1.3 million sub drop

[Zeek Daniels]

The reason WoW is losing subs is part business model and part age. There are a tone of new games coming out and that have come out in the past year. These games all have various business models that are better for players pockets than WoW. GW2 is B2P while games like TERA, SWTOR have gone F2P. Now i dont know any Eastern F2P mmo's but i would guess they are doing pretty well since most of WoW subs lost are from the East. That being said WoW is also not the best looking game and its art is also outdated. Alot of players leaving might be leaving because they dont like the graphic quality or the cartoony look.

I left WoW because of business model.

[Elian]

Adding to it:

WHAT BLIZZARD DID RIGHT DURING MoP:
===============================
World Bosses
IoT is ok

WHAT BLIZZARD DID WRONG DURING MOP:
=================================
-Killed 25 man raiding
-Thought LFR would be a replacement for a community of 25 man raiders. It is not.
-Scenarios
-Too many dailies
-Too many bots in BG's
-Lore feels almost completely disconnected with WCII, III and Vanilla.
-Pandas/Pokemon not a great idea.
Killing 5-man dungeons.
-->CRZ<--
Limiting GMs ability to interact with players, such as showing themselves, or spawning world bosses in big cities...

BUT if they banned BOTS in BGS they would lose more Subscribers

[Deleted]

The game has gotten great in so many aspects, but worse in the most important aspect: the community.

This is coming from a vanilla player.

The server community back in vanilla and TBC was awesome. Everyone knew each other, the realm forum was active, this was pretty much what hold everything together. It's like in real life. So many people out there are not satisfied with their jobs, but keep working their because of great colleagues.

You actually had to bond back then in order to get anywhere. To this day, 7-8 years later, I still find myself looking up old guilds, players and whatnot from my server back in my vanilla and TBC period, just to see what happened with all of them. In WOTLK, Cata & MoP, I didn't know a single fucking person on the entire server.

[Elim Garak]

It'd be interesting to see what happened if they gave one month of completely free xfers to players.

You don't need an experiment (that you won't be able to undo) to foresee what would happen...

All the people from the underpopulated servers would flock to the most populated servers and they would explode.

[Tomana]

You forgot premades in Random bgs

These were around since at least... oh, Vanilla?

[Krolikn]

MoP has really improved IMO. Guess its fatigue.

[docterfreeze]

These points really bug me...

People really need to move on from the old RTS games and realise that lore must progress. You are not always going to fight some bad guy from the RTS titles.

Pandas and Pokémon are not in the game. We do have Pandaren and Pet Battles using out companion pets though. Similarities are just that. At least give them their WoW-related names/titles.
If all you can think is how childish the Pandaren are or how the Pet Battles are childish, maybe you need to grow up and get over it. When you see the lore for Pandaren and level through it, there is nothing quite so childish about them. As for Pet Battles, well, even Blizzard admit that they are ridiculously popular.

Go up to a Pandaren and ask them to use their racial language. Tell me with a straight face that it isn't childish.

[kunah]

I agree. Ghostcrawler is like the manager of a football team. If the team fails again, again, again and again it is in everybodys interest that you find another job. He might be good, he might be awful. However, the facts are clear.

From my point of view, Ghostcrawler should be replaced. He cares not about the players. I understand that nerfs and buffs have to be done, but have you ever seen his posts? "We feel that..." "We felt that..." "We're convinced..." "We do not..."... Where is the player's point of view?

I think GC and the decision makers know exactly what the problems are with the game. They have a extra component to think about that we don't have. Which is to keep subs up and generate revenue. And the they way that do that is 1 week lfr lockouts, dailies, alt progression and rep grinds and other time consuming game play. But this stuff is subject to diminishing returns as a lot of play said don't think so and moved on.

Here's hoping that this is a good slap in the head they need to fix things. Even if they have to 'break it to fix it' at least it's a positive move and something good will come from this. I would love to come back,, but not as the game is now.

[Wildmoon]

It seems like WoW is just really old now. IMO MoP really brought great quality content but still lost subs anyway.

[docterfreeze]

BUT if they banned BOTS in BGS they would lose more Subscribers

Quality over quantity, friend.

[Yuyuli]

WoW is simply old, the oldplayer/newplayer ratio is going down, i doubt even the best content could bring WoW back to 12 million, but hey.. 8million is FAR from bad.
Also not to forget, WoW is pretty much hurting itself because of the massive amount of Levels and how it progresses.

I just hope Blizzards 'TITAN' MMO is good and not a 3rd person shooter/WoW v2, NCSOFT's Wildstar looks ok too from what i've seen so far but doesn't have any "new" feeling to it for me.

[MoanaLisa]

And now wow has had its most big sub lost with 1.2million "can't remember if cata dropped more in one quarter compared to this one" and blizzard themself's have done said that the subs will be lower by the end of MOP.

So once more ill ask what will bring back players....only one thing.......it starts with free......ends with play.

It's probably a bit premature to be thinking about that. Not that it won't eventually happen; I think it will but not at anything above the 5.0 million level. We might see the F2P version of WoW that now exists extended to level 40 or perhaps 60 or so. Two things that matter: game age and the market for P2P MMO's is simply disappearing, particularly in China and the East. Expansions are not the same as totally releasing a new game and WoW is what it is. Blizzard is being realistic about where their numbers are going and I suppose that's a good thing.

I don't expect to see World of Warcraft actually consistently grow again. Everyone can trot out their least favorite things about the game and wave them around as the primary reason why people are at last finding other things to do. Bottom line is the F2P/B2P competition was always bound to do this at some point. I'd give a lot to see breakouts by country. Those would be very informative.

Blizzard will be fine. It will be interesting to see exactly how they respond from a design standpoint. That's months away though. Whatever they do, they can't fix the P2P MMO market or really fix the age of the game.

[Deleted]

They fucked up with pandas IMO. Worgen were a stretch, but pandas changed the aesthetic of the game. Seeing those things lumbering about with their Disney/Pixar animations actually spoiled the feel of WoW to a certain degree for me. Look at the females ffs. They are animated teddy bears. I'm not using the 'pandas are childish' argument. I'm saying the race doesn't feel congruent with the WoW gameworld. I don't care if they were already part of the lore, they way they were implemented was wrong. I'm not sure they should even have been implemented in the first place.

[Glorious Leader]

Double gating is the perception, but I don't think it was the intent.

Think about it this way... wrath and cata saw MANY people complaining that at end game, there simply wasn't enough to do. It got to a point that folks would log in on Tuesday night, burn through 95% of the content they deemed worthwhile, and then didn't come back until the next week. They also saw players lamenting how long everything took.

So to combat this, they came up with a system that rewarded you for playing often, and made each task on its own take very little effort and minimal time. Dailies aren't difficult in the slightest, with only the IoT ones being mildly entertaining at times. 5 mans are a minor step up from dailies in terms of difficulty, and are even easier than Wrath ones ever were. Scenarios are phased dailies, essentially.

Folks complained that 25's and 10's both felt mandatory in Wrath, and that it was just too much raiding. Lockouts are seperate, and now players feel jilted that 25's are dying, and that now LFR feels mandatory.

Damned if you do, etc.

Well for some players that was great. For others that wasn't the case. I mean for some players all they wanted to do was raid log which was fine but even still for other players they couldn't burn through all that content anyway. They weren't raiding and played casually and always had something to do. Hell even in cata I would argue players always had something to do, the key was that it didn't have gear so why bother. The changes made to mists appeal to a minority of players who aren't sated anyway and burn through content like it's no tmmrw. Theirs no damned if you do scenario here. Those people will never be sated anyway.

I'm okay with them giving something to do for players. I'm not okay with it being valor. Like they wanted to get rid of valor at one point but balked at the idea and just put it behind rep. Well not that I particularly like the idea of getting rid of valor but at least if they did that the out cry would be so tremendous that they'd have to get their shit together and give people access to gear in some other fashion that WASN'T tied to rep. Even if that wasn't the case the current system is just worse than having rep tied to valor. Rep should be a choice not a part of the gearing process or worse just something you get when you raid. Actually I'm okay with the latter but not tied to valor. Valor has to be seperate period. Shoving everyone into rep is a bad design.

[Mikey P]

The game has gotten great in so many aspects, but worse in the most important aspect: the community.

This is coming from a vanilla player.

The server community back in vanilla and TBC was awesome. Everyone knew each other, the realm forum was active, this was pretty much what hold everything together. It's like in real life. So many people out there are not satisfied with their jobs, but keep working their because of great colleagues.

You actually had to bond back then in order to get anywhere. To this day, 7-8 years later, I still find myself looking up old guilds, players and whatnot from my server back in my vanilla and TBC period, just to see what happened with all of them. In WOTLK, Cata & MoP, I didn't know a single fucking person on the entire server.

The amount of drama on the realm forums back in Vanilla and TBC was almost worth the sub alone. So much crazy shit got posted on them on a daily basis.

[Durandro]

wonder how much money they lost from the 1.3 million.

Probably very little. Chinese subs and all.

And its amazing how many haters hang around these forums just waiting to hear the game they supposedly hate has lost more subscribers - and yet is still three or four times bigger then their MMO of choice has ever been. How very sad.

This means nothing to the western gaming audience. At all.

[Glorious Leader]

It seems like WoW is just really old now. IMO MoP really brought great quality content but still lost subs anyway.

I get that it's a convenient way to rationalize sub loss but isn't it just as likely that MoP really isn't all that good and that's why it's loosing subs? I mean this old excuse completely ignores the fact that the game is subject to quite often content updates and a whole team of developers updating and refreshing the game. MMOs more than any other game can and should be subject to all sorts of changes and innovations because well your paying for it to be updated.

[Ceece]

Ever since Blizz started to see Cata as a failure, they've been using various gimmicks to keep the sub numbers up quarter after quarter.

I see this as a possibility. Never really looked at it like this anyhow, and quite smart of them if they're doing it.

[Kaneiac]

This means nothing to the western gaming audience. At all.

You're crazy if you don't think Blizzard is going to change things. Every time there's a drop, they do.

[nekobaka]

well as I always say, they need to cater the casuals, because they are the heart of game. that's why wotlk was so successful. Few players want daily grind, valor capping and gearing up over months. They just want to have fun.

One of the issues is that those who do want to do those kinds of things call themselves casuals and have been treated like casuals by Blizzard. The same kind of players who complained in Cata about exhausting the VP vendors after VP capping every week crying for more rewards or threatening to quit. The kind of players that will only play with a carrot in front of them. This also includes the players that Blizzard says will choose the quickest path to gear regardless of enjoying it or not.