WoW Down to 7.1 Million Subscribers

Originally Posted by bryroo

You beat me to it.

You'd be crazy to not expect some drastic changes incoming.

Hell, they might even turn on flying now.

I don't expect any of that, honestly. I think they'll try to turn it into, "Well subs always fluctuate after the launch of an expansion." Or, "Well most of the subs came from Timbucktoo."

Originally Posted by araine

20 man mythic have killed so many guilds it is scary. since folks in general do NOT want 20 man or 25 man mythics as the norm. the result have been guilds crashing and burning and as a result of that crashing and burning folks have been mailing in the i quit at record pace this time around.

It is a fair assumption to assume that this step have impacted negative on the game for sure

Yep thats other reason as well...20 mythic killed a massive amount of guilds...I know personally about 20 people that quit for that reason alone...Blizzard is doing everything opposite and wrong...Making the wrong things casual and making the wrong things too hardcore.

Exactly as I predicted, no surprise here.

This is the worst, most boring and most gutted expansion to date, so it's a very well deserved drop. What wasn't deserved was the peak at 10 million after the release

- Garrison everywhere making the entire open world pointless.

- Ridiculous gear inflation (admitedly already a problem since WotLK, but I thought their decision to make a big number squish meant they understood such inflation was unhealthy, but nah they even made it worse in the end), making everything completely obsolete when there is already a drought of content.

- No flying is not necessarily a problem, but if you combine the two above problems, then their entire reasoning about removing it is stupid : "make the world dangerous again !" ? Yeah, except I've quadrupled my HP by just going from 90 to 100, and doubled it again with gear. Mob are not a threat when you get such ridiculous inflation. "make the open world interesting !" ? Yeah, except everything happens in the garrison, so the open world is made just a nuisance...

- Professions utterly destroyed (I really can't understand what they were thinking by slaughtering them like that).

- Dungeons relevant for a whole two weeks before being sidelined (same problem as always : gear inflation, the bane of WoW since WotLK).

- The whole stat dumbing down is pretty depressing too. Stat have lost all their "RPG" feel and are just "attack/spell power" now - being agile has no effect on a warrior, being strong doesn't help a rogue to strike harder ? Bullshit. Removed lots of actually logical stat to bring new boring ones out of nowhere.

- Gear is boring too. Automatically adapts to your spec ? Nearly nothing to gem and enchant ? Meh. Boring.

- Classes too homogeneous again, it's been years people complain about it, but it's just sad to see how formulaic they all are ("everyone in mêlée has the same counterspell with the same effect and the same cooldown !", yeah very interesting).

I won't even start to speak of the utterly retarded plot, which is the most idiotic thing I've ever seen in a game. Hard to involve yourself in the world and take the story seriously when it's all so absurd, illogical and thoughtless.

So yeah, WoD is a debacle, and the drop reflects that.

Originally Posted by Cougar

It's doom and gloom. The sky isn't falling. The game isn't suddenly on the fast track to death.

The subs will perk up when the next tier of content comes out... then they'll dip back down when people finish that content... then they'll perk back up when the next expansion is released... then they'll dip back down once people finish that content... and so on.

Blizzard could release the ultimate expansion with thirty new dungeons, five raid tiers, mountains of PvP content, and several maximum level zones... and the subs would drop after the first two quarters.

Nobody is really saying that the sky is falling or that the game is suddenly on a fast track to death. They are saying that WoD is the most lackluster xpac so far for multiple various reasons, and that the relatively sudden and large drop off of subs exemplifies that. Hopefully blizzard will understand this and get their game design in gear.

that's a pretty massive decline

Blizzard shot themselves in the foot with the garrison concept. It's called an MMO, yet a lot of people spend their time alone hanging around in their garrison and port to instances through a menu. What made WoW so great from the beginning was the constant interaction with others, duels, small talks, etc. in major cities. If they don't change this, things will go worse rapidly. You can argue all you want with my point of view, that's fine. But I strongly feel that this is by far the biggest issue. I'm not saying the garrisons are a complete failure, it definitely brought some fun too but the problem is that people idle there most of the time.

This is bad for blizzard. I am gonna play till the end ( because i CANNOT play a game series without finishing it and have been playing on and off since vanilla. I really do think that as they got done with this expansion they got it through there head that they shouldn't of done this expansion in the first place.... Great and beautiful idea but poorly executed... this expansion had a lot of potential but was pissed away. With this team that they supposedly added.. they better start releasing more content instead of this selfie or "garrison update" bullshit ( biggest mistake for this expansion honestly ).

Originally Posted by Varabently

The hype for WoD was serious, so it's not an "outlier" at all. Outlier implies it's weird or unexplainable IMO. WoD was supposed to be a really big deal and I think it's really just back to square one.

But that's all it was: Hype. There is nothing particularly outstanding about WoD, and (despite what some people think) there isn't significantly more or less content than other expansions at launch. Cata's drought was FAR worse than this.

So it is to be expected that the subscription numbers would stabilize after that sharp increase. WoW is too old to support that kind of playerbase anymore.

Originally Posted by Azgraal

So the humongous boost in subs that WoD reeled in already left and some...

You can see now why Blizzard are so eager to introduce yearly expansions and also why they raised the cost of the expansion. That month or two of a new expansion hit is becoming a bigger money spinner for them than it ever was before so they're adapting to get more of it. I personally think such a shift is very bad news for the WoW community and will lead to even more of the rollercoaster effect of the game feeling very alive and then very dead with minimal content support offered outside of the paid new expansions. The incentive is no longer to keep players playing WoW but to make sure they come back next year and milk them when they do.

That sharp drop is pretty funny. I guess GarrisonVille didn't work out so well for them. Who would have thought?

Originally Posted by Sil

Blizzard shot themselves in the foot with the garrison concept. It's called an MMO, yet a lot of people spend their time alone hanging around in their garrison and port to instances through a menu. What made WoW so great from the beginning was the constant interaction with others, duels, small talks, etc. in major cities. If they don't change this, things will go worse rapidly. You can argue all you want with my point of view, that's fine. But I strongly feel that this is by far the biggest issue. I'm not saying the garrisons are a complete failure, it definitely brought some fun too but the problem is that people idle there most of the time.

The concept wasn't a bad idea, the implementation was poor.

Originally Posted by charliesheen126

The subscription drop is about to get way, WAY WORSE. While 6.2 will bring back some of the subs, they will be lost fairly quick. WoD is going to have a pointless filler pvp season like MoP, "Season 3 Warmongering". This means a content drought will happen, I am guessing around 8 months at the very least. Blizzard as a company is beyond disappointing. With all the money they make this is what we get. WoD is a two tier expansion to push out the next expansion faster right? Nope, less content in the expansion that is HIGHER priced then the others, and we get a content drought anyways.

Im glad I am not the only one seeing that WoD is to last another 2(!!!) PvP seasons wich means it will get way worse then 14 months of Soo....

Alex Afersabi said in an interview about flying that it was "possible" that wow could be a fun game without flight. While flying certainty isn't the only issue plaguing the game it certainty didn't help things at all. I hope the devs eat massive crow on the issue.

I completely agree with you. I remember dungeons were amazing back then .. since you actually had to run there with a group of your friends or a bunch of random people you found through the chat system. meeting there at the meeting stones was the best thing ever and running to the dungeons was great. The garrison had a cool concept but its so boring and feels so "restrained"

meeting there at the meeting stones was the best thing ever and running to the dungeons was great

you enjoyed traveling to the dungeons and clicking on a summoning portal more than actually doing the dungeon...?

Second lowest sub number since September 2006. Great job 6.1....

People say this every expansion, I was told....you are just a hater...wow is great, I was told... people on the forums bitch all the time, WoD is doing fine, I was told.

How does it feel to have the proof of this god-awful expansion shoved in your face. Almost 3M people left WoW because of this abomination. The sheer incompetency shown by Blizzard is truly insane. "We need new content for out players to enjoy"-Chris Metzen "LOLokay nerd...Twitter is really hot right now and so our selfies...put those in the game and we will make extra profits and free marketing"-ActiviBli$$ard

We have gotten less dungeons
Little to no dailies
No new pvp content except Failran
A horrible cliche generic stupid and filler story
Garrisons (a fault on it's own)
Broken ass PvP

and MUCH MUCH MORE.
We were thrown shitty ass patches and were told "just accept it" to be given 6.2 which is a failure all on it's own...maybe if it released decent content for 6.1 I could accept 6.2. But as of right now WoW is in one of the worst states it has ever been in... fucking dumb.

I expect MAJOR compensation come 7.0, whether it be 50% off for anyone who bought WoD in Nov-EVER or straight up free for WoD buyers...we need something to make up for this shitfest.

Marketing at Blizzard: Okay, we've busted our ass getting people excited about the expansion. We should be bringing in a lot of new and returning customers. This is your chance to capture a whole shit ton of revenue from services and the store!

Game devs: Meh. We'll get around to it when we can.

Originally Posted by bryroo

Marketing at Blizzard: Okay, we've busted our ass getting people excited about the expansion. We sound be bringing in a lot of new and returning customers. This is your chance to capture a whole shit ton of revenue from services and the store!

Game devs: Meh. We'll get around to it when we can.

More like

Game devs: Meh, we'll get around to it when we're done programming the twitter integration and the SELFIE cameras.

Originally Posted by Taftvalue

burn Blizzard burn

they lost 3 million people because the majority of people don't really raid, yet there is virtually no content besides raiding.

No, they lost 3 million people because there was a massive influx of players and most of those players were bound to leave anyway. The playerbase is almost the exact same size it was prior to WoD's unusual spike. They didn't "lose" 3 million subscribers, they "lost" 300k (and really if you want to go back to pre-WoD hype, they gained 300k).