February 7: Blizzard Conference Call

[ro9ue]

As good as WOW is it has never been known for innovation, throughout its history it has been known for taking ideas and refining them.

Respectfully disagree. Even if WoW's major contribution was polish, innovations in design, UI/UX, accessibility and packaging are still innovations.

The only real area where they blatantly steal ideas is in lore, but lets be honest. Who doesn't steal from Tolkein when it comes to the Fantasy genre?

[BenBos]

As good as WOW is it has never been known for innovation, throughout its history it has been known for taking ideas and refining them.

Oh Oh Oh. that argument again...

Cross server game play - Cross server LFD tools - Phasing in the open world techniques (and just to let you know ... farms would be IMPOSSIBLE without this seamless technique - Cross realm play in open worlds - ...)

I won't go further into the picture, but I still don't see elemental things like owning personal flying mounts over continents without a loading screen in sight in other games.

I think that's the argument that has been debunked already years ago ...

[Unholyground]

The will mention their development has begun on their next expansion.

[ro9ue]

I believe GC does the best job he can. He seems like a reasonable dude, and he understands there are millions of people who want his job so he's very thoughtful on his decisions. Would I do things differently? Sure. But I guarantee just as many people would hate me, if not, more.

[Archdruid Dehydrate]

The will mention their development has begun on their next expansion.

They already mentioned that last Quarter Release

---------- Post added 2013-02-07 at 10:27 AM ----------

As good as WOW is it has never been known for innovation, throughout its history it has been known for taking ideas and refining them.

Yet everyone takes ideas from everyone including WoW, sometimes the whole game is put in the so called "WoW Style" that some people call it. You gotta admit alot of games have taken ideas from WoW and put them in there games aswell, Nothing is safe.

[ro9ue]

Not to derail the thread but since the next expansion popped up I just want to throw in that I think an announcement of a burning legion expansion would bring back a lot of old players and I think that they are actually strategizing around that. When numbers are showing a sure decline, it's time to bust out the dreadlord expansion.

[Unholyground]

did they mention the D3 expansion yet?

[Archdruid Dehydrate]

Your kidding right? there was only thousands until wow came in millions joined over time no mmo has ever done that period not even Everquest.back on topic anybody know what time zone there releaseing the info for sub count?

Mike look back between page 20 - 22, Myself & someone else have the times posted

---------- Post added 2013-02-07 at 10:30 AM ----------

did they mention the D3 expansion yet?

Not yet, but that usually a Blizzcon thing

[Layuth]

Respectfully disagree. Even if WoW's major contribution was polish, innovations in design, UI/UX, accessibility and packaging are still innovations.

The only real area where they blatantly steal ideas is in lore, but lets be honest. Who doesn't steal from Tolkein when it comes to the Fantasy genre?

They have used so much stuff from other games/companies they should be paying royalties. The development team is good at refining stuff from others, their ability to create something new from scratch is awful.

[Pann]

Yet everyone takes ideas from everyone including WoW, sometimes the whole game is put in the so called "WoW Style" that some people call it. You gotta admit alot of games have taken ideas from WoW and put them in there games aswell, Nothing is safe.

I am not saying it is a bad thing and it is a testament to the quality of WOW that many think that ideas that appeared in other games beforehand actually originated from WOW. But anyway that is a debate for a completely different topic.

[ro9ue]

They have used so much stuff from other games/companies they should be paying royalties. The development team is good at refining stuff from others, their ability to create something new from scratch is awful.

With all due respect you're just blatantly wrong.

[Archdruid Dehydrate]

Not to derail the thread but since the next expansion popped up I just want to throw in that I think an announcement of a burning legion expansion would bring back a lot of old players and I think that they are actually strategizing around that. When numbers are showing a sure decline, it's time to bust out the dreadlord expansion.

I would be shocked if the Burning Legion wasn't in the next one honestly. Well the amount of Lore they could throw into that expansion is big as they have hinted at it for along time. So many old lore figures.

---------- Post added 2013-02-07 at 10:40 AM ----------

But anyway that is a debate for a completely different topic.

Agree with you there

[lolalola]

It did in 2004. And it made some smaller innovations throughout the years: LFD, Mobile Chat, Achievements. I'd say the other MMOs coming out today aren't innovating as much as WoW.

When I look at the MMO genre, I look at EQ, EVE and WoW as the big innovators. Possibly even Planetside 2. Nothing else really broke any major ground. I will credit some cool small innovations like public groups to WAR though. RvRvR PvP was an interesting innovation of DAOC.

Yes I can see how the bold statement connects, how you form your opinion. In my opinon you've been asleep for the past few years. PS2 is a MMOFPS btw. There's tons of other innovations but I won't discuss them in this topic. (We can discuss them in the GW2 forum ) because I don't see the relevance to this topic.

[Palisis]

As you said when you subscribe to something you have a certain service attached to it, usually unlimited. In all areas except China it works like you pay an amount of currency and then have unlimited action, aka "the sub". China doesn't have this. So why call it subscription? Its a completely different league. Call it instead "WoW has 10 million players.

"you subscribe to something you have a certain service attached to it, usually unlimited." Time is not unlimited, hence, logically, a timecard of X amount if time, is irrelevant. They are subscribed to the game at X period of time which the 10 million stat is based on. I work in the billing side of the industry and all customers are called subscribers no matter the period of time they allow because they all have individual accounts.

As for why they dont call it "players", well, "players" is not a business-anchored/related word and it would not be appropriate for the group of people they are relaying the news to.

[Alewen]

By MMORPG standards... absolutely.

By Stock market investors seeing their profits sink into a pithole - not so much (enter the curse of "growing your business for investors")

While you'd still be happy, I guarantee at 5 mil subs there would be yelling, mass meetings and firings at Blizzard if that happened, not to mention the ENTIRE game getting a massive ideology reaction-gameplay shift (just like what happened during Firelands>DS). Especially considering that those subscriptions are the ONLY source of continual revenue funding goodness knows how many of their projects that they got going on... This isn't the old Blizz anymore, where they worked on 2 games, 1 expansion each at a time.

Right now, Blizzard does need a massive ideology change. Ghostcrawler's attitude towards people disliking Cross-Realm Zones, is a huge example of what not to do in a business model. He insulted the customer base, telling them they only want a single player game, when the majority of the complaints was about the game breaking bugs, like the 2-seater mounts, the flashing of the characters, which can cause a headache after a while, the hangups. And with Blizzard CM's now deleting all CRZ threads, even if they are being civil and not breaking any rules. I normally would not wish for firings, but I think such actions are in order, especially with Ghostcrawler, and his attitude towards their customers.

The old Blizzard used to be about "It will be released when it is ready" but CRZ in its current incarnation, was never ready for release. Especially when these same bugs were reported IN the beta, and it still went live and remains unfixed even to this day. If something can't be fixed, then turn it off and come up with a new idea. Insulting the customers only makes people quit. And I predict we will see the result of the trash talking ghostcrawler has done.

This is true the reason people come back is not that much the game itself but they friends you played with. If they are still playing you are more likely to come back. If they are gone though...well you are as free as a bird now.

Yep, that's why I returned. I missed my friends who are still playing. So rather than deal with CRZ, I been dungeoning it up and working on getting my characters to 85 and away from CRZ. Only time I have to put up with it, is during RP meetings.

A lot of peolpe quitted over dailies, some quitted over CRZ, some dont like the PVP season and quitted too.

I expect the number to be around 9.5M.

I just hope this makes Blizzard open their eyes at how much they failed with their crappy daily system.

That is a really generous number. Me, I am going to say around 8.5M. Too many people were insulted by Ghostcrawler. Too many posts cropping up about how low pop realms are now going completely empty with maybe 3-4 other people around in the cities. It's all pointing to a rather heavy hit to Blizzard's subscriptions.

You never played Vanilla or TBC did you ?? There was way more grind than this and people claim that to be the golden age of WoW.

The grind for Netherwing drake (daily quests) toke time & flying mounts that toke alot of gold or exalted rep for the mount or training (Expert & Artisan).

http://www.wowpedia.org/Classic_reputation_rewards
http://www.wowpedia.org/Burning_Crus...tation_rewards

New players were just spoiled in Wrath & Cataclysm.

Yep, vanilla and bc were pretty grindy. I remember farming hours the scourgestones to get the rep up with argent dawn. My paladin still has her scourge stone finding trinkets. However, the grinds still felt optional. End game, people still had a wide range of choices for gameplay. The rep grind factions weren't mandatory to gear up. They were side things that you could choose to do. In vanilla, my options when I hit 60 were:

Farm Lightforge (That gear was a blast to collect)
RP
pvp (I remember the original alterac valley, how the fights were really epic)
Each patch brought forth a major story and event, and farming for the AQ gate opening was pretty rewarding.
Professions

In BC, that was the first time I ever unsubscribed, and that was just before the sunwell. Only because I was burnt out. But the options were there for me just like vanilla. I even got to raid Kara (though at that time, only got past the opera event). But I had options.

Wrath, gave me even more options. Things were easy. At the time I thought too easy, because my tauren druid was able to solo 10 mobs at once. And I didn't like the 1-70 XP nerf. But I felt like I had a lot more to do. I even would slip on a tabard for rep.

Cataclysm was a decent expansion, but definitely not a good one like vanilla-wrath. For one, raids were way too hard. The guild I was in, would hop in wrath raids for fun during the day and could advance quite far. But in cata's first raid, we couldn't even get past the first bosses in them raids. The story was good, the remade world was nice. But the newest race for the alliance had started out with an amazing story which cut off. And if you wanted a zones entire storyline, you had to play through the alliance version and the horde version would finish it. So the horde bias was definitely prevailant in that expansion so I wasn't surprised to see the numbers go down as they did.

But this expansion, they did away with rep tabards altogether and people have to do the dailies if they want to advance. Operation Shield Wall, is a good example, where they decided they'd lock the main story behind a wall of dailies. And CRZ is so widely unpopular. That's why I think we will see another drop in subscription numbers.

Just one simple question: do you want his job ?

I know I wouldn't.

There's a fine line between doing ones job, and being an ass about it. He was doing a good job up until this expansion. Now, I think he needs a major attitude adjustment for sure. Lose his job? I'm mixed on that. Of course he could of just been doing what he was told. But I definitely think something needs to change.

[Yourcatdead]

We're not going to see any expansion announcements. For ANY game only because Blizzcon is this year. We may see some news for Blizzard Dota. As for subs I'm guessing it'll be even. Only because MoP saw a increase in subs, however I think the initial rush ran out again. So I think it'll be even or a small loss/small gain.

Remember all speculation.

[TJ]

PvE-balance? It's better than ever. Most classes are within 10% of the median.


See the contradiction?
WoW is in a good state, that's the definition of doing a good job.

Nope, because you assume GC does everything. I also said when you compare it to the WoW killers, if you compared it to Wrath I would definitely disagree. Good state means just that, good, not amazing or its best. All the other things I mentioned are still valid as well.

---------- Post added 2013-02-07 at 03:50 PM ----------

They have used so much stuff from other games/companies they should be paying royalties. The development team is good at refining stuff from others, their ability to create something new from scratch is awful.

lolwut, that's like saying because a car has 4 wheels the manufacturer should pay royalties to the first company to ever make a car. WoW improved on the most basic things and made them awesome, they didn't directly copy them.

[ro9ue]

Yes I can see how the bold statement connects, how you form your opinion. In my opinon you've been asleep for the past few years. PS2 is a MMOFPS btw. There's tons of other innovations but I won't discuss them in this topic. (We can discuss them in the GW2 forum ) because I don't see the relevance to this topic.

oh uhhh ok?

[lolalola]

"you subscribe to something you have a certain service attached to it, usually unlimited." Time is not unlimited, hence, logically, a timecard of X amount if time, is irrelevant. They are subscribed to the game at X period of time which the 10 million stat is based on. I work in the billing side of the industry and all customers are called subscribers no matter the period of time they allow because they all have individual accounts.

As for why they dont call it "players", well, "players" is not a business-anchored/related word and it would not be appropriate for the group of people they are relaying the news to.

You'd have a point if not for the fact they are not 24/7 subscribed!

I'm well aware some businesses think like this. To them I say: welcome aboard to the 21st century! The whole reason of the name still working like this is legacy reasons, "we do it like this because that is how we've always done it."

[Black Rider]

They already mentioned that last Quarter Release

Are you sure about that? I don't remember this from their last conf...