I think I'm going to change my answer to as 5.9 Million sub increase.
One of the biggest reasons people leave is empty servers. Mergers are a good idea, but going too slowly.
I used to play on a mid-size server, 45K alliance, 20K horde. Horde side has always been dead. Alliance side became dead during Cata/MOP. I quit as raid guilds died, xferred, etc. I am worried they may never merge my server as it is not one of the deadest servers.
Blizzard has been in denial of the problem, by the time they admit it, they are now too slow to fix it. At this snail pace, they won't have any subs by the time they complete server mergers.
So, tomorrow it is. I mantain my prediction, around 500k loss.
620k sub loss.
But the REAL problem will be the next 3 quarters when there is no content.
Free-To-Play is the future.
I honestly don't understand why people even care, lmao. This thread pops up probably 20 times every year and it's filled with the same people who quit WoW, for some reason waste their time complaining about it, and even weirder... wish Blizzard fails.
I'm unsure who has the problem here.
OT: You shouldn't care at all the amount of sub loss/gain. If you enjoy a game, play it. If you do not enjoy a game, don't.
I wonder, does my -1 sub count this quarter or next? My account lost playtime 6 weeks ago, but I have not logged on in 7 months.
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The game has been out for almost a decade, virtually everybody quit at one point, deal with it? Blizzard has a big market in MMOs, so they will always be of interest to me. I will watch Blizzcon without being a sub or player of any of their games.
Free-To-Play is the future.
I voted for 500k-1m.
Although I heard anecdotes of people coming back this patch due to the Orgrimmar raid, none of the old friends on my friends list have reactivated their accounts. I personally know several people who have quit recently as well.
I guess there is a chance that the sub loss is less than 500k, but I'd be quite surprised if that's the case.
And somehow, the last couple years of dropping subs haven't convinced Blizzard that a significant number of people aren't drawn to the current storylines, among other things. Heh.
Ideally no one has ever hit the level cap of the last expansion, looked at their dungeon blues, and thought "I win."
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ch...all/chuckabear
For me it is just a curiosity and I do find it interesting to speculate, but there are always going to be that bunch of people with an axe to grind and the false dichotomy of "see sub loss if they just took away flying mounts this would have never happened" and such.
Same here.
D3 was better than D2 in every one of those respects.
And D3 was about as close to D2 as is possible without actually releasing a game that looks like it was made in 2001.
Personally I think Diablo games are simply not that appealing to a lot of gamers because at their core they are Roguelikes and that's pretty niche. And a LOT of people who used to play D2 do NOT remember that game accurately, their tastes have changed and the game market is very different now.
1 day to go
D3 didn't have randomly generated maps.
D3's story was pulled from He Man. D2 had almost no story, which would have been an improvement.
D3 had three stages of no difficulty followed by one that was much harder, that isn't smooth difficulty progression.
D3 had one set of optimal stats for every build.
D3 had a wealth of throw away abilities, just like it's predecessor.
Better in every way? Who are you kidding?
They also think that their anecdotal experience applies to everyone.
"I enjoyed D3, so therefore everyone who liked D2 over D3 did not remember the game accurately."
That sounds so pretentious. Its a everyone else is wrong, I am right mentality. It breeds ignorance and stupidity.
Chronomancer Club
Yeah it did. And D2's randomly generated maps weren't very random either, I used to just follow an edge in a certain direction and skip through 90% of Act II...
None of the previous Diablos had much in the way of story, people seem to be expecting Planescape: Torment or something, if you want super complex stories then Diablo isn't the game for you and never was. D3 had the most complex story of all three and expanded the Diablo universe significantly. Maybe you don't like it, but that's just personal taste.
D2 was piss easy until Hell, at which point 1/4 of all monsters became completely immune to whatever type of damage you used.
Well, some monsters were OP on Nightmare as well, notably Duriel vs. certain classes.
D3 had much better difficulty progression than D2. And Inferno was actually legitimately hard, which was a huge improvement.
Er, unlike the stats in D2 where you got enough STR to use your endgame gear (because getting STR to use armour as a Sorc was just awesome) and then just pumped your main stat? Unless you did PVP and then maybe you needed VIT instead...
D2's stat system was primitive. Only acceptable because it was 2001 or whenever.
A handful of shitty ones, even the sub-par ones you could make exotic builds out of. In D2 you picked one ability and just spammed it until you ran out of mana, then you chugged a potion. That had no CD lol.
Please don't try to tell me that was a better design.
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No, I say that because all the specific things people cite as being inferior to D2 are demonstrably better in D3.
Ten years = complete memory wipe IMO.
If you don't like D3, that's cool. You don't have to like the things I like. I scratch my head when people point out specifics that are just blatantly wrong though.