WoW Lost 300k Subscribers, Patch 4.3 this year, Blizzcon 2011 Tickets, Blue Posts

[Beyond2]

i'm pretty sure the main reason they're losing subs is that the game is too easy for anyone who can get the same 10 people together one day a week for 3 hours.

i call bullshit on casuals. you're not casual, you're antisocial. you cannot possibly hand out more loots or water down the game any more than it is already.


they give you tier items AND THEN WHAT? sit around and do nothing with it? because you're not raiding, or else you'd already have a way to get the items. you just want a perpetual carrot, you can't stand it that you've gotten worst than the best gear and that's it. so? they add tier pieces as "easy to get" and you're now complaining that you cant get heroic. they give you heroic and you complain that you cant get the optional boss gear.

bottomline is raid itemization should only be accessible to raiders, because thats all its useful for. you opt out of raiding, you beat the game when you finish the last set of daily quests / grind the last rep.


sorry, but everyone i know that quit is because its way too easy to beat the raids and they have no interest in silly grinding to beat heroic versions which are not different / unique enough to matter to them. they are just sick and tired of

1. chasing the carrot
2. gear reset every expansion
3. constant fiddling with balance
4. things STILL out of balance randomly
5. pvp boring / arenas have too much dependence on comps and not enough on skill

etc. etc. i personally enjoy the few hours a week i put into wow and its cheap enough that even if i didn't play i'd keep my sub going.

You make a lot of assumptions. First and foremost, it has nothing to do with "having the best of the worst" - on the contrary, during WotLK I was perfectly satisifed with my base tier-10 loot set. I never once complained about how hard tokens were to get, I never once asked for heroic loot to be passed out to anyone with a pulse. Do you know why that is?

I'll give you a hint. Look at the blues you could get for running heroics when tier 11 was still current content. Take all the plate DPS pieces, or all the plate Tank pieces and put them on at the same time. Looks coherent, right? but utterly dull. It looks like it was something that was made on the lunch break of one of the employees.

Compare that set to ANY TIER SET FROM 11 OR 12. Any one. Any of those sets have coherent everything, and typically have bells and whistles. Glowing eyes on the shoulders. A hood that obscures the face. Some factor that makes them look cool. Some factor that makes YOUR CHARACTER look cool.

At the end of the day, i care about my avatar looking halfway decent. Blizzard has made having a cool avatar something only raiders are allowed to do, and that isn't acceptable if they want my subscription money.

and as for what to do when I have my full tier set? Why, good sir, I start working on my full tier OFF set. Gives me something to do, a reason to play. Being told "oh you can only get 3/5 tier" is like telling me "You have no goal to work for". No goal to work for? No subscription money.

Bear in mind - back in Wrath, which is the model I think worked best, casual dungeon running took far, far, far longer to obtain raid emblems. so it would be months to finish my tier, BUT AT LEAST I COULD. I'd keep playing till the raid after firelands if it meant I could finish the tier.


You'd think they'd have thrown a bone to casuals and at least make the old armor set buyable for points - herp derp NOPE.


Frankly, we can argue back and forth all day. At the end of the day, I spoke with my money, and I hope blizzard keeps losing subs until they fix what they broke. At that point, I'll resub and happily play. Until then, I'm done paying blizzard to develop for raiders when I'm not one.

[Tokurei]

It makes me happy to see more people leaving the game. As sick and twisted as that sounds, maybe blizzard will wake the fuck up and make tier accessible to non-raiders like it was in WotLK. Or at least give casuals something to do with rewards that aren't recolored rehashed shit, while raiders get all the new shinies. The new quest zone was a joke; I saw the rewards, I saw how little they value their casual players. "Just give em recolored rares, they'll eat it up. toss in a recolored mount too for kicks" No thank you blizzard, my money will go elsewhere. Make your game casual friendly like it was in WotLK and we'll talk about me re-subbing. If it takes another 1,100,000 people to leave to make a round two million, I hope blizzard it will get blizzard to fix their shit. I want to play WoW, but not in an environment where I have no hope for obtaining an armor set unless I'm a hardcore raider.

You can get most of your valor cap for the week solely by running trolls and random heroics, so unless you're complaining about getting your 2set too quickly as opposed to several weeks of daily heroic grinding in wotlk, not much has changed (or WILL change) in terms of casuals and their "hard earned" shinies. Just because you think the latest tier is badass or whatever and you want to show it off in 5mans and bgs as soon as possible, doesn't mean blizzard is suddenly going to change their mind about how it's distributed. Just wait around for however many nerfs it takes until you can pug the raid or just forget about getting geared from raids period.

[frott]

"The biggest update in content since Cataclysm" conveys to me that they think that this patch will be larger than the expansion, unless they just poorly worded it. I think they later is true, because Cataclysm as an expansion had a lot of content, the most out of any expansion to date.

cataclysm has not had the "most content," sorry but they trumpeted up redoing the entire old world as part of it. zzzz boring.

you seem to have a general issue with english, what they're saying is pretty clear as the largest PATCH since the release of cataclysm. That's not saying much. 4.1 and 4.2 were not exactly massive. All they need to do is release a bigger raid and a non-rehashed 5 man and their statement is true.

[sicness]

when they release gimp content that people destroy immediately, they can't seriously think people won't be wondering where the next content is.

4.1 was a non-patch to any raider. No upgrades available = not interested.

I'm so uninterested in it that i don't bother doing even the dailies now to cap valor. who cares? eventually i'll have more valor than i know what to do with, and the worst part is you don't even need full gear to beat the raids. by the time i get to the point that i would have needed it, it'll be nerfed anyway.

they've taken away any requirement for me to worry about flying through content because it is simply so easy to do so. Shrug.

You simply can't hide from the fact that making content more accessible actually loses subscribers faster because there is no prestige or value associated with obtaining items.

when it was *required* that you were 1 out of 40 people in a raid and had to dedicate time to obtaining upgrades, people CARED more. Now they don't, because anyone with any amount of skill can beat the content in last tier's gear. Zzz.

they hand casuals the ability to raid and the casuals ask for "tier loot without raiding."

you can spend less time in firelands than it takes to do a random heroic in a pug and clear a boss or two. on my server they're pugging heroic FL already.



blizz can't win. people whine about content being too inaccessible, so they make it easier and then people whine about there not being enough. Oops, kids clearly have no idea about things like development budgets.

Gimp content that took a month to clear with no artificial time inflating like resistance check fights and limited attempts?

Just because content being more accessible to you makes the game less interesting doesn't mean that's the case for everyone. You're also expecting the game to be what it isn't any more and hasn't been for a very long time now. Yet you blame Blizzard for that when they obviously have gone a completely different route with the genre that no one else has before? You do expect too much from Blizzard because you expect this game to be what it isn't, hence my statement about ridiculous expectations.

[Halicia]

Considering how long 4.2 took and how shit 4.2 was I can't really see how you call it 'flawed expectations'. If they can't meet player demands that sucks - for them.

Well, the major flaw to this, imo... is that 4.2 is all content that was originally supposed to be released 'soon after launch' as part of 4.1.

If 4.3 isnt announced SOON, then its likely the we'll reach a year since launch with only 1 new raid and 2 "recycled' dungeons to show for it.

If we're also looking at the new expansion next year, then that leaves about enough time for the scheduled 2 tiers of content before the pre-patch.

What I suspect though, is that whatever ill is plaguing Blizzard's development process will force them to skimp on one (or both) patches, aggravating the issues we've seen since the launch.

Remember when everyone said the 600k drop was just a 'seasonal thing, and you'll see it bounce right back' ? well... it didnt.

I'm not saying WoW is dying, but there's certainly a sickness that the membership drop is a symptom of.

[probert]

They lost almost 1 million subscribers in the first year of Cataclysm. Based on all the warcraft realms reports, we know that the big dropoff in player participation is actually in year 2 after the content is finally milked dry. Blizzard is stalling a bit with their raid release cycle, but typically we'd see the end-raid (Black Temple, ICC) in the november/dec period....probably this time they'll launch a new raid in the october timeframe, and the deathwing raid sometime next year. By then it might be too late -- GW2, SW:TOR, and a ton of other games... and Rift is getting more solid each and every day too (the dark horse in the mmo market). WoW isn't going anywhere, but the sun is setting on the dominance of WoW ... and probably the better of the whole MMO industry. "Peak WoW" was mid-Wrath.

[Beyond2]

You can get most of your valor cap for the week solely by running trolls and random heroics, so unless you're complaining about getting your 2set too quickly as opposed to several weeks of daily heroic grinding in wotlk, not much has changed (or WILL change) in terms of casuals and their "hard earned" shinies. Just because you think the latest tier is badass or whatever and you want to show it off in 5mans and bgs as soon as possible, doesn't mean blizzard is suddenly going to change their mind about how it's distributed. Just wait around for however many nerfs it takes until you can pug the raid or just forget about getting geared from raids period.

I do not enjoy raids. I will not do content I do not enjoy for the sake of getting gear.


I don't want to show it off in five mans "as soon as possible" i was content to wait for three or four months back in Wrath doing my daily, every day, slowly accumulating enough frost to buy my tier 11. I don't want it fast - i want it eventually. I just need a carrot on that stick that I know i can eventually reach. Right now, blizzard is adamant against providing me my carrot.

And as far as blizzard 'suddenly changing their minds' about how loot is distributed - I'm going to be loud whenever they announce more sub losses. I unsubbed before firelands. I kept up to date on the patch, and when I saw they were still fucking non-raiders, I decided to not sub.

See, it isn't about what you "think" people should have to do to earn armor. If I can't get a complete set of armor from running dungeons, my preferred gameplay, then I WILL NOT PAY BLIZZARD. That means less subscription money, and that speaks louder than your "B-B-BUT MY EPICS ARE SUPPOSEDTA BE SPECIAL"

[WingsofLiberty]

i like this whole idea of implementing patches faster. still it makes people not care about gear that much. all in all the new system is definitely nice

[Saverem]

I am one of those 300k. My subsription ended yesterday, and I don't plan on re-subbing for the foreseeable future.

I got tired of raiding halfway through T11 content and PvP lost it's appeal a few weeks ago, so there we go. Looking forward to SWTOR though.

[Deleted]

haha even my mac is faster than the piece of crap they're giving away

mac

point not made

[Roanthebrave]

the five pieces that compose the tier set still leaves two trinkets, the weapon slot, neck, rings, wrists, back, and feet. There's many, many slots left to fill that don't involve tier; also, as anyone will tell you, a tier set piece is slightly worse than a similar item of that ilevel, since the set bonus is incorporated into its stat weight. So someone wearing 5 pieces of tier from a dungeon would be better off with at least one of them being swapped out for a raid drop.


WHATS THAT? THERE ISN'T A DUNGEON SET? Gee imagine that. They could put in a dungeon set for people like me to work for. instead they give us hand me down raider gear with half the set locked away behind raid end bosses.

Just thought I would let you know that although it's not a true set with bonuses. The troll dugeon gear all matches and looks like a complete set.


OT: I think people are leaving now because leveling is so much easier. A lot more people have max levels of every class where as before, in Vanilla mostly but BC as well, it took a long time to max out a character. When some one got tired of their class they could re-roll. This could take months to max your character. Now, you can get BOA's and hit 85 in a solid 2 weeks from scratch. This meens people get board of that character faster. It gets to the point where you have made enough alts that you just get burnt out and don't have anything else to do. Wow world is getting smaller and smaller. Old content, outlands, northrend are dead areas with very few players and the new content is just so fast. It takes more or less 1-2 days to go from 80-85. They need to make leveling slower. More content. Better mixture of raids / dungeons.

[Beyond2]

Just thought I would let you know that although it's not a true set with bonuses. The troll dugeon gear all matches and looks like a complete set.

And you'd be utterly gimping yourself if you chose to use that complete set over the 359 tier you'd earn while completing the troll set.

Also, lets just sweep under the rug that all that armor is identical to the level 70 raid version. It's not a new armor set, its old models with inferior numbers slapped on it.

[MitchMeister-]

I'm not whining, but I'm one of those 300k also. Just can't keep doing it. Played since beta, leveled every class. Just sick of doing the same things over and over. It's nothing against the game, it's me expecting something different when I log in. I try to keep myself entertained. Let's tank now! oooo, let's heal! Only lasts a few days, and then I look back and go "damn I have no gold, maybe it's because I've bought epic flying on 8 toons and respec'd 3 or 4 toons several times the last 3 months to keep the game interesting". I tried Rift. Played for a month, got bored. Tried Aeon, played for a month, got bored. Let's hope ST:ToR is fun, which it should be for me since I'm a lore whore... which is probably the reason I can't get into a new random MMO. And if anyone's bored and like vehicle combat, try World Of Tanks. So far it's been a blast and it's free2play.

[soulkeeperx]

4.3 sounds interesting, hopefully its not Deathwing, 1 tier between the beginning and last would be kinda disappointing

[Deleted]

300k Loss total? That my friends, Aint nothing.For me, I see even more people then before. Small realms migth be boring, yes, and that will make some quit. But if you play on a crowded realm, you might not even noticed the loss of players.There is like.....200 realms or smt? That would be 1500x accounts not unsubscribed on each realm in general.

[gkai]

The subscriber loss doesn't surprise me the least bit. For me, a 6 year vet in wow.. what drives people away at least from my experience is the constant rehash and rebirth of old content and gear. Blizzard really needs to start making up new raid boss's instead of "New and improved Onyxia, Nef, Rag ect ect.." People want to see their money go to good use; and it's unfortunate that they're losing a ton of subscribers each month.

[Mercadi]

That Blood Elf Warrior/Rogue is amazing.

Her eyes lack the green glow, I would dare to say that she is one of the Alliance elves (High elves? as they call themselves).

[Tokurei]

I do not enjoy raids. I will not do content I do not enjoy for the sake of getting gear.I don't want to show it off in five mans "as soon as possible" i was content to wait for three or four months back in Wrath doing my daily, every day, slowly accumulating enough frost to buy my tier 11. I don't want it fast - i want it eventually. I just need a carrot on that stick that I know i can eventually reach. Right now, blizzard is adamant against providing me my carrot. And as far as blizzard 'suddenly changing their minds' about how loot is distributed - I'm going to be loud whenever they announce more sub losses. I unsubbed before firelands. I kept up to date on the patch, and when I saw they were still fucking non-raiders, I decided to not sub.See, it isn't about what you "think" people should have to do to earn armor. If I can't get a complete set of armor from running dungeons, my preferred gameplay, then I WILL NOT PAY BLIZZARD. That means less subscription money, and that speaks louder than your "B-B-BUT MY EPICS ARE SUPPOSEDTA BE SPECIAL"

"Gee blizz,, you think maybe I could get a complete tier set including trinkets and a pretty looking weapon? Oh and I don't really want to do any work at all for it. Also the shit you provide me in dungeons looks like shit! I want to be pretty!"I really don't see what else you're complaining about.Although I will admit a return of d sets would be fine. Hell yeah d2.

[wartoon]

i'm pretty sure the main reason they're losing subs is that the game is too easy for anyone who can get the same 10 people together one day a week for 3 hours.

i call bullshit on casuals. you're not casual, you're antisocial. you cannot possibly hand out more loots or water down the game any more than it is already.


they give you tier items AND THEN WHAT? sit around and do nothing with it? because you're not raiding, or else you'd already have a way to get the items. you just want a perpetual carrot, you can't stand it that you've gotten worst than the best gear and that's it. so? they add tier pieces as "easy to get" and you're now complaining that you cant get heroic. they give you heroic and you complain that you cant get the optional boss gear.

bottomline is raid itemization should only be accessible to raiders, because thats all its useful for. you opt out of raiding, you beat the game when you finish the last set of daily quests / grind the last rep.


sorry, but everyone i know that quit is because its way too easy to beat the raids and they have no interest in silly grinding to beat heroic versions which are not different / unique enough to matter to them. they are just sick and tired of

1. chasing the carrot
2. gear reset every expansion
3. constant fiddling with balance
4. things STILL out of balance randomly
5. pvp boring / arenas have too much dependence on comps and not enough on skill

etc. etc. i personally enjoy the few hours a week i put into wow and its cheap enough that even if i didn't play i'd keep my sub going.

alright i just picked the most interesting post here .. and you are right about few things and you wrong alittle

i have been playing this game since the release since the age of warriors one shotting people around '' if anyone remember '' and we enjoyed and luagh till we met the sweet UBRS raid with the amazing blues and greens we never looked at little things like heyyy GS or kick ! achive OR KICK all tho we care about you dps or hps doing ^^ '' it just show how active you are in raid '' aka the great world log in vanila we enjoyed zg ony mc aq20 aq40 bwl till naxx 40 and believe me there was people who can not obtain tier 1 even which is from MC but they were happy with some blues and greens running around with Mace of AV ^^ '' those lovely warriors '' EVERYONE was happy untill TBC came our talents changed our legendarys become a trash of 3 months of farm on legendary ! we had ilidan that actually drop it easly in your hands .... ive lost my sense of gaming in that time ...
but ! i found that in every expansion there is something that makes me '' enjoy '' in TBC arena created , it was something new and everyone rushhed to season 1 and BAAAAAAm! sorry ill call it the cursed expansion '' wotlk '' came with silly class .. the class that ruined other class's and made blizzard fuckedup and running out of options but then after 1 month the game met the point of 50%50 balanced lol .. oh damn i cant even remember what season was it but anyway in wotlk seriously we had nice instance - ulduar - amazing creation , blizzard had alot of subs in these days ! specialy on The crusader patch totc thing but the game become worse till the end of the expansion so we moved to cata .. and seriously guys cata was the best expansion so far tho we still havt seen much in cata but till now i feel like im playing the age of vanila with too many spells on my characters .. you talk about balance ? huh baby there was no balance since day 1 yes i play all class's and i know that 1v1 there IS no balance the game wasnt meant to be 1v1 ... tho one thing is BAD about nowdays than before .. i believe the game should be MORE harder in heroic PLUS i agree with some posts here about '' same gear but with different colors '' seriously blizzard i have no comment for that i mean lol even my son can draw better than these new items ... and RE-DO /RE-Colored is not going to work '' not in wow not in anything in this world ... even in sex you cant just fucking the same hole every day all day and every year its just boring at the end -.- anyway i think this expansion is great and arena is amazing atm .. dont qq about setups you just have to find your way out against every setup and create good setup and play .. just stop picking x3 mages and go like YEY we have alot of nova's now and 3 sheeps we will kick everyone ass and end up with 1.7 rated lal so the game is fine and we need harder heroic encounter with better items looking ^.^ and daily firelands is amazing finaly i can enjoy ganking and if you cant gank just run away little girl hmm what else ... gear reset every expansion YES man it should be and thats the fun in it your gear has to be changed its NOT like single player mode .. leme ask you do you wear the same T shirt everyday and forever !?!? simple
the game is fine people .. stop being weirdish enjoy every change in the game but seriously dont go nerdrage -.- i heared people saying '' bring back TBC or Vanila servers and shit but LOL even on those days I BET no one will play wow because there was also one shot around alll the time and ganking all the time no balance at all Lol '' old players will agree with me '' simple request '' just .. find .. your .. way .. out '' thats for arena peeps and pvp lovers and for pvers i have to agree with you folks the game needs some HARDER heroic .. and making the gear actually harder to obtain just like whats happening with pvpers that they cant get weapons untill they earn amount of blah etc .. anyway thanks for reading i just typed alot and im tired cya

[Rowrin]

I really dont think it is all that surprising. If you look at it, Wotlk statistically was the best time in wow, when the subscriber population peaked at around 12 mill. Something in wotlk raised the player "population cap" of wow. That said, cataclysm was suppose to bring back a burning crusade / vanilla feel to the game. By the looks of it, the game is easing back into Burning crusade / pre-early wotlk levels.