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  1. #861
    Legendary! Firebert's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fleugen View Post
    It has now been two days and your poll clearly shows that the majority does not rule in your favor.
    Biassed poll is biassed anyway. MMO-champ forums aren't a representative slice of the WoW playerbase.
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  2. #862
    The Lightbringer Perkunas's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Zagnut View Post
    Nobody cares. LFR is here forever, Wildstar flopped, and "hardcore MMO gaming" is virtually dead. You'll get your harder difficulty versions of the same content everyone else gets, but nobody is going to give you more than that anymore. What's more, none of you have ever successfully articulated why they SHOULD give you more, other than to feebly whine that this decade-old MMORPG would have totally never ever lost subscribers if only they'd listened to you.
    Uh, difficulty had little to do with Wildstar failing. Wildstar failed because they rushed an unfinished product to the masses and then the community chased away anybody who dared say anything about it being broken for the first month. By the time they fixed major launch bugs and design flaws the masses already migrated back to their original MMO's.
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  3. #863
    Quote Originally Posted by Perkunas View Post
    Uh, difficulty had little to do with Wildstar failing. Wildstar failed because they rushed an unfinished product to the masses and then the community chased away anybody who dared say anything about it being broken for the first month. By the time they fixed major launch bugs and design flaws the masses already migrated back to their original MMO's.
    Of course the guy with the "unskilled masses blah blah welfare epics" signature wants to shift blame for Wildstar's failure onto anything except its core design tenets. As if it's totally a coincidence that the hardcore dream game imploded on launch. As if a few more bug fixes would have turned it into some kind of thriving poopsock utopia where a million casuals paid $15 a month to /inspect the gear of their betters and revel in how great it felt to be locked out of content.

    Whatever, believe what you like because it doesn't matter. Have you looked at a list of upcoming MMO games lately? Nobody is dumping cash down the toilet trying to clone WoW anymore, much less oldschool WoW. It's over. The revenge of the hardcore never happened.

  4. #864
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by kinneer View Post
    I said the game is more accessible now. If contents were accessible, why do we have more raiding difficulties now, LFD and LFR? If Blizzard was happy with the numbers of players doing these contents, then why spend developing them? Or could it that that decided to make these contents more accessible?
    So i repeat... cos u obviously didnt get my point...

    U say Wow is more accessible now... so 12million players back in Wrath thought the accessibility was fine. So in your opinion the game is more accessible with 6mill players than it was when it had 12million players?

    I think that when the game had 12million players it was doing something right.

    Basically the sub numbers speak for themselves.

    Quote Originally Posted by kinneer View Post
    So you say you do not know. I do not know and even Blizzard do not know. But you don't believe that people can get bored with the game. Let me ask you, do you still play the games you did 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? Or maybe TV series that you have stopped watching?
    Errrm actually i do! lol

    I started gaming back in the 1980s and i often go back and play retro... i could list u dozens of old games i still drop into even today. I have at least 20 games installed on my PC that are older than Wow.

    Good quality games never get boring.

    Quote Originally Posted by kinneer View Post
    You may not want to subscribe to the idea but people do get bored playing the same game for several years.
    I dont subscribe to a 6mill loss purely on the basis of the game being old... im sure some of that 6mill was due to the game getting old but not all of them. Like i said, im confident that if Blizzard made better design decisions from Wrath onwards they would have more players than they do now.

  5. #865
    Quote Originally Posted by Endemonadia View Post
    I think that when the game had 12million players it was doing something right.

    Basically the sub numbers speak for themselves.
    Yeah, when Wrath hit, WoW was 5 or so years younger, and so was the playerbase, WoWinsider had a nice article about that called "the incredible aging demographic" (It's at http://wow.joystiq.com/2014/08/28/th...g-demographic/ ), and there are some good points made there, that coupled with the general shrinking of the paid MMO market (All the subs WoW lost didn't join other MMOs) make comparing to Wrath pretty apples-and-oranges...

  6. #866
    Quote Originally Posted by Endemonadia View Post
    So i repeat... cos u obviously didnt get my point...

    U say Wow is more accessible now... so 12million players back in Wrath thought the accessibility was fine. So in your opinion the game is more accessible with 6mill players than it was when it had 12million players?

    I think that when the game had 12million players it was doing something right.

    Basically the sub numbers speak for themselves.



    Errrm actually i do! lol

    I started gaming back in the 1980s and i often go back and play retro... i could list u dozens of old games i still drop into even today. I have at least 20 games installed on my PC that are older than Wow.

    Good quality games never get boring.



    I dont subscribe to a 6mill loss purely on the basis of the game being old... im sure some of that 6mill was due to the game getting old but not all of them. Like i said, im confident that if Blizzard made better design decisions from Wrath onwards they would have more players than they do now.
    Whatever the changes that may of caused that may be, I really doubt it's raiding. because many people didn't do it before, and many people aren't doing it now. (Unless you count LFR)

    (Though, it's a well known fact that WoW used to have some massive subscriber churn, and it makes it really hard to make a statement of "People obviously liked it!" when for all we know, half or more could of been quitting and been replaced by new people fairly quickly. I subscribe to the idea that that is the core problem of what happened to WoW. the Churn stopped, and they desperately tried to plug the hole with desperation tactics because the game post level cap offered very little to motivate most people to keep paying those fees! Remember: Sometime around the end of WOTLK/early Cata, Blizzard had something that they used to have, IIRC, something to the tune of over 40 (I think?) million former paying subscribers AND most didn't even hit the level cap, part of which was the motivation of the low level changes in the game, to try and motivate new people to keep playing, which they've sort of clearly failed at. So it seems it's now a desperate race to keep what they have as long as they can.)

  7. #867
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by mysticx View Post
    Yeah, when Wrath hit, WoW was 5 or so years younger, and so was the playerbase, WoWinsider had a nice article about that called "the incredible aging demographic" (It's at http://wow.joystiq.com/2014/08/28/th...g-demographic/ ), and there are some good points made there, that coupled with the general shrinking of the paid MMO market (All the subs WoW lost didn't join other MMOs) make comparing to Wrath pretty apples-and-oranges...
    I dont doubt for a second that one of the factors involved in players quitting is people getting sick of the paid sub model. How many people its impossible to say, but its definitely a factor nonetheless.

    Quote Originally Posted by Otiswhitaker View Post
    Whatever the changes that may of caused that may be, I really doubt it's raiding. because many people didn't do it before, and many people aren't doing it now. (Unless you count LFR)
    I think u will find that among the quitting longterm players that raiding would most certainly be a factor. All of the stats show a large drop-off in raiding since Wrath whatever way u try to cut it. I dont think thats a coincidence.

    Its impossible to know what proportion of the 6mill quitters r normal churn or longterm players, or raiders... I think its a mixture of the two with both demographics being significant.

    Its unwise to assume that the number of longterm players, or raiders, who quit is tiny and insignificant.

  8. #868
    Quote Originally Posted by Endemonadia View Post
    I think u will find that among the quitting longterm players that raiding would most certainly be a factor. All of the stats show a large drop-off in raiding since Wrath whatever way u try to cut it. I dont think thats a coincidence.

    Its impossible to know what proportion of the 6mill quitters r normal churn or longterm players, or raiders... I think its a mixture of the two with both demographics being significant.

    Its unwise to assume that the number of longterm players, or raiders, who quit is tiny and insignificant.
    Looking for reason of subs drop solely in disappointments with raiding isnt very objective.
    Its just wrong to look at every drop or increase of subs as a result of how good, bad, hard or easy raiding is.

    As Blizzard said, very few people raided, and huge amount of players didnt even reach level cap.
    Sure, there are some hardcore players who couldnt stand their exlusive right for raiding is shared with other crowd, but those are not so many.

    IMO, Sub loss reasons during cata are:

    1. During wotlk, players killed main WC3 villain and somehow they "finished the game".
    2. No new continent, being at long-time known continent isnt very new or interesting to players
    3. Burnout from raiding 4 different modes on main and alts in alt-friendly expansion
    4. Too long existance of ICC before Cata came out
    5. Wow is really old, players got bored. You can get bored of wife/husband, kids sometimes... how not of a video game
    6. Hard Cata 5man heroics at launch
    7. Worse raids than in Wotlk
    8. Much more competition in MMO market than before
    etc.

  9. #869
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Maniac2 View Post
    Looking for reason of subs drop solely in disappointments with raiding isnt very objective.
    Which is exactly what i didnt say... i said its a MIXTURE.

    This is what i said>>>

    Quote Originally Posted by Endemonadia View Post
    Its impossible to know what proportion of the 6mill quitters r normal churn or longterm players, or raiders... I think its a mixture of the two with both demographics being significant.
    Last edited by mmoc978ad45763; 2014-09-01 at 12:52 PM.

  10. #870
    Quote Originally Posted by Endemonadia View Post
    I dont doubt for a second that one of the factors involved in players quitting is people getting sick of the paid sub model. How many people its impossible to say, but its definitely a factor nonetheless.



    I think u will find that among the quitting longterm players that raiding would most certainly be a factor. All of the stats show a large drop-off in raiding since Wrath whatever way u try to cut it. I dont think thats a coincidence.

    Its impossible to know what proportion of the 6mill quitters r normal churn or longterm players, or raiders... I think its a mixture of the two with both demographics being significant.

    Its unwise to assume that the number of longterm players, or raiders, who quit is tiny and insignificant.
    Only something like around ~20% of the players ever did ICC when it was current. Do try and remember that, and don't try and artificially inflate raiding's popularity.

  11. #871
    Well look, sure WoW started losing subscribers at the exact same age as every other MMO to have led the market. And yes that was at the same time as the Cataclysm difficulty hike, and sure that was all a year before LFR even launched. Yes organized raiding was ignored by at least 4 out of 5 WoW players even at its most popular, and yes the one game that hyped itself as bringing back hardcore raids and attunements was a terrible failure.

    But WoW would have grown forever if only it weren't for LFR. Some misspelled rant on a forum somewhere said so.

    Whatever. Like I said, it's over. WoW will never get rid of LFR, and no new hardcore raiding MMO will arise to carry the banner. No one is even trying at this point.

  12. #872
    The reality is that it's impossible to say why exactly the subs started to go down. We can speculate all day, but we will never know. The only productive thing to do is to look at the game objectively and say "Why would players leave this game? What would prevent new players from joining the game?"

    For the former question, here are some potential answers:

    1. Game is too easy (heroics are a joke, lfr is a joke, etc.)
    2. Game has been out for 10 years (i.e. people don't want to play an "old" game)
    3. People get burned out
    4. The story isn't immersive (this is a personal one maybe, but I had no idea what the story was in MOP; to be fair, I didn't know this in TBC either)

    For the latter:

    1. The level cap is so high that it turn people off
    2. The game is old (the perception that it's dying)
    3. Competition
    4. Sub cost (the rise of F2P games)

    But again, it's impossible to know why people DON'T buy a game. What makes someone go to a game store (do people still do that?) and ignore this game and buy another? They may not even know, nor can you ask them anyway.

    Blizzard does do an exit survey when you cancel your subscription. I've cancelled mine enough times to know. They should have pretty good data on why people quit, but again people may not know why exactly. Or they may not be truthful. For me, I typically quit once I start getting bored or have no excitement when loggin in. Typically that's when the only reason I log in is to farm rep or otherwise do grindy things. I also tend to quit when I don't have a stable/fun guild to play with. WoW as a single player game is pretty lame.

  13. #873
    Spam Assassin! MoanaLisa's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Varabently View Post
    The reality is that it's impossible to say why exactly the subs started to go down. We can speculate all day, but we will never know. The only productive thing to do is to look at the game objectively and say "Why would players leave this game? What would prevent new players from joining the game?"
    Here are a few things we do know:

    1. According to the WoW infographic published earlier this year there have been over 100 million people who have played the game one way or another over the years (including free trials). So about 92+% of those people have quit. Free trial accounts are 100% irrelevant to the topic of raiding or LFR for obvious reasons.

    2. Blizzard has said that in the early years they had enough people coming into the game new to cover the people that were leaving and then some. So the population grows.

    3. After a number of years the number of new people joining the game is now not sufficient to cover the number of people who are leaving.

    4. MMO's of WoW's type have ALL been steadily shrinking over the last few years.

    5. The monthly subscription model has grown steadily to be more unpopular with prospective new customers. WoW is about the only MMO that has shown any ability to sustain itself on a mass-market basis with that model for a long period of time. ESO Online and Wildstar are giving it a go. Neither has done much to scare Blizzard into thinking that they will cause some mass exodus from the game. Neither of the two newer MMO's are doing all that well but they may be doing well enough to continue. Or maybe not.

    Blizzard thinks that LFR is important for the game. They've designed a progression path specifically for it (and another for Flex/Mythic) in Warlords. They are doing what they can to keep LFR as an alternative for certain kinds of players and optional for everyone else. These simple facts trump everything else.

    Theories about subscription loss that do not take into account points 1-5 above are almost certainly misleading and outright wrong no matter how vehemently they are defended here or anywhere else. Raids, by themselves, have less to do with this than most people think. For one thing the numbers simply aren't there. As a percentage of game population participation in non-LFR raiding hasn't changed all that much over the years. So the sort of large losses that have occurred simply cannot be explained by raid configuration changes and lack of new people signing up has nothing at all to do with raids per se.

    It's all much more complicated than people make it out to be. Nonetheless, LFR isn't going anywhere. Starting with Warlords anyone that finds themselves in it against their own personal will should examine their priorities.
    Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2014-09-01 at 08:55 PM.
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  14. #874
    WoW's population dropped by 40% and the hardcore 5% tried to pretend it was totally because of their irrelevant minority and the stupid issues they bitch about constantly. Nobody else bought it for a second.

  15. #875
    Quote Originally Posted by Zagnut View Post
    WoW's population dropped by 40% and the hardcore 5% tried to pretend it was totally because of their irrelevant minority and the stupid issues they bitch about constantly. Nobody else bought it for a second.
    The hardcore minority likely didn't give a shit. Only scrub betas care that what they play is liked by other people, the rest just play what they enjoy.

  16. #876
    The Lightbringer Perkunas's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Khorm View Post
    The hardcore minority likely didn't give a shit. Only scrub betas care that what they play is liked by other people, the rest just play what they enjoy.
    Oh, Gods. We've got a Red-pill'er in this thread. To be fair my issues with WoW lie with the rampant homogenization that occurred from Wrath through Cata. Now that LFR no longer rewards tier sets, important trinkets or gear that's required for progression I'm content to let people faceroll their way to ugly gear that they are just going to mog over with old items anyway.
    Stains on the carpet and stains on the memory
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  17. #877
    Quote Originally Posted by Perkunas View Post
    Oh, Gods. We've got a Red-pill'er in this thread. To be fair my issues with WoW lie with the rampant homogenization that occurred from Wrath through Cata. Now that LFR no longer rewards tier sets, important trinkets or gear that's required for progression I'm content to let people faceroll their way to ugly gear that they are just going to mog over with old items anyway.
    State what class you played before going on about 'rampant homogenization'.

  18. #878
    The Lightbringer Perkunas's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Khorm View Post
    State what class you played before going on about 'rampant homogenization'.
    Elemental Shaman and Holy Paladin.
    Stains on the carpet and stains on the memory
    Songs about happiness murmured in dreams
    When we both of us knew how the end always is...

  19. #879
    Quote Originally Posted by Perkunas View Post
    Elemental Shaman and Holy Paladin.
    I can see why you hated it, lost your guaranteed raid spot even if you were a numpty.

  20. #880
    The Lightbringer Perkunas's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Khorm View Post
    I can see why you hated it, lost your guaranteed raid spot even if you were a numpty.
    Actually, I loved being the guy that the raid depended on. When I was a Holy Paladin I was the foundation of the raid. If I failed the raid wiped and I loved that pressure. I was a Cleric in EQ and a Terran Trader in Earth and Beyond after that. I healed tanks and that's my favorite role. When I was Elemental it was a Utility DPS character. I had more responsibilities than the average DPS'er in a raid because my DPS was substantially less than the other casters so I had to take on the crazy roles. Somebody has to be the link for the core during Vashj? Gotta dispel the skulls during M'uru? Idiot Rogues screw up and kick deaden during RoS? It was fun and it provided a depth to the class in general. People who raided as the spec knew exactly what they were getting into yet many still pissed and moaned because they couldn't figure out the buffs they brought to the group, and their personal DPS equaled more overall damage than another pure would have provided.

    As an officer in a top 100 guild at the time I didn't have to ever worry about a raid spot. It just wasn't as fun without the extra responsibility. I'm hoping that with the removal of 10-man progression and a single size Mythic format semi-niche roles can make a bit of a comeback.
    Stains on the carpet and stains on the memory
    Songs about happiness murmured in dreams
    When we both of us knew how the end always is...

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