Wow sub numbers now below Burning Crusade

[DeeTwelve]

World of Warcraft's subscriber numbers are following pretty much the same course as those of every other big successful PVE fantasy MMO, except that WoW is actually doing a little bit better than most at retaining their customers. Go look up the old EverQuest numbers, the Lineage numbers, and actually compare what percentage of their peak subscribers each one had left at the nine-year mark.

Fucking Chicken Little WoW babies with their little charts have no idea how this shit works, like this is the first MMO to ever grow old.

[LairenyX]

Note that I'm not diminishing the importance or validity of what you wrote, but quoting the whole thing will take up way too much room.

Okay, so.

I think you're misunderstanding me if you think I was bringing in Blizzard to justify the way things are being their intended design. To be honest, that's implicit in that the things we're discussing are actually the state of the game right now. I am attempting to explain the merit of something that is already there, while you are counteracting my argument by asking for a feature that isn't.

Let's move on to the actual difference you seem to be missing. LFD is basically there so that you can do dungeons without the tedium of finding a group the way we used to have to do it. Note that this is OPTIONAL. The old way is still there: if you really want to you can ask for a group in trade chat and actually travel to the dungeon and zone into it just like we did before LFD came along. However, the actual dungeon (with the exception of a minor buff) is exactly the same in every way. There is no difference between LFDing it and getting a 5-man group of people on your server and running into it yourself. The only thing LFD is changing is the method by which we enter the dungeon.

Your hypothetical feature of not wiping, if you also get loot from the fight the way you're saying, completely changes the state of dungeons because there would be literally no reason not to use it. Nobody likes dying in the game because you get nothing from it, so if there were an option to get your loot like normal with no chance of dying, I doubt many people would opt out of it. (there would obviously be some who would because they like to actually work for things, but given the state of the community today the vast majority would use it). Does that mean it's a good idea for a feature? Perhaps, but Blizzard hasn't added it to the game yet so clearly they haven't yet considered it important enough to put in the game.

I honestly don't know how I can get across the difference between these two things any better. It's not a huge difference, true, but it fundamentally changes the flavour of the debate we're having.

In short, your feature will make dungeons trivial, mine simply lets you get into them more easily. They're affecting completely different areas of the game, so they can't really be compared. The only sense in which it's logically the same thing is that they make some aspect of the game more convenient, but that's where the similarity ends for me.

LFR, as far as I'm aware, was basically created because not everyone is in a raiding guild and not everyone necessarily has the time to PuG raids, but they still wanted everyone to see the instances and get the chance to fight the bosses. That's why the loot isn't as good as in normal or heroic: it's not meant to be a competitive raiding tier, so much as a try-before-you-buy sort of thing. Whether that has met expectations is a topic for another debate.

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Why don't stats matter to you? You're hitting bosses with your stats, not your looks. If you want to look good, then transmog is a GOOD thing because if you end up with a piece that's good stat-wise but you don't like the look of you can opt to change it to something that's more aesthetically pleasing to you. You say it's diminishing it, but the only reason people transmog gear in the first place is that they'd rather a piece look like other piece X than current piece Y. I honestly can't fathom the problem you're having with this because on other people it affects you in no way whatsoever and on your own character if you don't want to transmog your current gear you're completely free to not do so.

Okay man... okay...

I know you'll never be convinced, but transmog is evil. Eviler than the Lichking.

[Deleted]

OK, thnx for sharing the facts with me OP.
But what are you trying to accomplish with showing this temporary fact?
Are you trying to explain that because WoW has less subs atm than it did during TBC's release that it'll be like that forever now, because I can't find the post where you properly explained your point when you decided to show this fact that is techincally useless for the average WoW player.

[Marema]

I hope the game drops down to around 1 million people; those of us who actually still enjoy the game. Everybody else could just go away.

[Wixwix]

Not surprised.

Blizzard ruined their own game, people think it sucks and they stop playing.

[Darthmatty]

Is this even accurate? I thought that we hit top subs in wrath not cata

[Feeline10]

I think as a player I should give a shit since development, content, game design and game experience are all effected by the amount of subs.

Yes and no.

Subscriptions are, as pointed out, back to BC status -- but a few months ago they announced another 40 or 60 people added to the WoW team re-distributed from SC2 / D3 / unnannounced project's teams. So, obviously they're interested in faster content patches, expansions once a year (as said by Ghostcrawler a week ago), so your statement isn't really true..

[Belize]

AMG WOW IHS DEINGYING

Am I doing it right?

[Deleted]

Is this even accurate? I thought that we hit top subs in wrath not cata

It was, the graph shows that....

[LairenyX]

I hope the game drops down to around 1 million people; those of us who actually still enjoy the game. Everybody else could just go away.

Oh? are you and those 1 million people going to build an extra secret castle together on the South Pacific Islands, live together, and rule the world? occasionally going to Blizz HQ for sandwhich and tea time lunch?

[Azrile]

Still beats any other MMO going around. Numbers have peaked. They will likely only get lower from here.

I especially love the part about ´this is not normal and not good´. Does the OP realize that aside from EVE, there has never been an MMO that hasnt´peaked in the first 2 months. SWTOR, AOC, WAR.. all of those games had their áll-time- high within a month of launch.

Eve is the exception because it started with like 5000 players and allows you to pay for alt accounts using ingame currency. How many subscribers do you think WOW would have if you could have second accounts paid for with ingame gold?

[Deleted]

I seen this




Turns out the numbers are right. We now have the same amount of players as Classic

Do you know what makes me really fucking laugh about this post.

"THIS IS NOT NORMAL AND NOT GOOD".

What I really am interested in knowing is what they are basing normal and good on?

On all the other MMOs with 12 million subs at one point?

Saturation (which is imo what we are seeing) is perfectly normal, is it good I guess it is not if your Blizzard but what can they do.

[Deleted]

Even if wow lost 2k subs a year it would take another 4 year for it to be dead. By that time Titan is finished, and that will be the next big thing. Something tells me they calculated for that.

[Golden Yak]

Doesn't surprise me - MoP content is pretty much over with and no sign of new content for a while. Many people will be taking a break.

[Redmage]

Other game companies would sell their souls to fail this bad.

[Senftw]

Are you trying to tell me that a 10 year old game is losing subs?1

I don't believe you!

[Katchii]

Turns out the numbers are right. We now have the same amount of players as Classic

And it still has like 5-10x more players than the next most popular MMO. The game's old, numbers will drop. As long as this game has even 5 million subscribers/ players it will be ridiculously profittable and succesful. Even at 1 million the game is still completely viable and able to be sustained indefinitely.....WoW will never die unless Blizzard shuts it down.

[Tya]

What shocks me more is how few subs Cata actually bled. I thought it was way worse than that.

[McNeil]

Doesn't surprise me - MoP content is pretty much over with and no sign of new content for a while. Many people will be taking a break.

I think after Blizzard announced that there won't be a patch 5.5 or anything new for MoP, people suddenly started unsubscribing and are now waiting for WoD. Trough maybe the release of the PS4 and Xbone could also play a role in the huge decline, but thats just speculation

[Holtzmann]

I'm not disagreeing with anything you've just said, but you're not really answering the question.

The reason I stipulate "outside of how long you've played" is because that's entirely up to the individual in question. I've no doubt some people started their WoW experience with Mists of Pandaria, so saying the game is old in that respect makes no sense. It's probably fair to say that a lot of people who started in MoP have already ditched, and they'll have done so for any number of reasons, but I really doubt they did so because the game was "old". It wasn't old to them.

This is what I'm trying to hone in on. Why is a game being old mean it has to decline. There's literally nothing to suggest that it has to, so my question is why it is.

It's also fair to say that a lot of people who started in Burning Crusade have stopped playing during Burning Crusade. Likewise with Vanilla, Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm or any specific patch. Player churn is a constant in the game because there are always people leaving or joining, and we cannot make any assumptions as to why people do that because they have a thousand different reasons that we factor in a graph. The more important point is that a game only starts to lose subscription numbers when the number of players coming in is overtaken by the people leaving.

As the game gets old it's going to attract fewer new players. Simply put, there aren't enough people interested in playing World of Warcraft nowadays as there were back in 2004. There is a finite pool of potential players that is eventually depleted as more and more people try the game, play it for any length of time (very few people play any game longer than a couple of years), then move on. That's why games and games series decline as they become older: there are simply not enough people to play them after a while.