICC, T11, T12 and MoP content that actually forced people to learn to play their class. Even from my personal experience I haven't felt Vanilla/TBC content challenging my skill as a player. It's in Ulduar up that I actually had to put some more time and thought into being more effective and doing less mistakes.

The raids were playable by casuals before LFD and LFR, depending on your definition of casual. If you use casual to mean plays a shorter period of time, then yes the raids were playable by casuals. If you use casual synonomously with bad, then no the raids were not playable by casuals. Of course if casual = bad then the raids are still not playable by bads as LFR isn't a raid anymore than taking 10 toons to deadmines was a raid. It's an activity that happens in a raid group, it's not a raid (the same way VoA and BH bosses were raid bosses but weren't a raid).

Yeah, I mean casual as of someone who has less time. Bad players won't do heroics and it's the only content that is comparable with that from the time with no heroic mode. I believe that there were guilds who raided less and cleared a lot but I would assume it happened less often than nowadays. As for my personal experience I have to spent much less time in order to be a satisfied PvEr. I actually feel progress coming mostly from how well I play and not how much I had not farm outside of raid or how much time my guild has to spent to gear up recruits since anyone can do that on their own now.

I get a feeling that you weren't very successful raidwise in Vanilla/TBC because you try and make it sound like that period was only about having no life in order to be successful. This couldn't be further from the truth. TBC I raided 9 hours a week (roughly), Wrath I raided about 9 hours a week, and Cataclysm I raided maybe 5 hours a week. The amount of content I cleared scaled almost exactly with time invested in each expansion. More time invested just means you clear content faster, hence why top end guilds frontload their raid time. Bosses tend to take players a relatively equal number of wipes assuming equal skill level. Wipes take x amount of time. Thus full clearing is skill based number of wipes * average time per wipe * number of bosses. This isn't going to change. The more skilled you are, the less wipes it will usually take. The more gear you have, the less wipes it will take.

You are right about the amount of wipes but this is isn't time investment that is bothering me - never did. The problem was with all the boring activities that you mostly had to do as a guild (gearing up recruits thro old, boring, content) or farming outside of raids (that was mostly towards Vanilla and begining of TBC - this started changing for better during TBC).

As for me being successfull, well I was but the cost felt like it was not worth it. I admitt I might be slighly overemotional on the topic because if the end of TBC was more like nowadays, my Vanilla/TBC guild would have survived and many of my good WoW friends and skilled players would not have quit. Raiding was too exhausting if you wanted to keep the good level or get better. Also, people quitting in the last content equaled end of raiding for that expantion. In Vanilla we have simply stopped raiding when this happened knowing the raids in next content will be smaller so there was hope for survival, however, when this happened in SWP the hope for survival was none. Since the new raid model is around, people quitting hurst much less and unless it's the whole guild, the game makes it easier for you to rebuild. And no, Wrath and Cata weren't my best time in WoW but I have seen the game model changing for better. I have seen similar situation that killed my old guild and how in the new model it wasn't such a problem anymore. Brick walls are falling over and more depends on how you play rather than other things that don't depend on you.

And as for Realm first whispers - a lot of people don't even notice them. I noticed a Death's Demise title, I noticed a person in Naxx 40 gear. I don't notice one line of pink text when I'm in the middle of pvping or raiding because I have more important things on my mind.

Realm firsts give title as well ^^ And the whispers don't only come when it happens but even some time after. So in my experience, people care.

[BenBos]

This thread wasn't about relative performance of those games vs. WoW on XFire. It was about the decline of WoW numbers in absolute terms, and the comparison of that rate of decline to the rate after the release of previous expansions.

In no way does a growing ratio of WoW/SWTOR or WoW/GW2 time invalidate the observations made in the first post.

It does, because both these other games got patches recently (or went free to play) and they still lost ground to WOW on a weekly basis.

BTW: http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weekly...hp?serverid=-1

WCRealms shows growth vs Nov Dec 2011... and over the complete year 2012...

So the OP has no leg to stand on. In the first weeks of lauch it is normal everyone wants to play for 8 hours a day each day...

There simply is no decline in the long run, on the contrary: it is growth from YEAR to YEAR point.

As we know the game had 10.3 M official subscribers in Nov/Dec 2011...

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weekly...hp?serverid=-1

shows us the game has grown bigger... (activity wise).

And IN these charts there is NO representation of Chinese or Russian servers or Asian servers as well ...

---------- Post added 2012-12-07 at 04:56 PM ----------

Which is also what I said. Another suggestion is that if you have nothing to contribute to the thread except hostility, perhaps it's better not to contribute at all?

it is not about hostility, it is about the fact WOW shows growth over a year long measurement in the newest tool he used in his OP

IF that sample is even trustworthy ... because Census plus can't track Asian servers, Russian servers, new South American servers etc...(and with cross server (open world) game play not all activity can even be traced anymore !

But it is very clear that player activity now is higher from year to year point of measurement of this sample; Nov-2011 -Nov 2012...

Conclusions:

1. 2 new MMO games launched (Jan 2012/Aug 2012)... and they had ZERO impact on a year to year LONG term playing.

2. Only Diablo 3 influence can be seen in May_June in WOW, but only for a few months.

3. WOW is the only huge MMORPG with a paid subscription right now and it ... GAINED over the same period from 2011.

So it is normal people become angry against dudes who invent things on the fly...

[Deleted]

Which is also what I said. Another suggestion is that if you have nothing to contribute to the thread except hostility, perhaps it's better not to contribute at all?

Would be better not to leap on someone with a differing opinion, if he isn't contributing anything don't give him any attention.

[Deleted]

Irrelevent stuff

No your posting rubbish, he wasnt comparing to to December last year, It SHOULD be higher then December last year because that happened in the middle of an expansion that saw 2.9million leave, where the pathetic DS patch was boring people, this is 2 months after a Major Expansion launch, If it wasnt higher they'd be in serious trouble.

If you look at the active players on there, its alreadytrending close to Pre MOP levels, and this has the benefit of being in the quarter when they also release a content patch AND holidays are coming, all hes musing about is saying do the numbers show people are getting bored faster compared to the opening few months of other expansions.


And you show your blizzard white knight colours by trying to deflect blame by bringing up other games, this is NOTHING about other games, its about WoW's performance against itself.

As well as the rest of your garbage in your showing your more blind blinkered fan boy esq by actually claiming GROWTH!!..growth!

Go and look at the numbers, WoW's revenue was down, in this quarter they launched MoP and revenue was 345million the same quarter they launched Cataclysm, was 544million, 199million lower, and if you take off box sales from the opening week (the announced 2.75million @$60), it shows that revenue from everything else wow related other then the box sales was 180million ( a new record low)

the only one spreading misinformation and fan boy vibes is you.

[Deleted]

some garbage

No, you are wrong. People got back to their usual pace of gaming, and not playing for 10hours/day.
For example in my guild, I didnt se any major decline, still 2 groups are riding, with plenty other casuals doing their thing, as it was from the start, but they are just not playing so often, some log on for a raid and log off after - it's NORMAL.

[SamR]

If you look at the active players on there, its alreadytrending close to Pre MOP levels, and this has the benefit of being in the quarter when they also release a content patch AND holidays are coming, all hes musing about is saying do the numbers show people are getting bored faster compared to the opening few months of other expansions.

Did you look at the Cata chart that the OP posted? Cata numbers were below end of Wrath numbers a few months in.

So MoP numbers are holding up better in the first few months of the expansion than Cata numbers were. But the OP is about how MoP numbers are falling faster than Cata numbers were. There's certainly a disconnect in the OP's arguments here.

[Osmeric]

Did you look at the Cata chart that the OP posted? Cata numbers were below end of Wrath numbers a few months in.

So MoP numbers are holding up better in the first few months of the expansion than Cata numbers were. But the OP is about how MoP numbers are falling faster than Cata numbers were. There's certainly a disconnect in the OP's arguments here.

There's no disconnect. What you're omitting is that the jump up to the release peak in MoP was larger (in percentage terms) than the jump in Cata was.