WoW Loses 600k Subscribers, Diablo 3 Beta Q3 2011, Arena Passe, Blue Posts

And another yawn inducing Daily Blink, makes you wonder if they ever make a funny one.

Originally Posted by Vasz

So with the fact that we have had no new major raid content in 5 months, and Rift is new and exciting to a lot of players, any wonder with the big drop in subs?
Although it seems they only think Cataclysm has been out 4 months?? "The expansion had been out for close to four months, and most of its content had been consumed by a large percentage of the player base"

They don't 'think' Cata has been out for 4 months, the numbers pulled date back from 1st of March, when Cata actually WAS out for 4 months.

People concluding the game is not balanced and therefore people are leaving should try some others recent MMO's and demonstrate which ones are balanced. From what I understand, balance wasn't something the Rift developers were even going for. I would imagine some complaints on flavor of the month classes for that game too. And I'm positive a lot of other games will have the same issue. Class balance in WoW is constantly being tweaked on a very small scale, because it is not a huge imbalance in any way. And any imbalance there is, usually gets addressed quite fast.

A 600k drop in subscribers comes from people that have seen what there is to be seen (all quests, zones, dungeons) and concluding they either cannot be bothered to raid because of difficulty constraints, or just out of boredom because they have been playing this game for 5 years and can finally distinguish the addictive pattern it creates. New expansion, delete old gear, gather quest greenies that are superior to your overpowered and hardearned epics, quest/dungeon to max level, start gearing up again. Only 600k people growing bored of this and probably still returning when a 4.1 patch drops, or 4.2 arrives, is still good business.

The sky will fall when the drop Blizzard sees is round about 3-4 million players, and a patch failing to return half of those to the game to check it out. Even then, WoW would still be the biggest MMO out there. Perspective, all you doomsayers should get it

Originally Posted by xHypnotoad

TBH it shows through how Devs have been treating the expansion. 75% of the Q&A answers were "This is something we don't currently have planned, but would like to work on in the future". I among many WoW players are just tired of the course Blizzard has been taking so far, relying on carrot on a stick gimmicks to keep people paying for extended periods of time. A great example would be the concept of splitting 4.1 into two major content patches since troll dungeons were ready long before Firelands was finished, but spent weeks on PTR while many features were implemented and prolonged the PTR for around a month and a half.

tl;dr
Though there certainly is a downtime going on, Blizzard's new game plan for Cataclysm hasn't been working as they hoped.

So true. All they talk about is how they would like to implement these awesome ideas, but either don't want to do it mid-expansion (lol we're not even past the first tier), or they don't have the technology (aka programming skills or want to prioritize it over say creating NPCs named after themselves), to do it.

Can't wait to see more on D3. Really anxious to play it for myself. Great news there, too bad about the subscription loss, but honestly, they still have a LOT of subscriptions and where some people leave, others join, certainly nothing to place too huge an impact on anything.

Originally Posted by Mikrotaster

get your facts straight, yes there are more people raiding 10 man, however about 50 kills on sinestra compared to 160 25 man kills, so please do some research before you start moaning about difficulty. 10 man raids have from the beginning been overtuned and just now over the past month or two been "nerfed" and actually have become doable on 10 man.

lol... what?... Go ahead and take a look at heroic Al'akir 10-man kills compared to heroic Al'akir 25-man kills, bub. The point is that 10s and 25s will never, ever be equal in difficulty and it was really stupid of Blizzard to actually decide share loot and achievements between the two.

Originally Posted by Brogdan

content lull like right now.

Somebody learned a new word, how cute

I went to cancel my account and had to fill out a survey of pre-made selections.

Where was the option for, "I'm just bored."?

WoW has become increasingly less fun the past couple of years. It's just burnout. Cataclysm is fantastic, but no amount of content can make an old game new again.

Its absolutely no suprise to me to see these numbers of decline....I dont have the time to be a hardcore raider like i was in BC, LK you could pug almost all the content, and Cata, well, there's no room for errors in raiding. So unless you raid, there really isnt too much to do outside of Arenas. I loved LK content and played through the entire expansion as a casual player. But now the game is so limited...that is why I cancelled my sub 4 weeks ago. And to hear Legendaries to keep going to the raider....hmmmm....nope still dont feel like playing again lol.

hehe, the more I think of it, the more they made archeology in WoW a lot like RL.

- Fly around to potential places. During flight, you do something else not archeology related (I watch online TV, go work out, chores, etc.)
- Employ the use of cheap 3rd world labor to dig for your old sticks. (Archeology bots)
- Tell some guy you have a lot of old sticks, and he'll give you a shiny object.
- Rinse and Repeat

Like Archeology, smart people pay someone else to do the work for them, and claim it as their own.

Archeology failed because people expected it to be more Indiana Jones type stuff and it turned out to be the worst profession you could ever design. I mean, you don't even play WoW 95% of the time. You're in flight, fly to the spot, put out your finder a few times, and you're done. Then fly back to the flight point, send your character to another place, and alt-tab to something else.

hehe, it's like Blizz designed a profession telling you to do something else instead of playing their game.

A bit of a tangent, but it's little things like this that make Cata a fairly weak expansion so far.

Another example... I've enjoyed getting, and using, the engineering toys from TBC than I ever have with the Cata ones. Loot-a-Fail-Rang and Interrupt-Your-Own-DPS-Bolt-Gun were the two toys that were conceptually interesting, but poorly implemented.

I mean, it's just a lot of little things they just didn't bother to touch on with this x-pack. I know, I know, a lot of old areas were redone, and yes, that's a ton of work, but it's stuff that is extremely low on my 'sounds like fun' list. I've flown over all those places, and I'd have to reroll several newbies to experience those zones. It's just not something I'm interested in when I've leveled up like 12 lvl 80+ characters.

Updating the zones to redo them so it's exciting for new players was a good idea, but the end game, which is where pretty much everyone is at in an old game, tends to be the more important thing to focus on, and they didn't do a solid job of it.

Firelands so far looks pretty standard.

The devs are incredibly excited about offering guild members a pet for getting the new legendary since no other legendary had done it. Is it really that big of a deal to do that? Seems like a pretty small thing to get excited about. Like their expectations are super low or something.

Well my 25m 8/13 HM guild died last night due to people bored and quitting, no doubt it's the same on a lot of other servers.

Now to find another guild -.-

Well im one of the 600k :P and dont plan on going back, become happy for my freedom and not 4 hours planned almost every night.
warrior with 3 legendary and close to 900k gold just thrown in the corner to rott :P

Hmmm the way this article is written (and the way Blizzard is speaking), it feels like they think people went through the content too fast... Yet the first tier wotlk raid content was waaaay easier than first tier of cataclysm, if anything, Cataclysm lost subs because they decided not to cater to casuals as much.

Heroic 5s were pretty challenging, normal raids were pretty challenging, I got through them but trolling the forums I saw sooo many people getting discouraged and quitting, imo they toned stuff down too late. Most of the people trash talking the casuals couldn't handle heroic difficulty, yet they were worried about normal getting too easy. Also I had to laugh when Blizzard said stuff like "hey if heroics and raids are too hard just play normals!" (number of normal level 85 dungeons at the time: 3) Then they wonder why people got fed up and bailed.

I myself made it through all the heroics + normal difficulty levels, I'll admit I'm not hardcore enough for heroic raids but I had a good time of it... I've also been to plenty of Blizzcons, met a lot of the average WoW players, who enjoy the game for the social aspects as much as the game itself. That doesn't mean they don't want to raid, but I, as a guy in his 20's who has played a shitload of video games, raided a ton etc found normal difficulty raids right at about the level I wanted.... Now what about the 90% of people who have less experience/time/bananas/w/e than me... tough cookies?

The fact that they said in Wotlk "hey we more people to actually see the raids, because they really are cool content and they progress the story" then they turned around and said "hey play those three normal difficulty dungeons" in Cataclysm made no sense.

People want to be able to enjoy content, including raids. Look at Wotlk, plenty of subs with easier content, the more people who can enjoy bottom tier the better. I say put in another difficulty level (easy) and we'd be in a good place. Let casuals play casually and drop the "hey we can be hardcore too!" attitude Blizz, that isn't what got you where you are now.

PUBLIC BETA!!!!!!!! *happy dance*
Don't care what the rest is about, fucking public D3 beta Q3 this year *goes back to happydance*

Originally Posted by Ooldoong

lull? Isn't 4.2 suppose to be basically done? 4.1 content was suppose to be a piece of the bigger 4.2 Firelands. If they wanted to end a lull (or loll) they could have launched 4.2 sooner if players are consuming it faster than expected.

I think most could tell that by how the 4.1 patch went that 4.2 wasn't even close to being ready. With 4.1 introducing a whole new set of fail, in terms of bugs and game issues, I cringed at thinking of what a bigger 4.2 patch would have done to WoW.

Consuming the content too fast may have some truth, but I honestly think it's only a small part of the real reasons 600k people left. A few little things aren't a big deal, but as more and more little things pop up, and give reason to not play, it's only a matter of time before it's too much and people "need a break".

Blizzard not doing something about this lull means they don't have the people on the WoW team to get rid of it, especially when they have to consider the timing of the launching of all their expansions and new products. They could end a small lull now, or prevent a bigger subscription loss later when a new game comes out.

hehe, gotta love how people try to put their spin on the situation.

Edit: hehe, the 600k could have been from them banning all those folks running that archeology macro.

there are still unfinished dailies, bugs that prevent further daily testing and the firelands raid is not even open yet so its still gonna be atleast a month before its on live.

Originally Posted by Oztiks

Its absolutely no suprise to me to see these numbers of decline....I dont have the time to be a hardcore raider like i was in BC, LK you could pug almost all the content, and Cata, well, there's no room for errors in raiding. So unless you raid, there really isnt too much to do outside of Arenas. I loved LK content and played through the entire expansion as a casual player. But now the game is so limited...that is why I cancelled my sub 4 weeks ago. And to hear Legendaries to keep going to the raider....hmmmm....nope still dont feel like playing again lol.

That's ok because I think they keep more subscribers by only having legendaries in raids than if they weren't

So uhm, since they decided they would only release the old subscriber numbers from March 1st, was the drop in subscriber numbers even more appalling in the 2 months following?

Anyway, for the record I've been unsubbed since a few months before Cataclysm.. and I was in the Cataclysm beta, which did not make me want to resub at all.

Guess wow has peaked, interesting how long the trip is down, I'll expect that it will be quite a while. We might see some more dropping of subscriptions but I think wow has a really strong core that will play for some time.

Originally Posted by avadakedavra

no prob, after recyling the bc content a lot more than 600k will stop playing.

Theres nothing special anymore, the major part, the casuals: Mimimi we want everything that a hardcore raider can get.
The hardcore raider: For what should i spent a lot of "hard work" if i can get everything lot easier.

My optinion is that warcraft reches the nearly end.
A community of mimimis and their contraries and a ton of ideas like. Hey that ols s..t is probably to recylce !

Sry but for me a blizzard fail !

oh noes! Iz it 2012 yet already?!

Originally Posted by Gerti

Guess wow has peaked, interesting how long the trip is down, I'll expect that it will be quite a while. We might see some more dropping of subscriptions but I think wow has a really strong core that will play for some time.

*points to thread about Kungen quitting*

Originally Posted by Aekero

Hmmm the way this article is written (and the way Blizzard is speaking), it feels like they think people went through the content too fast... Yet the first tier wotlk raid content was waaaay easier than first tier of cataclysm, if anything, Cataclysm lost subs because they decided not to cater to casuals as much.

Heroic 5s were pretty challenging, normal raids were pretty challenging, I got through them but trolling the forums I saw sooo many people getting discouraged and quitting, imo they toned stuff down too late. Most of the people trash talking the casuals couldn't handle heroic difficulty, yet they were worried about normal getting too easy. Also I had to laugh when Blizzard said stuff like "hey if heroics and raids are too hard just play normals!" (number of normal level 85 dungeons at the time: 3) Then they wonder why people got fed up and bailed.

I myself made it through all the heroics + normal difficulty levels, I'll admit I'm not hardcore enough for heroic raids but I had a good time of it... I've also been to plenty of Blizzcons, met a lot of the average WoW players, who enjoy the game for the social aspects as much as the game itself. That doesn't mean they don't want to raid, but I, as a guy in his 20's who has played a shitload of video games, raided a ton etc found normal difficulty raids right at about the level I wanted.... Now what about the 90% of people who have less experience/time/bananas/w/e than me... tough cookies?

The fact that they said in Wotlk "hey we more people to actually see the raids, because they really are cool content and they progress the story" then they turned around and said "hey play those three normal difficulty dungeons" in Cataclysm made no sense.

People want to be able to enjoy content, including raids. Look at Wotlk, plenty of subs with easier content, the more people who can enjoy bottom tier the better. I say put in another difficulty level (easy) and we'd be in a good place. Let casuals play casually and drop the "hey we can be hardcore too!" attitude Blizz, that isn't what got you where you are now.

Well spoken mate....the whole point Blizzard made in LK was to separate casuals from hardcore with normal and heroic raids. That was SOOO perfect for my style. I still got to see end game content and it kept me going. But with Cata it's near impossible for me to do this. Even the heroic dungeons are a wipefest (noob tanks and healers now electing the queue made it even harder and longer to complete). With casuals making up over half of the subscriber base I think Ghostcrawler got lost in his world of gaming and lost the focus that made LK so great to all types of players.