What can WoW do to gain Subs?

[TJ]

Improve class balance,

Rely less on dailies - People really hated this one,

Move away from Pandas - Most people don't care but it affects how WoW is portrayed and has annoyed some players,

Address issues earlier - Things like PvP burst being out of control since the start of the expac and only being attempted to be fixed in 5.3,

Fix dying realms - One of the biggest issues, some people can barely play because they have no one to play with and can't find a guild or buy gems etc,

Possibly reduce the cost of transfers or add a loyalty option where you buy so many and get one free - Not to be hypocritical about my dying realms point but this is because some people with 5 chars or so are completely bound to one realm because of the cost and can't leave to play with friends etc. I know a few people that quit because they wanted to move realms and join a new guild but figured it wasn't worth over £100 which is definitely valid.

There is more things as well but what you can do for an 8 year old game is limited, to a certain degree no matter what Blizzard do now the subs won't be as high and that's just how it is.

[loki504]

1) Drop monthly price to about $7-$10 range
2) update graphics, they pushed this 2002 graphic engine as far as they could revamp all the graphics at least to 2010+ status.
3) Make the lore darker, the game is called WARcraft for a reason, its suppose to be bloody and violent and hellish.
4) Keep all the casual stuff the LFR, but establish a new elite hardcore tier of raid that would require guilds to run raids like before.
5) Bring back 40 man raids
6) More rewards and incentive to PVP non instances, encourage city raids with mounts and rare rewards, its a game of war, bring back that element.
7) Guild housing reward the guilds that play hard and work hard in game.
8) more integration into smart phone and tablets, certain aspects of the game should be playable on tablets.
9) Multi day raids, they need to make more epic/very long raids, like a cavern of time, where the guild can only do the first 6 bosses after unlock, then they must rest and wait til the next day to unlock the next 6, then the next 6 the day after, the point is give people a challenge, don't just push the challenge as only being an aspect of easy or hard, but challenge guilds to organize and plan and make players have to come together to get things done.


See the game has lost that edge, when I started I was very casual (the start of BC), but the game seemed to still kept me busy and kept me pining and wishing I can get all the super elite 40 man raid gear (which I never did get) but thats ok, it kept me trying kept me playing. The game needs to be inclusive, give a wide range of players something to do, yet it needs to only reward those who really do work hard and try hard. The game reached a good balance of keeping casual busy as well as hardcore players, during the BC-LK days, but then it felt like Cata was when things really just came unwind, and the wheels came lose.

1. that might bring back some players. but not alot.
2. updating graphics is going to cost alot and not worth it if you ask me.
3. there is noting wrong with the lore.
4. heroic are your elite hardcore raiding. and lfr is casual normal is for casual who are willing to play via a roster. don't see what should change here.
5. really? people are alrdy whining that 25m are to hard to full up. and 40m would be to freaking hard to balance.
6. i fully agree on that. but how are you going to deal with servers like stormscale where 99,99% of the 90ish are horde?
7. don't really see the need for guild/players housing never seen. but some might like it. so can't really agree nor disagree with.
8. instead of saying some aspects tell them what you want to do on a tablet/smartphone.(maybe petbattle will be nice) because you can alrdy post/make action with your marthphone.
9.waiting for lockout is a challenge? thats new to me. what might be a good idea to bring back the chalenge is someting like normal-max ilvl and heroic maxilvl. where your item will be lowered. kinda like heroic challenge mode.

[Deleted]

Release another expansion.

[dukem]

I left because 10man dropping the same loot as 25man killed my guild. the reason I won't return is the diablo3 talent system and pandas.


other than that

1) Drop monthly price to about $7-$10 range
2) update graphics, they pushed this 2002 graphic engine as far as they could revamp all the graphics at least to 2010+ status.
3) Make the lore darker, the game is called WARcraft for a reason, its suppose to be bloody and violent and hellish.
4) Keep all the casual stuff the LFR, but establish a new elite hardcore tier of raid that would require guilds to run raids like before.
5) Bring back 40 man raids
6) More rewards and incentive to PVP non instances, encourage city raids with mounts and rare rewards, its a game of war, bring back that element.
7) Guild housing reward the guilds that play hard and work hard in game.
8) more integration into smart phone and tablets, certain aspects of the game should be playable on tablets.
9) Multi day raids, they need to make more epic/very long raids, like a cavern of time, where the guild can only do the first 6 bosses after unlock, then they must rest and wait til the next day to unlock the next 6, then the next 6 the day after, the point is give people a challenge, don't just push the challenge as only being an aspect of easy or hard, but challenge guilds to organize and plan and make players have to come together to get things done.

these are awesome ideas

[Omgarsh]

I think WOW is honestly pretty good in MOP as far as content goes (launch period gating everything behind dailies aside). But there are a lot of things newer MMOs, and other games I have played do better that WOW can't just incorporate into their own game like they could before.

Personally I feel like WOW's combat is dated. I don't mean fight mechanics for raid bosses, but I do mean the idea of being borderline GCD locked to do max DPS. In games like League of Legends there's tons of room for skillful play with just 4 skills per hero. But I think making rotations consist of that few skills in WOW would require rewriting the combat engine and changing the rules of the game almost completely. It'd be like a different MMO. I'm not totally against it, but I think that might scare off more players than it would gain.

Also, this is something particular from GW2, but I wish I didn't dread running into other players in WOW when I'm out questing and stuff. In GW2 you don't even have to ask someone to help them, you just do it and you're both rewarded. I'm not sure Blizzard can do this one in WOW because they would have to do away with the two player factions.

That said, I think if they can find a good balance of content and let casual players like me not feel daunted by leveling up new characters or just getting LFR-ready, they can at least maintain if not gain a few subs with some more expansions. But I do think it's gone over the peak and will slowly trickle out from here.

[Deleted]

3) Make the lore darker, the game is called WARcraft for a reason, its suppose to be bloody and violent and hellish.

WarCraft lore has never been hellish and bloody, not even in WC1 or WC2 which were by far the darkest games of the franchise. It is a setting characterized by cartoonish looks and humor, with darker tones sure but your idea of the lore is more suitable for a Diablo game.


I think that 90% of the sub loss is independent from gameplay factors. Game being old and people getting increasingly tired with the core structure of the game are IMO the primary reasons for this loss of sub and those are factors that can't be radically changed.
Besides that I think that the game is too grindy atm, I'd lower the amount of dailies and the time required to cap Valor.[COLOR="red"]

[stumpy]

Nothing except put out another patch, followed by another expansion, after which numbers will continue declining because old game is old. I think people grossly overestimate the power that "cool new feature X!" has to draw in new subscribers. If you didn't play WoW before, the fact that there's now a dance studio, or that there are 44 specs instead of 33, or that you now have to walk everywhere because they removed flying are not going to bring you back.

[Otimus]

Go back from Activision Blizzard to Blizzard of the north?

Pfffft, like the current era Blizzard is any different from past era blizzard. We're talking about the company that was the first to introduce the $60 PC game here, years before anyone else. They're a match made in heaven for Activision.


That being said, nothing can probably be done.

They could, in theory, do every dream suggestion there is. They could do most anything ever, and it's still going to drop.

The consumer's love affair with MMOs, to put it mildly, is over. MMO players now only want to play MMOs, and the general consumer isn't as interested as they used to be. This is why MMOs are failing left and right, despite being good at launch, and being well received. It's also why almost all old MMOs are failing to gain ground anymore. They're not really getting many new people. This is even MORE true in the west, though. Probably doesn't help that lots of "simple" and easy to play no-online-fee games use the MMO-style carrot on the stick mechanics now, without the monthly fee. (i.e. leveling guns/soldiers in FPS's, etc).

I think WoW's playerbase is going to keep dropping until it's around a couple of million or so, in the next couple of years, and no other MMO is ever going to be big again, at least not for a really, really long time. It's like platformers, or something. They had a time in the sun, but now, despite the quality, and unless it's a Mario game, no one gives a damn anymore.

[MouseD]

Get rid of CRZ......merge dying realms...main thing get rid of CRZ...

[Pann]

8 year old games don't gain players, simple as that. Doesn't matter how great they make it (and I believe they have done a GREAT job with this expac), the game style itself has been played to death at this point. They will of course keep supporting the game as long as people keep playing, but don't expect its numbers to grow when the entire industry is shifting away from this genre.

Do they not? Eve has just turned ten and announced its highest ever number of subscribers at the beginning of the year.

[solipsiste]

Well, if Blizzard offers a few retro servers, like a vanilla and a BC server, with the state of the game simply rolled back to those day, I promise I would return. I'm very nostalgic of BC and while I don't want to start a war about what WoW has become, I think no one would lose if they did what I suggest.

[IdTheDemon]

I doubt Blizzard will ever reach WotLK's subs again. The game will be 10 years old next year and it's fire can only last for so long. It makes sense for WotLK to be the peak of Wow it was based on one of Warcrafts favorite story arcs which bought back some old school Vanilla players and fans of Warcraft III. I think's MoP was Blizzard's experiment of making an expansion that isn't based on a Warcraft II/III story because other than the Burning Legion and Azshara, there isn't much else to use so they had to create something new/

Blizzard's in a no-win situation at the moment. If they try to please the hardcore/social people then they put off the casuals/playing for fun people and vice versa.


What I think would help the game on a social level:

1) Help out the dying servers. In a perfect world, every server would feel like at least a med pop server at peak time. I was on a medium pop server for years and after going to a high pop server for the first time in years, it felt like I was in TBC again where there were guilds and people everywhere.

2) Reduce the cost for server transfers or create combo packages. There are plenty of people out there who want to go to a new server but they feel like spending $100 on bringing their main and some alts over is too much and it is.

3) Create events like the AQ War Effort again where the entire server gets involved. One of Vanilla Wow's greatest magical feeling was the server community and how alive it felt due to being in a new world. Now a days, some people just log in for LFR/Valor capping and that's it.

[Deleted]

As the title suggest, what do you think Blizzard can do with WoW to gain more subs, and make up for the colossal drop in Subscribers?

To be honest, I don't think there is anything they can do to regain subs. At least, they can regain some temporarily, but they can't hold them.

They would need to release a WoW 2 with a completely new engine and graphics as well as lots and lots of new content. That would be a totally different game though, so it doesn't really count and I can't see it happening. Blizzard is probably just milking WoW until Titan is released. They know they'll continue to lose subs but they just try to keep the speed at which people leave to a minimum by releasing new content.

[Deleted]

Funny that the question is posed in terms of gaining paid subscriptions and not gaining players. I think they should drop the subscription model. My guess is they'll do it when Titan is released, making them both B2P.

[Glaziola]

WOW is fine as is.

China inflated the sub numbers, now that is going away.

The real core of this game is in North America and Europe.

Those numbers are stable.

I believe so too as long as EU/US still pays the bills there doesnt need to be a gain in subs and blizz will keep profiting enough so theres always new exciting content.

Oh and also offtopic: Blizzard should get rid of RaF and purge all account subscriptions that run with RaF gametime. It's funny how all people that I know pay 5k gold for month game time while I pay 13 euros for it. It makes me sad really that such injustice exists and blizzard does nothing against it. I would use RaF myself too bad I was stupid enough not to choose a country thats eligible like they did. (UK, Germany, etc.)

[Deleted]

Well, if Blizzard offers a few retro servers, like a vanilla and a BC server, with the state of the game simply rolled back to those day, I promise I would return. I'm very nostalgic of BC and while I don't want to start a war about what WoW has become, I think no one would lose if they did what I suggest.

What would be interesting would be progression servers similar to what Everquest have had for a while. Start off at Vanilla with everything except Molten Core locked, unlock new patches and expansions over time.

Problem is that apparently Blizzard no longer have the server software for the old versions of the game, so they either can't do it or would have to start over coding a new version of the game that has the old content and systems built into it.

[Deleted]

Oh and also offtopic: Blizzard should get rid of RaF and purge all account subscriptions that run with RaF gametime. It's funny how all people that I know pay 5k gold for month game time while I pay 13 euros for it. It makes me sad really that such injustice exists and blizzard does nothing against it. I would use RaF myself too bad I was stupid enough not to choose a country thats eligible like they did. (UK, Germany, etc.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

[Gimlix]

At this point in time I think the only way it is going to gain players is by going F2P.



Losing almost 20% of your customers in six months is far from fine. The game is not stable in NA and EU the earnings report stated "...the game saw declines of approximately 1.3 million subscribers, mainly from the East, but in the West as well.”

Other words, most of the subscribers lost are from china, but a few thousand are from US aswell.

[papaz]

Give Titan beta to those who sub for 12 months.

BAM, 2 million gained in subs.

[Deleted]

Losing almost 20% of your customers in six months is far from fine. The game is not stable in NA and EU the earnings report stated "...the game saw declines of approximately 1.3 million subscribers, mainly from the East, but in the West as well.”

So we can establish that both Maths and English aren't strong areas for you...