1.3 million sub drop

[oraz4000]

Well ToT tuning was a disaster especially normal modes i can see the possibility of subs lost there, add the fact nothing has really changed its still the same game IE : not much to do outside of raiding.

Pet Battles, Brawler guild, Isle of Giants just wasted development time imo.

[Deleted]

1.3 mio and here my guess in the quess thread was only 500k up to 1 mio damn.

but I can understand why. Why pay for what has essentially devolved to a single player game? Filled with a lot of chores.

Maybe they schould have made as much levelling content for pandaria as they made for wrath and bc. Back then there was a lot of content still on the board even after you dinged at 70 and 80.

[Deleted]

So you quit cause you don't like the game anymore cause there are no players around...
Yet you claim its fantastic...

hmmmm

Can you read? That's not what I said now is it?

I've enjoyed the content up until this point. The problem is my guild disbanded for personal reasons and we were unable to recruit on a dead realm. That means I can't play it anymore unless I fork over more cash. If they fix the realm population problem I'd come back in a heartbeat.

[Xl House lX]

The next big hit will be when a Western company nails down the F2P MMO genre, like Blizz did with the P2P MMO with WoW. I'm already expecting Titan to be a F2P.

You're actually on to something, seriously. Starcraft is F2P, Diablo is F2P, Hearthstone will be F2P. The whole pay to play thing is old and with cheaper alternatives out there, things are starting to look grim for the game that is WoW, and it is showing.

[Ceece]

It looks like it. The reason is there is no lack of content or anything but there is a fast loss of subs. Its kinda sad how blizzard manages to mess up their own games at a fast rate..

That's what I mean about wanting more evidence, and that's asking too much. I'm looking at things in the long run, rather than what's going on short term. It's a huge loss for sure, but where were the majority of the subs lost? Asia? What was the reason behind it? Chunk of subs lost, but the game isn't dying at a fast rate. Hopefully they can better their game with losing players, somehow. I'll look at it as a good thing.

[sam86]

Much worse than I thought, actually I thought of stable or increase
I mean they are doing good job, why that insane bleed ? Maybe because it isn't alt-friendly anymore ?

[Glorious Leader]

Another thing I don't understand is their conviction that they'd rather players have to do multiple different things for gear as opposed to just one thing they like. LIke the gearing blog is basically a laundry list of bs that I have to go through when before it was just pretty simple. Run dungeons. Buy gear. I don't understand why they think it's better that I do all kinds of different things as opposed to the one thing I liked to do in the past. Why does the optimal route have to be so convuluted? It hasn't brought back immersion. All it's done is made the game more inconvenient.

---------- Post added 2013-05-09 at 12:27 AM ----------

Much worse than I thought, actually I thought of stable or increase
I mean they are doing good job, why that insane bleed ? Maybe because it isn't alt-friendly anymore ?

Because they're obviously not doing a good enough job. Like I get that people like mists but doesn't this sub drop at least in principle suggest that the product is lacking in some respects?

[Gnarz]

WoW has been on its way to rock bottom every since Wotlk, dare i even say TBC

[MoanaLisa]

I think AoW had already released in Asia.

I could be wrong about this but I believe that it released in early April.

[K i s u]

WoW is still going strong but I admit i'm a bit surprised by the drop at this point, figured it was one of the better fairing expansions.

[Osmeric]

Another thing I don't understand is their conviction that they'd rather players have to do multiple different things for gear as opposed to just one thing they like.

I think they were terrified of people running out of things to do. So instead that gave too many things the players felt they had to do. Straight from one error into another.

Couple that with organized raids being priced out of reach of most players, guilds bleeding from Cataclysm, LFR being meh at best, and PvP being more broken than anytime since Vanilla, a lot of players must have said "eh, going to go play something else."

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

You're actually on to something, seriously. Starcraft is F2P, Diablo is F2P, Hearthstone will be F2P. The whole pay to play thing is old and with cheaper alternatives out there, things are starting to look grim for the game that is WoW, and it is showing.

The only reason Blizz isn't shifting WoW to F2P is because at this point they can get more money per month out of monthly fees than they can out of an optional cash shop. It seems the cut is somewhere around 1-2 million players.

[Deleted]

There has been less engagement by casual players. Is it ok to blame casuals now :P?

[Ragashii]

It's simple really, as to why this is happening. The MMO genre is just not as popular as it once were. Is it still popular? Yes. Are things like new generation consoles/etc. diminishing the popularity of MMOs? Yes.

Has nothing to do with anything in game.

Personally I think that blizzard made a mistake this expansion and spread themselves too thin. There's more content for everyone, you simply cannot argue against that. But you can argue that it is not the right kind of content for everyone. What it seems like they did was make a bunch of content for different players and tried to match them with content. So they assumed that casual players would like dailies, scenarios,pet battles and LFR. They assumed semi-hardcore people would like tougher raids. They assumed that hardcore raiders would like tougher heroic content. The problem is that once you try to stick someone with content that they don't agree with, they are frustrated and unhappy. So what happened? Well, they focused a lot of casual content, that was the mantra of this expansion. Things to do while you don't raid. But they went about it in a horrible way, for example if you look at the history of the game, most players have done 5 mans. Players have been doing 5 mans way more often than raiding. In classic, most players were doing the higher level dungeons to grind out their D1 sets. In BC most players had to do 5 mans to acquire badges, or they just got season 2 epics. In wrath you had to do 5 mans to get badges, but you could also raid to do so. In cataclysm you could do 5 mans, but they were too hard. This was the content that the majority of the playerbase does, this backfired on blizzard very quickly. Even though they nerfed the content, the damage was already done. There's a trend in every expansion except for wrath, the amount of 5 mans got smaller. Wrath had more 5 mans than any other expansion, because that's what most players turn to. In every expansion, you could gear up and catch up simply by doing 5 mans. Except for in mists that is.

As many people have pointed out, double gating things is horrible design. Especially when it hasn't been that way since a lot of people can remember.

tldr: MoP tried to change too much by severing 5 mans from the playerbase.

[Glorious Leader]

I don't understand why everyone is so surprised about the sub loss versus the quality of the game. People have been screaming for months that it was crap. Grinding stupid dailies was dumb, the raids were overtuned, valor was a pain in the ass especially tied to rep and that the game was just simple to god damn slow.

[Sansnom]

im not sure if they release the data about specific regions, all they say is most of the losses are in the east.

Well, if they would not tell us, then maybe they have something to hide?

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

I think they were terrified of people running out of things to do. So instead that gave too many things the players felt they had to do. Straight from one error into another.

My best guess is Blizz was afraid their new features weren't being used by players, who would then start whining about "nothing to do" again.

Perhaps due to numbers that showed LFR was in fact a huge flop that people did once for the achievement and then never touched again.

So they made all of MoP's features, plus LFR, mandatory as part of the gearing process so players would have to do them.

[Osmeric]

There has been less engagement by casual players. Is it ok to blame casuals now :P?

No, but it's ok to blame the game that didn't retain them.

Understand that the casuals are not an optional component of the player population. Without them, the game is toast.

[Iceman2500]

I didn't like how most of the content was locked behind dailies and lore wise, this entire expansion feels like a filler TV season; the plots unfolding in Pandaria don't really play a part in the grand scheme of the Warcraft universe.

[MoanaLisa]

I think they were terrified of people running out of things to do. So instead that gave too many things the players felt they had to do. Straight from one error into another.

I've never written much about this but I've often wondered about it; especially when considering my MoP bucket list which is quite extensive and as far as the time I have to devote to the game quite unrealistic. I don't play but a few hours a week and the number of things I'd like to get around to but haven't is ever-so-slightly overwhelming. This has nothing at all to do with alts either. I don't have any alts at all at end game.

I've said a lot of times that I'd rather have too much to do than too little but it's something to think about.