WoW Down to 7.1 Million Subscribers

Even if it drops to 5m sub, all the veteran players will still buy the next xpac and then couple month after the release they will come to MMO-champ and complain about ..... everything.

Im looking at these subs and im wondering what kept people subed during wotlk, 6month of lolNaxx, 6month of the worst raid ever *togc* and then a LONG year of ICC, did Ulduar really saved wotlk?! TBH, Its not much better than Mop or WoD raids.

As a pver, I think they should go back to Wotlk pve system, badges system (drop from any boss in the game, with decent gear to buy, + some dailies/weekly), relevant 5man content every patch, easy 10man, hard 20 (or 25) man on different lockout, NO LFR. Why change everything when they had a really good recipe.

Originally Posted by Cougar

I don't know what you mean by "tons of gold flooding the market".

The Tryhards with 11 Lv100 characters with max followers doing lots and lots of gold missions = players capping on gold on all of their characters before too long.

You don't think all that gold is going to have an affect on the market? lol.

Garrisons print money, but there's nothing to really spend money on, so they start adding on ridiculous prices onto everything (see the 100,000g added to the mounts on PTR? lololol). But the problem is, not everybody is a tryhard and some people only have 500k or such and they don't feel like getting up 5+ characters with max gold followers.

So what happens, is there's a huge, huge, HUGE goldwall in front of the more casual players and they go "blah..." and they decide that a mount costing 100,000g just isn't worth it. But when everything is starting to come in the tens of thousands of gold now, they're just going to roll their eyes and quit instead of dumping that much time into printing gold.

Originally Posted by Iflash

OMG, preaching to the choir here. I tried archeology in Draenor, hateeed it, and I like archeology. I did all the MoP achievements, all the 20 project ones. But Draenor? Takes forever. Not to mention all the digsites with uneven ground. Like the one outside Khadgar's place. That one took forever to complete. Horrible, horrible experience.

Funny thing is, I maxed out every profession on my character including Archaeology, Fishing, and Cooking. What's worse?....I was nearly maxed on it again on my second toon before my time ran out. I was THAT bored.

hrm i wonder if the lack of flight has anything to do with people leaving by the millions...

This is when you start fireing the people you just hire. When you hire more people and get less content out, that's just bad business.

And many subs are already discontinued and just rolling from the last 2 month gamecard.

They deserved this 100%. I'd say I hope this serves as a wake up call but we all know they never learn from past mistakes.

Wow, more than I expected. Hopefully this will be a wake-up call.

I'm still playing, but much much less than I did even during the 14 months of Siege. Especially now that SWTOR is doing its bonus XP thing.

Originally Posted by Baneleaf

Before everyone starts screaming "the sky is falling WoW is dead" you need to step back and look at the numbers. Blizzard was sitting at just over 7 million WoW subs before the expansion launch. They publicly stated that they never expected 3 million people to resub for the expansion which is why we had world of server crash for the first few days of the xpac. There were later articles that stated that many people came back to see the game and getting a free 90 boost with the expansion purchase made it a very appealing situation but many of those same folks were saying they had no intention of playing past the new year. Now we have stable servers and a game population around the same as it was in October of last year. My own raid team had at least a dozen people who came back for Highmaul and left before BRF was even announced because they had seen what they wanted and were going back to Diablo or Hearthstone but they still keep in touch with the WoW folks waiting for the new thing. Just remember that over 7 million people still pay in one way or another to play this game and it is not going away any time soon.

The sub fee at the start of WoD shows that people REALLY want to play WoW, just not in the shape it is now. Those 3 million subcribers could of easily been sustained if they just put the effort in they did years ago.

People obviously came back expecting what they remember and got a load of shit like selfie cams.

-Nothing to do outside of raids
-My guild pretty much ONLY logs in to raid and instantly logs off after (and I admit the raids are GOOD, but just about it)
-Garrisons are to menu intensive instead of activity driven
-Professions totally and utterly gutted
-PVP balance while never great has been worse thus far
-My server is pretty much dead. Most are. Only about 10-15 are worth playing on right now.

Originally Posted by MaraStarfury

It's because retards continue to pay for the shit content while throwing cash at them for store levelling and mounts. They effectively get huge income with less people on their servers.

It's win win for Blizzard. More money, less strain. Who needs to make content when they can just sell micro transactions on top of a sub?

Gotta be a little fair here though....
There are heaps of players that think they have enough content.
It might not be enough for many, but many think otherwise... And calling them retards is not the way to go.
People have different preferences. The ones playing and enjoying it might think your ranting is retarded...
It's a matter of perspective.

I too would say the content lacks variety. But that's just my opinion, not more.

Originally Posted by AbsolutVodka

Still very impressive for a 10+ year old game. Losing that many subscribers would sink other games, but WoW manages to stay afloat and still reel in considerable income.

Saying it "deserves" this is petty. People seem to take the state of the game too personal. If you've quit the game, you shouldn't be so emotionally invested that you jump for joy when people quit. It's a bit depressing.

I don't think they're taking the game itself personally, but are rather looking for the reassurance that they were right in quitting.

Basically, people don't want to be seen as just another 'sheeple'. They don't want to be the black sheep either. Look at the old Nintendo vs Sega, or Apple vs Everyone, or good ol' consoles vs "PC Master Race".

Someone that enjoys PC games, only to find that most of his friends talk about how much fun they had on their XBoxes and Call of Duty the night before. The person is insecure, and doesn't want to admit to being 'wrong' for preferring PC games- on the other hand, they want to be included in the group.

Solution? "CoD sux! PC Master Race! Dump your XBox and come join me on PC!"

The more they're afraid that they are wrong, the more they'll scream that they're right.

...it's childish, school yard sandbox, stuff.

WoW is ten years old. It was popular when it was new, peaked two expansions in... and the community has since moved on. While many, many people still play WoW, it's not nearly as popular as it was in the media. It'll still be around for many, many more years. Eventually something new will replace it.

It'll become another Everquest.

Still, until that happens, the kids that quit WoW and seek the approval of strangers on the internet will kick and scream that they were right to move on from the game, trying to convince others that it's the right idea- because if others agree, then they were right to leave the game.

Just look at all the posts that say "WoW is dying". Ever notice how many claim that they were right?

"See? SEE! I predicted this! The drop in subs is because they didn't do <whatever I wanted>"

Originally Posted by Hammerjack

I'm not a white knight nor am I fanboy but this data still shows more people like the game than dislike it.

That being said - they really only lost the people who came back for WoD - the base fans will most likely always be there.

There are problems with WoD - it's a flawed expansion - removing the ability to customize gear and upgrade it, removing flying, and the mess that is Ashran are a few points.

I still enjoy raiding with my friends though - nothing about it has gotten stale - BRF was an excellent tier and HFC looks just as good.

I see this loss and am not really concerned - if this trend continues through the end of the 2nd Q though, then it might scare me.

You have defined yourself als fanboy, I am sorry to confess to you.

Originally Posted by Multistryke

That's what you get for adding stupid stuff like Garrisons & Selfie's.

Yep. Nether of them have any place in MMORPG, yet those features are the main focus of developers. Single player instances and social media.

What made WoW successful was social side of game. Players needed to form social bonds in game to do the coolest content. Players made connections to other players, formed in game friendships that kept them logging in for years.

But now developers are pushing single player content as main feature of the game and social media as new "exciting" addition. Raiding has been reduced to multiple difficulties treadmill with ability to see all content (even though its on lowest difficulty, its still same content) without ever talking to anyone. Completely opposite to what made game successful. More garrisons stuff coming in 6.2.....

Does this mean panda land was a better expansion? Wod has drop more than panda land in the same amount of time.

Hey, they changed the name of the boat that got the SJWs butthurt, that'll help, right?

Mmm yea the end game outside of garrisons and raids is abysmal. if I didn't mind slogging through LFG I would have unsubbed a while ago.

Originally Posted by minifreak88

Blizzard,

I have an idea. BRING BACK 10-MAN HARDCORE RAIDING. Both of my raid teams quit because we just could not for the life of us find 5 more awesome people. We had 10 solid raiders, 5 who would show up some times and were okay, then 5 randoms and bads. For the love of god, bring back 10-man hardcore raids.

+1

I never really did care if 25man and 10man were balanced, and even then how much of an issue was it really to balance them - How much do they gain really from forcing 20 man apart from destroying many many 10man guilds

I can't wait for all the Jaylock threads.

Originally Posted by DarkBlade6

Even if it drops to 5m sub, all the veteran players will still buy the next xpac, couple month after the release they will come to MMO and complain about ..... everything.

There will be a time when said veterans will just shrug and go "too many broken promises" and they'll go to another game that isn't doing the stupid stuff Blizz is doing.

For example, ARR.

Wanna know what ARR is advertising in their first expansion? FLYING MOUNTS. I find that ironic, if not downright trolling on SE's part, haha. ARR has crafting that actually matters, they don't limit you to doing older dungeons on certain weekends, they don't stuff you into instances all day long, they actually create new open-world content and try to keep you in the open world (and keep instances relevant at the same time), they don't make you re-roll an alt anytime you want to play a new class, etc.

Just one example of other MMOs learning from WoW's mistakes. If Blizz doesn't get their heads out of the sand and realizing that they're stumbling over their own feet, they will end up in 2nd place to somebody else eventually and it'll go downhill from there if they don't figure out just what is wrong with their design process and why they are not listening to the players.