I blame all the wasted resources on pet battles.
did a little audit on you buddy, didn't make for good reading. seems your 2500~mmr and hardcore raiding experience actually means you didn't break 2.2k in 3s and didn't even clear Karazhan until Cataclysm was released.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...kerjack/simple
so you don't have the experience, you were never any good at the game (bloodlust? time warp w/speed boost... what does that even mean?), you don't know what you're talking about but you still log onto the game (you were PvPing in March) and you still come onto a WoW forum.
---------- Post added 2013-05-09 at 12:13 PM ----------
I don't know why people care what the sub numbers are. I could care less if WoW lost 5million subs, as long as my guild didn't lose enough members that we couldn't raid on Sunday.
If WoW stuck to the "we only create content for 3% of the players" formular they had at the end of vanilla and begin of Burning Crusade the game would be down to 1-2 million right now. The game got most subscriptions when it was easy to raid for the first time. Wrath of the Lich King. That was the expansion that changed the whole system. That was when WoW peaked. Casuals are the majority and bring most of the money. But they are also not very loyal and bored fast. So Blizzard was and is forced to add more and more casual content to please the masses that pay most of the money. The 3% hardcore progress raiders are loyal and still play, they do not bring the big money. But they are very vocal in the forums. Fact is, Blizzard did most things right and they still have 8 million people paying for their game after nearly 9 years. Show me another game that was able to keep more than 8 million PAYING people for such a long time.
PS: Eve Online was always there - but they only did content for the hardcore players. So they never managed to lure in million. Now Eve starts to open up a little bit to casuals and their subs grow. No surprise there. They will soon find out that casuals are bored very quick and need new entertainment every few months or they just leave.
Atoms are liars, they make up everything!
Blizzard can not get new players with the current state of the game. Every game that releases today offers BETTER leveling experience for less money and much more RPG variety with talent trees and choices. WOW can not expect to get new players in unless the take a big U-turn on how they release content. They need to get the expansions out of the main leveling experience and create a word where ppl can get to max level without playing the most outdated content that hasn't even been looked at in 6 years. Even tho ppl are still paying money for those expansion packs....
lol.
in todays internet absorbed age, you think that even a casual player finds it troublesome to posts on forums, esp a player of an online MMO? really?
There are much better considerations to do with the type of person who posts on forums, bias towards negativity and of course confimation bias within forums to take into account, but access to fourm availability is pretty damm minor.
No one denies there are limitations in using forums as indicators fo player attitudes, but as long as you are aware of them, it can still be useful data.
Wrong, WoW actually peeked late TBC and early Wrath and has since declined with the very short exception of Cata launch that made it spike up to similar levels if I recall correctly.
Can't compare EvE with WoW, just can't not even on the plane you are trying to, no really, you can't.
In terms of the playerbase increase this is true , WOLTK the game did plateau with a slight increase.
I still remember our GM back then saying towards the end of WOLTK that blizzards implementation of making 10s and 25 man guilds equal will kill a lot of 25 man raiding guilds and a lot of communities those big guilds supported. I think we are now seeing the ripple effects of that change.
Every realm/faction where 25 man guilds have died off have destroyed realm communities as 10mans are too small and inactive to please the casual/social player in terms of community.
I dug up the actual graph. Wrath was released Nov 13th 2009, and Cata Dec 7th 2010, both representing the peeks. Ever since Wrath launch the game has been on a steady decline with a few peeks along the way, prior to that it was a permanent incline.
I don't disagree, that is surely a part of the issue, something that happened to my guild as well.
I still enjoy the game well enough. LFR is fine, it is my end game cuz I just don't want to dedicate time to raid "for real", which is partially due to being in 3 raiding guilds and each slowly falling apart. I just don't want to do that anymore. Am I annoyed with some of the changes? Absolutely. Am I happy with some of the changes? Absolutely.
the casuals felt the up hill climb with the sheer volume of dailies and the horrible new "catch up method" of having to do the lower tier raids again.. and again... and again... and again... The legendary chain is just aweful aswell. The fixes coming to that are in my opinion too little too late
i think its pretty obvious why they are losing subs
the constant bans on the Chinese gold farmers and other botters has finally taken its toll and yea they no more want to "play"
I have to agree with this. Before the cataclysm, there were no less than 10 25-men raiding guilds on my server and after cataclysm only 1 left, now there is none. I don't think its a unique event to my server as you can see the top page of WoW progress. It had always been dominated by 25-men guilds and now there are 12 10-men guilds, out of 20, on the first page. Before the shared lockout change, players were actively looking for 25-men raid guilds to gain access to the best gear and those who were in one were cherishing their guild membership. Also a 25-men guild can accommodate far more players than a 10men guild can do. 10men raid guilds are far less robust than 25men, if one key member couldn't make the raid, there is a risk for cancel and also 10men guilds cannot afford a big bench list either, 2-3 maximum without upsetting anyone. I can understand why blizzard had implemented this feature to please 10men guilds but I think this change had shaken the foundation of WoW community and put this game into a downwards spiral.
Herein lies the problem. Casual players are not a loyal player base. They move from title to title, they are sporadic in their invested game time and they can move on regardless of the content you provide.
For example - I download an iPad game. I love it at first, I try out stuff, I may play it on and off for weeks. But when something else catches my attention, I forget about it, usually just uninstall it and try something else.
Trying to cater to the casual player since WotLK had only one long term side effect - Blizzard managed to breed a generation of self entitled players who think WoW is another iPad game where 5min investment means access to everything this game has to offer. They will claim they don't have time to play more, they will claim they don't want to do repetitive stuff, they will claim they don't want to hit their heads at hard content, they will claim they don't want to read patch notes to know what's going on, they will also claim they want instant access to FotM classes.
And they got all. Speed leveling, idiot proof content on ALL levels (questing, solo, scenarios, 5man, raiding), access to epics even if you play 1h/week, reputations that take a week to get to exalted. But then it's catch 22 - too easy content means you burn through it fast and are left with nothing to do. Make thing a bit more challenging, and the QQ starts.
And Blizzard keeps tending to the QQs, changing the game from left to right, losing core players who are tired of a game that is no longer made for them as well as the casuals, who have not sentimental attachement to the game anyway.
I just know one thing. 7 of those active subs play healers. Those 7 active healer subs were just all on the horde in my last wsg.
If anybody knows Benbos you should probably check up on him to make sure he is okay. With the combination of WOW losing 1.3m subs and the Diablo 3 gold dupe happening in the past week. Well let's just say things aren't looking good for his ivory towers right now.