1.3 million sub drop

[kreb]

I will try to give my opinion as simple as possible about this, after mentioning that i played from beta till end of cataclysm, as a hardcore raider at that.

From mid Wotlk expansion, i felt that the company is literally butchering everything i have worked for, my character, my main. That is the point of an MMO for me, the character that i am playing on, spending my valuable time on. The steps that they have taken over many, many aspects, erased an entire memory that i worked over the years, in a beep. Server communities lost, no one gives two cents about who is the guy passing by, only the guild matters, for some even that does not.

So from mid Wotlk, the game was simply over for me, what kept me going on till the end of Cataclysm was the guild, my friends that i played together over the year. I played for them, each and every single one of them, played for the other. At least, that is my opinion. I really think that the fun, was because of the community that was formed, and kept me going not the game. Every single patch, i raged, many of the current players are able to see, ( please take this as an opinion; ) the so called new and fast content, is a different color of the old one, what really keeps you going is the time that you will spend with your friends grinding that new color out, and having maybe even awesome time at that !

But yet again, in my opinion, the second you will realize there are better ... you might find your self in the sub drop.

[Mormolyce]

Isn't it ironic how an Asian themed expansion is accountable for their biggest Asian subscribers loss?

Just more evidence it has little if anything to do with what's going on inside the game.

Dailies. Talk about them being "optional" should raise tons of laugh now. Thousands of people took "option" to not do them, and as without them being at lv90 is full of misery - they quitted WoW.

Pet Battles is niche content. You don't buy smartphone simply because it has tetris on it? Same here - people don't choose to play WoW for Pet Battles.

Old dungeons and raids. before MoP - it was great option to make up some quick cash in order to make up for raid expenses. Well, it was nerfed to oblivion, and x-mog is something appealing to quite a small group of people.

Leveling up alt with CRZ in - it isn't really wonderful and social experience. And during 80-90 leveling, you lose all your powers in the end due to rating decay, so you end up with toon which has no hit, no crit, no haste, no mana regen, no avoidance, nothing. Lv89 character before dinging is like 30%+ more powerful than after dinging lv90. So dailies await you if you want playable character.

Grinding achievements. It could have sense before MoP. I don't know for others, but with account-wide achievements they became as more obvious time-sink, something very artificial. Before MoP achievements were showing progress of your char, adding some uniqueness to him, you were somewhat progressing char, now it is just some worthless account points.

Grinding reputation... What do you think most of this expansion is about?

And seriously, in all honesty, WoW just lost over million of players after all that stuff with CRZ, dailies and ruined raiding scene... Now we can see how those "dailies are optional", so there is no need to repeat this nonsense 100 times more...

I just want to say how passionately I disagree with everything you just said.

[Deleted]

I tried to start again from scratch. New server new main no heirlooms no money.
Unfortunately I have to admit, the game is just... you know, poor.
Linear questing made a HUGE world basically smaller and boring. I remember levelling many alts in vanilla/tbc and even wotlk and never taking the same path twice. Cataclysm litterally butchered that. Mop continued in the new world. Very short sighted of them if you ask me.

And then there's the community and dungeons...
I mean, there is absolutely no point in having an Internet connection on while levelling. you might as well let the game create 4 bots for you to dungeon with.

These might be non issues to many of you and in fairness to me too when considering endgame.
But as a new player stepping in, I don't know.
Would I have kept playing if I started lets say, in cata? Or mop? Not sure...

[Jainzar]

no matter what changes blizzard is going to make to the game, no matter what features they're going to implement, no matter how epic future expansions and raids are going to be, the game is old and more and more people will leave. it's just the natural flow of things.

[Deleted]

Oh and then there is the total lack of immersion....
It's very important to many people and having half of quests either a joke or just silly or a reference to something in real life makes questing so flat and uninspiring.

It's a game after all and it's got to be good to keep new people playing.
And as a 8 years old game you need to have new players cause the old ones must be burning out by now.

I'd be worried with such losses if I was a shareholder of the company, and I would ask for heads to roll.

[Al Gorefiend]

I've since unsubscribed from WoW before 5.2 went live. Not really interested in the constant numbers game. Put on gear with numbers to dish out numbers to an even larger number to subtract that large number down to 0, then collect gear with even bigger numbers to do more numbers in damage.

I like things like new races, new lore, storyline and socializing. WoW's charm is dying for me as Blizzard patch content = raid content which means "YAY! Bigger numbers! EVERYONE FREAK OUT!!"

Maybe if innovative new things (Like the charming and wonderful Sunsong Ranch) got added in a patch, I'd be entertained. But I do not raid, and it isnt because of my skill or guild, but rather I've realized raiding is nothing more than hardcore addition and subtraction homework.

[Deleted]

no matter what changes blizzard is going to make to the game, no matter what features they're going to implement, no matter how epic future expansions and raids are going to be, the game is old and more and more people will leave. it's just the natural flow of things.

As people leave, you can get new players in.
The game is old but it's not like HUGE amazing game changing improvements have been done to the mmo genre in the meantime.

[Starving Artist]

They went from being amazingly casual friendly in WOTLK when they had 12 million subs to making the game for hardcore elitists again . People with lives can't play this game 40 hours a week ....I just wonder how many subs they have to lose before they start shit canning the people most responsible ( ghostcrawler etc etc )

[Ferocity]

I just want to say how passionately I disagree with everything you just said.

I have nothing against one-liner reply, and I don't want anyone to agree with me personally. People can keep saying that everything is fine, but they only do bad to themselves. In the end it will be you who will play on dead realms with handful of people, who share the view on such things as dailies are optional. CRZ won't be problem as there will be much less players. Raids won't be problem too as they won't be there, because handful of guilds who will be able to do content won't be enough to make up for development expenses. This situation is partly real for quite a number of servers already, including mine.

That's unless if Blizzard won't wake up and stop listening to people who defend idiotic design decisions.

I just wonder how many subs they have to lose before they start shit canning the people most responsible ( ghostcrawler etc etc )

I truly hope to see some action taken soon, such "sudden" huge loss is not something to ignore. I still love WoW, as otherwise wouldn't write here, and it is currently in quite a sad state.

[Starving Artist]

I truly hope to see some action taken soon, such "sudden" huge loss is not something to ignore. I still love WoW, as otherwise wouldn't write here, and it is currently in quite a sad state.

I do also and I would love to see what some new fresh blood could do with the franchise because frankly ghostcrawler has grown very stagnant ...he has a lot of skill in various ways so maybe not fire him but defiantly needs a demotion or to be moved to titan because his lead on wow is just not working .

[Deleted]

THe quality and speed of delivering content is okay IMO. Far better than in Cataclysm yet subs are still dropping fast.
There are 2 possible reasons of this

1) Old game. Natural aging process, some people played this for almost a decade now.
2) Unreasonably jewish pricing on server transfers. People stuck on dead servers with many characters and tons of their gold just quit the game, not willing to pay a hundred euro for complete transfer. Those that can afford it are coalescing on few select "superservers" while other realms are dead ghost towns, every day less players.

[Mormolyce]

They went from being amazingly casual friendly in WOTLK when they had 12 million subs to making the game for hardcore elitists again . People with lives can't play this game 40 hours a week ....I just wonder how many subs they have to lose before they start shit canning the people most responsible ( ghostcrawler etc etc )

There was no such thing as LFR in Wrath. End of.

[Glorious Leader]

There was no such thing as LFR in Wrath. End of.

Lots and lots of easy to pug raids though.
Lots and lots of valor gear to buy that didn't require any rep to spend.

Lfr in and of itself is not the be all and end all of casual friendly. Espeically when it takes an hour to que for it, 2-3 hours to complete it and doesn't pay out in any gear. Even without lfr wrath and cata were far more casual friendly by and large. They had these things called rep tabards...

[YouAreAllWrong]

I didn't expect to lose that many players either.
This is very interesting, the best WoW expansion to many people (including myself) already lost the most subscribers than any other expansion and put the game in a new low that we didn't see since 2007.

[Seefer]

They went from being amazingly casual friendly in WOTLK when they had 12 million subs to making the game for hardcore elitists again . People with lives can't play this game 40 hours a week ....I just wonder how many subs they have to lose before they start shit canning the people most responsible ( ghostcrawler etc etc )

Such a stereotypical canned response, my raid leader has a wife (who plays) 3 kids, a weekday full time job and side jobs on the weekend, all of the people I raid with have full time jobs (minus the high school kid), I have a job..........it's called time management, stop making your lack of it an excuse.

[Glorious Leader]

Such a stereotypical canned response, my raid leader has a wife (who plays) 3 kids, a weekday full time job and side jobs on the weekend, all of the people I raid with have full time jobs (minus the high school kid), I have a job..........it's called time management, stop making your lack of it an excuse.

It's not an excuse but even if it was so what. Asking players to manage their time to that degree is the hallmark of a non casual game.

[Ryme]

It's all well and good saying 8.3M is a good number - it is extremely large - but the drop is insane. Drops like this change the direction of subscription game, this drop effects everyone playing right now.

In one quarter, losing 13.5% of your playerbase is shocking, don't pretend the big guys in charge aren't shouting down asking what's up and what to do to change it.

[ringpriest]

I think their just gonna have to bite the bullet on this one. People are happy raiding on their 10 mans and no amount of incentive will get them to do otherwise I think.
I don't see the problem with it one bit.

Personally, I'm kind of hoping they'll come to their senses and go with one 15 (or even 20?) man raid size. 10 is just too small for a proper raid, imo. But whatever they go with, they need to, as you said, bite the bullet and go with ONE standard raid size. How much effort are they currently wasting trying to balance multiple sizes for raids?

[inboundpaper]

MoP has been pretty good so far, kind of suprised.

[Rawmac]

I don't know about anyone else but I unsubbed shortly after the 2nd raid tier opened up, After grinding dailys, then grinding LFR ( I was in a raiding guild, but you had to grind LFR too remember) I couldn't handle grinding any more.

Completely killed my passion for WoW, it's still installed, but I have no desire to log on.