best news all week
Even if it's not more expensive (flat fee model) - the tuning seems more concerned with constraining people who will play 20, 30, 40 hrs per week or whatever it takes to max their progression and ignores the time-friendly, QoL improvements that were among the best parts of Cataclysm. (ie 7 dungeons per week to cap valor, not having vendors scattered all over the world, rapid corpse runs, guild summons, practical levelling in BGs and dungeons)
So much of MoP seems designed to generate more time needed and probably was designed that way to milk a minute here and minute there in Asia and it apparently didn't fly there and isn't going over so well among monthly payers.
If they don't drop the time inputs needed drastically this will just continue as people who cannot progress in the time they have to play will quit and most of us don't have 20 hrs a week to play WoW.
A lot more than I expected. This is without the effect of the recently released Age of Wushu right? We wont see the effect of the 20mill subs that has gained until next quarter's report?
Anyway... MoP is a fantastic expansion, not sure why people in this thread are claiming otherwise... The reason I quit is that I can't actually *play* said expansion when I'm sat on a dead realm. I simply refuse to pay Blizzard another £60 to get my chars off it.
The next big hit will be when a Western company nails down the F2P MMO genre, like Blizz did with the P2P MMO with WoW. I'm already expecting Titan to be a F2P.
Lets clear some shit up. MOST of the people who played in TBC or vanilla have quit, or just casual through. I would not implore blizzard to look back that far.
They need to look at wrath. Great story (the lich kings presence was pervasive, yet relevant), some of the most revolutionary fight mechanics (not counting NAXX), they did well with bringing crafting into each teir, and allowing them to be relevant but not all out better (in most cases) than drops/tier.
Or the playerbase is way more volatile than ever before. There is a reason why the casuals are the one that left AND China taking the biggest hit, the F2P MMOs are rising fast there.
All we can take from this is that the P2P MMO market is gone, being WoW the last man standing.
It's simple really, as to why this is happening. The MMO genre is just not as popular as it once were. Is it still popular? Yes. Are things like consoles/AAA titles (CoD/Halo/etc.) diminishing the popularity of MMOs? Yes.
Has nothing to do with anything in game.
Call me House.
"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?"
Sure the vanilla players grew up. But where's the people that were 8 when WoW came out? Why are they not playing the game?
Saying "we had a good run but it's time to give up" is just trying to shrug off numbers that if we were discussing xBox Live would get someone fired.
FFXIV - Maduin (Dynamis DC)
thing is, dead server is part of blizzard "involontary" design, given the fact they have taken no steps to fixing it. And it certainly one of the reason of this huge drop. For many people, they will remember MoP as the "dead server expansion"
how easy would it have been to drop the transfer fee by at least 75%, or even better free with a cooldown? how many line of code are we talking about? how much time? Dead server are not a bug, they are consequence to game design.