1.3 million sub drop

[Sturmbringe]

Having a former home on one of the servers that got caught in one of these downward spirals during WotLK, I can't help but think "I told you so". Many players said Blizzard should have intervened on servers where there were bad things happening with the population but that went unheeded.

The above is an historic screenshot because it shows what had happened to the game by the time I returned to WoW, which was during patch 4.2:Rage of the Firelands. I had originally quit in late WOTLK.

I returned to WoW only to find my guild had switched to 10-man instead of 25 man, 80% of my guildies had quit the game, 75% of the people on my friends list gone, and my server had become a ghost server.

My WOTLK guild, which had been together since Vanilla (2006) as a Dutch guild does not exist, and EVERY SINGLE ONE of my friends has quit. They didn't even try MoP. Like we have explained to Blizzard several times, this was the result of:

1. Blizzard allowing 25 man raiding to die (many people quit as their DPS role no longer fit in 10 man guilds or they didn't like the 10 man model and couldn't find a 25 man guild to raid, and 25 man guilds were the glue that held the community together).

2. Several other flaws in both CATA and MoP.

To sum up, the game has changed way too much since the original (Vanila, TBC) in fact so much so that it is no longer recognisable as the WoW we fell in love with.

[mistahwilshire]

You must be on one of the remaining super servers, were my server's pop has went from around 3500 people on at prime time at the launch of cata to under 1000 on now at prime time. Lucky



What ? I'm going to challenge you to find those numbers. We had roughly 9.2ish at the end of cata, MoP launched and we got to 10 million and by the end of the first full quarter we're back down 9.6ish. At most you can say is they added around 400K for 1 quarter.

It was either 2 or 3 quarters ago we were at 11.2 million. There was a thread exactly like this one full of 'end of days/sky is falling' people.

[steveyboy]

Guys, look at it this way for a second, Their last call was about 3 months ago...

That's 1.3 MILLION players lost in 3 MONTHS

Roughly 1 person leaving ever 5 seconds :|

[Arbs]

Just merge the damn servers, people are leaving because they can't or will not pay the stupid high prices to transfer their toons across.

I agree they to need to merge servers. 246 servers are to big.

[-Superman-]

Guys, look at it this way for a second, Their last call was about 3 months ago...

That's 1.3 MILLION players lost in 3 MONTHS

I am guessing the loss took place over a longer period of time, but they were fluffing the old calls to make the launch look better than it actually was. If we were at 9.1 at the end of Cata, and 8.3 now... that is 800K actual loses without any gain in the course of 9 months. Honestly, it could have been a lot worse, and I think most of the doomsayers wish it had been. I could only imagine the blow up had we fallen under 8M.

[Byniri]

Guys, look at it this way for a second, Their last call was about 3 months ago...

That's 1.3 MILLION players lost in 3 MONTHS

Yeah, people need to stop saying "it's still 8 mil".

It's a pretty big deal.

[Myrrar]

I don't think a lot of people are really seeing the problem.

1.3m out of almost 10m doesn't seem like a huge deal, but they lost 13.5% of their subscribers in 3 months. That's a huge hit.

While I personally felt my disinterest in MoP(quit really playing after playing pretty constantly since release) was due solely to graduating Uni and just being into different things, clearly a lot of other people are jumping ship too and something needs to change.

Their attitude towards their subscribers, as seen through most of their blue posts, is atrocious. They wave a dismissive hand at genuine complaints while trying to calm the masses with completely bullshit responses.

WoW is old, it's on an old engine with not easily upgradable graphics, and it's so deeply established, since the foundation has been built on for 9 years, I really don't even know what they could do to breathe new life back into it. WoW's not going to die, shit, EQ one still has plenty of people playing it, but while a new 'gamebreaking mmo' used to be it's main and only real chance of being knocked down single players, FTP MMOs, and games like LoL have picked up and are clearly stealing subscribers.

I always played a ton of single players and bounced between other MMOs over the years but always still played WoW. There are so many good options out now though that I don't need WoW as that home to go back to.

[ShimmerSwirl]

^Qft
Also adding a pro tip for blizzard, next time don't hire a fucking marine biologist as your lead developer, or a lawyer as encounter designer.., sure they even have some burger flipping mongo handling the community relations

The loses have nothing to do with the "competition", sub-price or any other strawman excuse they can conjure, it's got to do with a chopped up shitty community which is the result of an even more devastating hack n' slash job they've done to the game.

Ever sense GC took over I noticed a philosophical design shift from 'creative' to 'organized'. He runs the game like an accountant, the only thing that matters is making all his columns come out even on his little stat sheet.

[Zaelsino]

Eh, steeper than I thought.

Wonder how they'll address it.

[yjmark]

Does anyone have any real information as to why the subs dropped? Or just wild guesses with nothing to back them up?

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

Does anyone have any real information as to why the subs dropped? Or just wild guesses with nothing to back them up?

It would seem someone said on the twitch livestream that it was most likely the increase in F2P games over in Asian.

[Shuttle]

I'm guessing that 60% of those are from Asia, whereas the remaining 40% split are from US & EU. While the game isn't dying, I'm in agreeance that it's time to merge realms. There are simply way to many realms.

[Hubbl3]

Here's hoping the next one is Burning Legion and rekindles the excitement from TBC.

It wont. Wow is fucking old. That is the main reason people are quitting. Not because the game has less quality than 2007. Blizz has to reinvent ALL the mechanics to make the game "new". -> Blizz has to make a whole new game.

And: The MMO Market has not infinite growth. WoW will never ever be at the high points of its career again, never. Still MoP is the best expansion to date.

Oh, and except few people in this forum I never ever read that the main reason people are quitting is because the game content is shit. The reason is always: "The mechanics are the same as in 2004 and it's getting old" or "I don't have time anymore, because abc"

[hyphnos]

Leaving the "WoW is dying" thing aside for the moment, does anyone else think that a goodly part of this drop might be due to the 1 year agreements finally falling off from the sub numbers. 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. There was no particular special deal in 2013 Q1 (as far as I'm aware). Perhaps all that sub-bumping has finally caught up with them? (Or alternatively, perhaps they just decided it wasn't really worth it and stopped trying to artificially boost sub numbers?)

They released a new raid tier less than 30 days before the Q1 end, that had to have helped the numbers as anyone who came back to take a peek at ToT would have been active at the end of Q1.

Hopefully if they lose enough pay by the hour subscribers they'll end their campaign to waste a minute here and a minute there with pointless travel and scattering vendors all over the place and focus on keeping their monthly subscribers in the west.

[Mawnix]

we wont even seen the hit from Age of Wushu coming out in Asia till Q2.

And yet you continue to argue you don't want subs to drop, and have no problem with Blizzard's games.

Someone's a tad bit too happy about something that shouldn't even affect how they play a game.

Regardless, this is probably my only comment. Oh well. Subs dropped. I'll be still playing the game per usual tonight when I raid.

Cheers.

[Byniri]

Does anyone have any real information as to why the subs dropped? Or just wild guesses with nothing to back them up?

A lot of times most of it is the Chinese/Korean gamers who pay by the day(?) instead of monthly.

[Pann]

I am guessing the loss took place over a longer period of time, but they were fluffing the old calls to make the launch look better than it actually was. If we were at 9.1 at the end of Cata, and 8.3 now... that is 800K actual loses without any gain in the course of 9 months. Honestly, it could have been a lot worse, and I think most of the doomsayers wish it had been. I could only imagine the blow up had we fallen under 8M.

Complete and utter nonsense they have not fluffed the figures if they had announced 10 million and someone said that there would an absolute shitstorm. MOP was their chance to attract people back and not only has it failed to keep the million who returned it has now lost a further 800k.

And yet you continue to argue you don't want subs to drop, and have no problem with Blizzard's games.

Someone's a tad bit too happy about something that shouldn't even affect how they play a game.

Yeah you're right we should just ignore the fact that one of the largest MMOs has just launched.

[Deleted]

Still MoP is the best expansion to date.

Sure it is.
As numbers show.

[Deleted]

Not FTP, they should drop their sub price a bit though, its like £8.99 now, drop it to £4.99

thatd be nice but i dont see that happening anytime soon

also i hate exams, im now part of a statistic

[Jtbrig7390]

What? Yes it has. It rose almost 2 million with MoPs release..

it went from 9.1mil to 10mil with MOP's release that is a far cry from 2million.

Tip to everyone talking about MOP getting subs and what cata had: Please look it up before throwing at random numbers.

cata ended with 9,1mil subs blizzard then stated wow had a little over 10million after mop's release. Now wow is at 8.3 mil and dropping.

It is like I said wow is going to keep losing subs until it hits a point and sits there. there will be no patch no xpac to raise subs and keep them there.

The age of wow is setting in it happens if you enjoy the game play it but it has became a fact that wow's subs are going to keep dropping until they hit that point.

I am not saying wow is dying but age has set in.

I personally think MOP will be around 6 million subs when MOP comes to a end and that would mean in 4 years it lost half its sub base that it had in WOTLK.