It's startling how fast game activity is falling

[Tomana]

It's a sad day when you start caring more about the amount of subscribers rather than the amusement you have in the game.

People like to rationalize their quitting (or any other act for that matter) by comparing themselves to what others do. Nothing new.

OT: Wth is Xfire and how such a small (and more important, non-representative) set of data could possibly be relevant?

[Kisho]

I welcome these news!

The less people are subbed the higher the chance that Greg Street will be booted. They need to get decent developers as soon as possible and remove the people that introduced "grind is endgame" idea.

The item upgrades are just another form of brutal grind as a means of progression that is hard to stomach.

So... Remove the Everquest design team? Remove the UO design team? Since, y'know, Blizzard are definitely not the ones who created that idea. Hell, back during Vanilla the game was touted as a more casual and less grindy alternative to those types of games.

Yeah, when Vanilla is described as less grindy, you know there was a problem with other games back then.

Also, Ghostcrawler is basically one of the best things to ever happen to WoW. Not only that but funnily enough, he isn't the entire development team. Strange concept I know, since people seem to love the idea of scapegoats. But he's not to blame!

[Zenko]

Blizzard makes the cake, serves it to you, but says that you can only take 1 bite a day.

The forums cry foul as they want a whole slice whenever they want, wherever they want.

I say good riddance.

[Syfy]

Of course it is, the game is complete and utter dogshit, a game for nolife casual kids.
The endless grind of dailies for someone like me with a 10 hour job and family is not entertaining or fun or even worthwhile at that.
Hope to see more and more people unsubbing as this is just a sad joke, ofcos the kids and trolls will stay but no one but themselves care in any case.

[Osmeric]

OT: Wth is Xfire and how such a small (and more important, non-representative) set of data could possibly be relevant?

As has been pointed out time and again for the math illiterate, the sample size is not a problem. Bias could be, but historically XFire and WCR have done a passable job of showing trends.

The most interesting part is that the trend looks worse than it did for Cataclysm, and you know what happened to subs in the first half of that expansion.

[Deleted]

Even if only a couple of thousand players use them its still a good survey size to see trends, which alot of people here dont seem to understand

And it is interesting, that the player activity is very close to being back down to pre MoP levels in only 2 months, it took cataclysm 3 months to get back to go down to that level, i wonder if they have the TBC and WOTLK activity charts to see how they did.

I think its just the MMO community these days and how they play games, If you look at SWTOR, Gw2, Rift and the last 2 WoW expansion (the only data we have) they're all very short termist, people buy them, play the crap out of them and leave in a couple of months. and then it leaves you with a baseline population that always play them, WoW's is just higher then the others, patterns are the same.

I wonder what the TBC and WOTLK data said, i'd guess that the spikes arent as large as they are now and it took more time for the player activity to go down, but without the data i can only guess.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I won't lie I have pretty much stopped logging in minus raid times with an hour before and maybe after to knock out a LFR and/or some dailies. The guild I roll with just does normals for casual fun/gear and mostly avoids heroics until we get board (16/16 normal right now) and we only raid 2 MAYBE 3 nights a week. Mostly just to hit 90 coins and cap valor each week which is pretty easy now that the value of reputation has bottomed out and has been mostly reached max. That's the problem with centering the game around reps and grinds. Once they are reached you find yourself either doing something you don't need to do anymore or the most likely situation of not wanting to do it anymore. Unorganized PVP has lost its charm for me too since it is just about burst down bull and bots. If that got fixed I might log in a few more hours a week but I doubt it will be.

[Tomana]

I welcome these news!

The less people are subbed the higher the chance that Greg Street will be booted. They need to get decent developers as soon as possible and remove the people that introduced "grind is endgame" idea.

The item upgrades are just another form of brutal grind as a means of progression that is hard to stomach.

I welcome these news!

You should stop there, because this "flag" sentence it makes all that follows a bunch of nonsense.

They need to get decent developers as soon as possible and remove the people that introduced "grind is endgame" idea.

This is an MMO, deal with it. Also, while you're there, show me a MMO where there is no grind.

The item upgrades are just another form of brutal grind as a means of progression that is hard to stomach.

Brutal grind? Seriously? Doing a daily 5-man here and there and some LFR is brutal. And I'm not even mentioning normal raids and dailies.

I was sitting on 700ish VP yesterday already. Capping conquest points is a MUCH brutal grind for me than this.

[Deleted]

The new-car-shine is starting to fall off, and people will start to diverge into other directions - this isn't news, this was expected.

I for one, am having fun still and will keep playing.

[Osmeric]

And it is interesting, that the player activity is very close to being back down to pre MoP levels in only 2 months, it took cataclysm 3 months to get back to go down to that level, i wonder if they have the TBC and WOTLK activity charts to see how they did.

Also, the jump UP to the peak in MoP was higher (in percentage terms) than it was in Cataclysm.

[Evil Inside]

Xfire..

/thread.

[Kisho]

Activity and subscriber trends will affect what happens to the game, which will then affect you. You may feel perfectly happy with the game, but if the trends are bad, the game could change in a way that could ruin it for you.

If it does, then that's the point when I quit as well. However, I trust Blizzard to make the right decisions for me, because historically they have almost always made the right decision for the game. Sure, in the short term it seems like a bad choice, but in the long term it makes perfect sense.

That's why I keep playing. Not because of subscriber numbers. Maybe subscriber numbers are Blizzard's motivation for changing the game, but my motivation to keep playing is Blizzard's design direction. Indirectly related maybe, but no direct relation whatsoever. Thus, I don't particularly care. What can I do anyway about sub numbers?

Yes, I do. Statistically, it's an adequately large sample. It could be biased, but that's a separate issue from the size of the sample. XFire trends for games have historically seemed to track actual success or failure of the games.

It's biased and a tiny sample size. It's less than 0.03% of the entire player base. About 0.7% of the subscribers in the west (assuming 4,000,000 subs), so again: how on earth is it relevant, apart from it being able to be construed in a way that supports your viewpoint?

[Oneru]

Yes, I do. Statistically, it's an adequately large sample. It could be biased, but that's a separate issue from the size of the sample. XFire trends for games have historically seemed to track actual success or failure of the games.

It's large, but it's definitely biased.

It only checks a group of people who have made one particular choice (use XFire addon). So the only thing you can say is that game activity is falling fast amongst players who use XFire. You can make no other relevant statements based on this information, no matter how accurate it may have been in the past.

[BeastmasterGuardian]

Not sure how this topic is anything more than one person's boredom with a game rolled into unreliable facts, and then flamed with hatred from the pedantics who get caught up in disputing it. Regardless of the amount of time played, Blizz still gets paid. This entire thread serves no purpose and offers no constructive merit to chat about the game.

[Ryme]

WoW Census has been shown to accurately reflect the state of the game in general time and time again, it should be no different now.

With that in mind, those figures are genuinely scary. I'd lay claim that it's the grindy nature that people feel they are experiencing as a prime cause.

[Deleted]

I didn't buy the upgrade or sub after MoP and within 2 months of launch Blizz have already offered me 40% off the upgrade and 10 days free play time.

I don't know if this is what they usually do but it seems quite soon to be doing this. After a tier perhaps but we're still in the middle of the first tier.

[Leonard McCoy]

If it does, then that's the point when I quit as well. However, I trust Blizzard to make the right decisions for me, because historically they have almost always made the right decision for the game.

The revisionist history is funny. Blizzard makes the right decision even when they make decisions opposite of what they did. So they made dungeons hard. Right decision. Then they made dungeons really easy. Right decision. The double think is astounding.

When the next expansion comes out and they reverse or scrap many of the decisions they made in mists you'll be telling me the same song and dance. It's getting old really and tired. Denial is a bad state to be in. Eventually you'll move past it thought I have faith. Were you this in denial about Cataclysm? Will you be this in Denial about Mists?

[Deleted]

The problem with the expansion, I think, was not that there was nothing to do, but that there was not enough worth doing.

The distinction is crucial. It's the difference between boredom and something closer to ennui. Blizzard has added a lot to do, but has also tweaked the cost (in time) and fun of the activities, so that they don't feel worth doing.

There's more to do than in any other expansion. And how is that stuff not worth doing? What would be worth doing?

[Peacemoon]

WoW without social ties and a vibrant online realm community is just an above average RPG. Something for Blizzard to reflect on.

[Osmeric]

It's biased and a tiny sample size. It's less than 0.03% of the entire player base. About 0.7% of the subscribers in the west (assuming 4,000,000 subs), so again: how on earth is it relevant, apart from it being able to be construed in a way that supports your viewpoint?

Dude, if you have a random sample, the size needed to reach a given level of statistical significance is (for large N) independent of the population size. That's why presidential polls have samples of just a few hundred voters, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people.

Bias in the sample is the concern, not its size. Its size is more than adequate.