"Players rarely argue for less convenience." - Ghostcrawler

[Mormolyce]

This thread is number 4563 in our series "OP is wrong, quote from GC is right".

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A very large minority were so pissed they simply left (20% of the player base).

You know why those 20% of people left? Do tell. I suppose you asked them all an exit survey? And compared the results to people leaving the game in earlier time periods?

[Defengar]

This thread is number 4563 in our series "OP is wrong, quote from GC is right".

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You know why those 20% of people left? Do tell. I suppose you asked them all an exit survey? And compared the results to people leaving the game in earlier time periods?

WoW only started losing players faster than it was gaining them when Cata hit. That didn't even happen during the year long time we were stuck doing ICC runs. It was very clear Cata was full of garbage people did not want.

[Robert3620]

I would say from the time of ICC to now a large portion of the community got left out of content. LFR servers the people it does well. Heroic serves it's people well. I would say that normal is the problem. It's been tuned further and further up, leaving more people that were doing normal raiding out of it. With that happening problems just kept building up. The social and lower tier guilds quit. Servers started feeling deader. Higher end guilds had less places to go to find new people. So now we have a handful of servers with anything like the raiding community we knew and many without it. That's what flex is suppose to help with and it could work but I think it would of worked better at the start of MoP then now. It's going to take time to try to rebuild what was once there and I really feel as if the end raid of a expansion is not the right place to start that building.

[nekobaka]

WoW only started losing players faster than it was gaining them when Cata hit. That didn't even happen during the year long time we were stuck doing ICC runs. It was very clear Cata was full of garbage people did not want.

Then apparently MoP is just the same.

[Deleted]

A huge majority of the playerbase never voice what they like or dislike on any forums anywhere anyway. They never provide feedback and usually when they stop their subscription they don't bother to fill out any elaborate reasons why they stopped either, because they just don't care.

That is the reality of things.

Secondly, the small minority on the forums that does say what they like and dislike are often too ignorant to hit with a stick. The truth usually is that consumers are fickle and don't really know what they would enjoy or wouldn't enjoy. Sometimes giving them what they ask for is the worst thing you can do.

But complaints... for complaints you usually can only depend on your small minority, because the large majority lays forever silent. When people on the forum continuously keep complaining about something it at least gives you a good indication of what your dedicated playerbase experiences. One of the things they need to learn to balance is how to provide content for their dedicated playerbase that doesn't piss off their bigger uncommited casual playerbase and vice versa.

People have been complaining about rogues and mages since day 1 of WoW.

Not all regular and persistent complaints indicate an actual problem or represent a majority.

Jesus, could you make one post without the pseudo-intellectual senseless crap, Anarchor? Do you even read the nonsense you're writting?

[Wildtree]

Ghostcrawler's job is basically to insult his customers on Twitter.

Only those who lack the brain to understand him are insulted.

This thread is just one of many... And it's like all of them a perfect example for not understanding...

Forums/Fan site = a few thousand players.
Game altogether = some 8 million players.

The few thousand players are already divided with their opinions. The 8 millions never say a word..
GC's Tweet proven as fact, right there.

[Deleted]

WoW only started losing players faster than it was gaining them when Cata hit. That didn't even happen during the year long time we were stuck doing ICC runs. It was very clear Cata was full of garbage people did not want.

This kind of "post hoc ergo procter hoc" argument is getting really tired.
Correlation is not causation.

[Noorri]

WoW only started losing players faster than it was gaining them when Cata hit. That didn't even happen during the year long time we were stuck doing ICC runs. It was very clear Cata was full of garbage people did not want.

THis can just as easily be contributed to the "gain" rate of new customers dropping to basically zero since close to all people who would ever be interested in a MMO has already played or are playing WoW. I'm not saying you are wrong, but we can't know which scenario is right.

[Deficineiron]

Why does it matter where the sub losses come from? The fact that there are massive losses is all that is important. You also have zero idea if western subs are stable at all. You only know what they said in the call, "Majority came from the east." That doesn't mean nothing came from the west. The west could have lost 600k players and their statement would still be correct.

They point out why they think their losses came about. They also aren't dumb and wouldn't come out and say to their shareholders, "Hey we really fucked this game up and don't know how to fix it now... so keep giving us money." They will word things so very carefully to make it sound like they got a handle on things to keep the money rolling in. So all their data they release with conf calls is highly subjective because it's all them trying to sound good while saying they lost a lot of things.

finally someone who understands the specific language used on this topic. All the 'majority of losses' means is 1 sub more than half of total losses, at a minimum. Used to, you could use a certain non-deferred category of revenue and get a pretty good idea of what was going on, but they have put COD elite subs into that number (which has been growing as I understand it, not sure in the last q) that I am not sure how useful it is now.

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WoW only started losing players faster than it was gaining them when Cata hit. That didn't even happen during the year long time we were stuck doing ICC runs. It was very clear Cata was full of garbage people did not want.

this is likely not true - blizzard did state china subs hit a new high and continued to grow from q4 2009 (first full netease quarter) onwards while the worldwide sub number remained static. very likely western subs were slowly declining, offsetting the china gains, in the last year of wotlk/west.

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THis can just as easily be contributed to the "gain" rate of new customers dropping to basically zero since close to all people who would ever be interested in a MMO has already played or are playing WoW. I'm not saying you are wrong, but we can't know which scenario is right.

agreed, this is ONE factor in the overall calculus of why western sub growth spiked and began slowly declining shortly after wotlk release (west). I would propose that another possible factor is the radical tuning changes in 3.0.2 vs. prior content. Only blizzard has the data to be able to offer concrete analysis of new sub attraction/retention rate vs. attrition of existing subs in this context.

[DrSteveBrule]

Only those who lack the brain to understand him are insulted.

This thread is just one of many... And it's like all of them a perfect example for not understanding...

Forums/Fan site = a few thousand players.
Game altogether = some 8 million players.

The few thousand players are already divided with their opinions. The 8 millions never say a word..
GC's Tweet proven as fact, right there.

Correct, yet they still make decisions based on this "minority" feedback.

That's infuriating. They really do listen to who cries the loudest.

[Count Zero]

Hey just wondering, how is it they can measure the 1% when the vast majority don't even give feedback at all?

So apparently people on the forums only account for a small minority of the playerbase? Well then why on earth did blizz listen to the forum complainers in 4.1 and decide to nerf all the heroics...

Basically it's summed up in Det's sig line:

"By looking at actual stats, actual progression, time spent playing, where, and to what extent, ... so yes, we absolutely are able to tell without a doubt that the plan we're enacting is actually what players playing the game want and need, and are not just listening to people on the forums."

They see what people are and aren't doing in-game. They know when (relative) use of a given feature declines, and when use increases. Actions speak louder than words.

[Deficineiron]

Basically it's summed up in Det's sig line:

"By looking at actual stats, actual progression, time spent playing, where, and to what extent, ... so yes, we absolutely are able to tell without a doubt that the plan we're enacting is actually what players playing the game want and need, and are not just listening to people on the forums."

They see what people are and aren't doing in-game. They know when (relative) use of a given feature declines, and when use increases. Actions speak louder than words.

remember this is the same omniscient company that knew exactly how to tune lvl 85 content on cat. release, because they were so smart and have all this data.

[Count Zero]

A very large minority were so pissed they simply left (20% of the player base).

This ignores so much that it's ridiculous. You're saying every single person who stopped playing did so because they're "pissed" about how convenient the game is ? Barely even warrants a response.

Not a single one of those people simply couldn't afford to play anymore ? Not a single one got too busy with work, school, family, etc, to play anymore ? Not a single one simply doesn't enjoy the genre itself anymore ? Decided to move on because they prefer another game rather than hating WoW ?

Nevermind the fact that nearly every other subscription-based mmo had comparable, or worse, subscription losses over the period of wow's subscription decline. Were all those other games also losing players over how convenient they'd become ?

[Uvwaex]

This has to be the most infuriating tweet I have ever seen from Ghostcrawler

Either the community managers are doing an atrocious job, or the designers are pretending complaints don't exist

I mean, players have been complaining about WoW being more and more casual-friendly since WoTLK, complaining about its accessibility and convenience. This story really begins with the implementation of LFD towards the end of WOTLK, then flying mounts in cataclysm, and finally LFR. Dozens of LFR threads are made weekly, how come players rarely argue for less convenience?

People have been complaining since sunwell patch badges

[Count Zero]

remember this is the same omniscient company that knew exactly how to tune lvl 85 content on cat. release, because they were so smart and have all this data.

What, do you want them to be psychic ? They made a miscalculation.

Subs were going up more/faster in BC when there was a higher barrier to entry. They probably saw raid/dungeon activity have a sharp decline and attributed it to ease of access, and figured it wouldn't level off as quickly if it took longer to get there in the first place. But they overshot the mark (or perhaps more accurately, had too steep a slope -- jumping from fairly easy normal dungeons into the launch heroic 5-players and normal raids without any way to bridge the gap), and they reacted to the fallout.

[Deficineiron]

People have been complaining since sunwell patch badges

in absolute terms, however, getting a 150-badge 2.4 boj item was a very significant amount of time and work, either 7 kara lockouts (= 7 weeks), ~40 heroics (when heroic meant hard), or ~30 daily heroics, or some combo thereof, and this doesn't even take into account the issues in getting heroic groups once kara started dropping badges. I suspect most players who collected 2.4 badges may never even have gotten 150 before wotlk release. it was certainly an easier gear method than the raid-only that had existed before, but by today's standards, it was oppressively hard to actually earn those badges.

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What, do you want them to be psychic ? They made a miscalculation.

Subs were going up more/faster in BC when there was a higher barrier to entry. They probably saw raid/dungeon activity have a sharp decline and attributed it to ease of access, and figured it wouldn't level off as quickly if it took longer to get there in the first place. But they overshot the mark (or perhaps more accurately, had too steep a slope -- jumping from fairly easy normal dungeons into the launch heroic 5-players and normal raids without any way to bridge the gap), and they reacted to the fallout.

given your quote about how omniscient they were and how they know everything exactly forever, it seemed appropriate to point out that all that data does not correlate to a conclusion that they are able to make correct game decisions for their economic goals. I am not sure where the paranormal issue you bring up came from, blizzard certainly hasn't claimed that though they seem to get close to it in their bragging you quoted.

[Uvwaex]

He says "rarely"

Yes, there are topics on the forum every day that are against "casualisation" and some argue to remove flying. But in the grand scheme of things...those people are rare. It is not like when somebody makes a complaint threads that everybody jumps in and joins that guy. Many oppose him (to then be called sheep and fanboiz)

So how many have been complaining? If even 100 000 complain (and it is definitely less) while 8, 9, 10 million play and play....what does that tell you?

What would you have the designers do? Assume, (like you do) that the millions who LFR and LFD every week hate every second of it?

Would you say because 90% are complaining threads and only a handful are "I love this game" that 90% of all players hate WoW?

The problem is people on forums always commit a correlation vs causation fallacy, assuming that because a million or so players leave, they're all leaving for the same reason that people on forums post about, instead of accounting for that a million very different people are leaving for a mess of varied reasons.

[Sanguinare]

Flying are people saying it is bad because it is too convenient or it is bad because it is harder to find people in the open world to gank.
LFD are people saying it is bad because it is too convenient or it is bad because they don't get to meet new people.
LFR are people saying it is bad because it is too convenient or it is bad because "bad's get to see all the same bosses that they do".


I just looked up no less then 10 threads about how bad LFR was and not one of them was about how crappy it is that you can now drop in for a short time raid on you own time log out and go do other things.

look at flying they make you get to 90 to fly in Pandaria and boom first alt bitch, bitch , cry , cry why can't i get flying on all my alt at 85.
then we get zones like thunder island that are no fly zones so you can have all that fun interaction with other players "ganking"
what the man GC is talking about is what if we kept LFD but put in some thing better to help you find people "flex raids", "heroic scen"


now when things take to long like 6 weeks of valor cap people complain about that. Needing to do GL dailys to even open shadow pan and AC rep that is not convenient at all. people do not say well i just find that dailies give to much rep i should need to do the same thing over 3 times more. I mean i don't remember all the out cry about have group will travel just draining the life of wow hell i remember people crying about how as a sub max level guild no one would join because it was so crappy not to have them.

Not wanting a feature that is convenient is in no way the same thing as not wanting a feature because it is convenient.

[Osmeric]

They released Cataclysm at the end of 2010, so by all rights subscriptions should have temporarily surged, just like they did with MoP. Instead they dropped by 300k, as you pointed out. We don't know why they dropped. Only Blizzard knows that. From their response, however, we can infer that the game's difficulty had something to do with it.

Q1 2011 saw a 600K loss in net active accounts. Q2 2011 saw a further net loss of 300K. In Q3 2011, when Cataclysm released in China, net 800K were lost (with a majority of that net loss in China.)

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But complaints... for complaints you usually can only depend on your small minority, because the large majority lays forever silent.

Yes. Look at net losses in some quarter, and estimate how many people quit per day. It's orders of magnitude higher than the number of people posting complaints on the forums. The vast, VAST majority of people quitting the game just walk away silently.

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Ghostcrawler's job is basically to insult his customers on Twitter.

I'm not sure there's a way to point out someone is being stupid without being at least a bit insulting. And good lord, some of the tweets he has to respond to...

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igiven your quote about how omniscient they were and how they know everything exactly forever, it seemed appropriate to point out that all that data does not correlate to a conclusion that they are able to make correct game decisions for their economic goals. I am not sure where the paranormal issue you bring up came from, blizzard certainly hasn't claimed that though they seem to get close to it in their bragging you quoted.

I think we can put greater weight on their hindsight (knowing after the fact from the stats why people were quitting) than their foresight (knowing how people will react to changes).

They probably saw a decline in hardcore raiders in Wrath, and decided that harder content would keep them. Their miscalculation was, I suspect, in believing the newer, casual raiders in Wrath could be induced to step up their game. I believe they discovered that large numbers of people have a rather low skill/care cap, and if the game goes beyond that they disengage.

We've see GC say several times now that many people don't step up their game. I conclude this is one of the big lessons Cataclysm beat into them, one they will not be forgetting.

[MoanaLisa]

A very large minority were so pissed they simply left (20% of the player base).

That's one explanation although it makes less sense than "people leave all the time and there are very few new players joining up". Not everyone that quits is pissed off necessarily. Some are but there's a fair number that simply quit for their own reasons that have to do with real life crowding in on free time or deciding that with all the free alternatives out there--some of them quite good--it's not worth the monthly dues any longer.