What can WoW do to gain Subs?

[jax]

Where? If you mean in Asia, then yes, that's where most of the subs are dropping. NA/Europe are more or less stable, dropping and gaining some percentages here and there.

Where does it say that?
What I read was "mainly from the East" that leaves the number up to huge speculation... "mainly" could mean 50.1% or 70% which would put the losses in the 300k to 700k range in the west...

We have no clue, they were blatantly vauge on where and how much so lets not spout nonesense when we dont know what and where the numbers are.

Other words, most of the subscribers lost are from china, but a few thousand are from US aswell.

Again it no where says anything even remotely close to this... its says "East" not China... I seem to recall Korea is in the East and they shut down over 50% of thier servers and merged them all into 9 or so... that surely had a effect and has nothing whatsoever to do with this China place people keep trying to put out there...

[Pann]

Other words, most of the subscribers lost are from china, but a few thousand are from US aswell.

If you look at the Non-GAAP Online Subscription revenue it is a little more than a few thousand from the West that left.

So we can establish that both Maths and English aren't strong areas for you...

Care to explain your silly little insult?

[Deleted]

Anyone who suggests wow going F2P fails at basic math.

Not really, just depends on the context.
If their only goal was to gain subs (or player base) then they could make it f2p.

However as a business (context) making it f2p would increase player base but a lot of money.

[ItachiZaku]

They need to bring back the old talent tree since this one doesn´t feel rewarding when you lvl up.

Queued for a dungeon... then roommate got on... we chained like 6, went from level 19 to 36. Oh, I got 5 new abilities... I'm fine with the 2 I've been using. Meh.

---------- Post added 2013-05-13 at 04:11 PM ----------

Where does it say that?
What I read was "mainly from the East" that leaves the number up to huge speculation... "mainly" could mean 50.1% or 70% which would put the losses in the 300k to 700k range in the west...

We have no clue, they were blatantly vauge on where and how much so lets not spout nonesense when we dont know what and where the numbers are.



Again it no where says anything even remotely close to this... its says "East" not China... I seem to recall Korea is in the East and they shut down over 50% of thier servers and merged them all into 9 or so... that surely had a effect and has nothing whatsoever to do with this China place people keep trying to put out there...

New York is also to the East of corporate headquarters.

[Deleted]

So according to u its ok to focus on the language discussing subs drop in the East but we should ignore the language used to describe losing subs in the West... LOL

Those of us without any agenda whatsoever r reading the entire text and taking it all into account... cherrypicking doesnt help anyone.

You did read your post right? I mean the one with the bolded and underlined bit covering just the loss from the west? And you want to try and tell me I'm cherry picking because I said read what's written.....

And please do tell me what language they used to describe the loss from the west, I'll give you a clue:

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft® remained the #1 subscriptionbased MMORPG in the world with more than eight million subscribers, although the game saw declines of approximately 1.3 million subscribers, mainly from the East, but in the West as well.

So you ignore the word "mainly" and focus on "in the west" could you point out any qualifying word before west I should be paying attention to?

If I say "I had breakfast this morning that was mainly Yogurt, but with some muesli as well" can you magically work out what the percentage of muesli to yogurt was?

Oh wait, you have no idea, either about my breakfast or the sub numbers because there's no information in that statement except that there is some loss from the west, but it's mainly from the East....like it says.

[dd614]

-More dungeons with heroics that give a clear sense of accomplishment from completing them
-One difficulty raiding with a clear progression path. There is nothing wrong with a guild clearing Jinrokh the first week and struggling the next 3 weeks on Horridon. That's how raiding should be, not mediocre guilds clearing Lei Shen normal in 2-3 weeks and pounding into heroics. Why even have normal difficulty?
-Remove LFR difficulty and all the headaches it brings
-Work out some sort of Proving Grounds experience to help players learn their characters.
-Bring back lengthy dungeon/raid attunement and crafting questlines but keep them transferable across account
-Clearly enforce tough new rules against trolls, racists, assorted jerks, etc and bring back a sense of community. If you want to act like an asshole to others in WoW, you should be ready to have your account perma-banned.
-Remove paid character/guild transfers and allow 1 free transfer every month(perhaps every 2 or 3 months)
-Make the complete game minus the MoP expansion free to download. It's ridiculous people have to drop 100+ dollars to get caught up. That is not conducive to bringing in new players.

[ReleaseDay]

Release a succesful expansion, fast.

Funny, because thats where the WoW subscriptions were lost.

Incorrect, the majority of subscription loses was in Asia.

[Deleted]

Oh wait, you have no idea, either about my breakfast or the sub numbers because there's no information in that statement except that there is some loss from the west, but it's mainly from the East....like it says.

Congratulations u arrived at my exact point! lol

I was bashing all these idiots on here who are trying to insinuate that the West subs are fine and its only the East thats suffering subs losses.

I gave evidence that BOTH East and West are losing subs. Everyone knows that the East is losing more but nobody has a clue how much more because Blizzard will not give us that information. Idiots are assuming that the East are losing massive amounts and the West only a handful... thats stupid groundless garbage.

NOTE: if u bothered to read the post i was commenting upon then u would see that i was bashing Pancaspe for saying "West subs are stable". Thats groundless opinionated garbage without any reference to fact.

[mikencarly]

Funny, because thats where the WoW subscriptions were lost.

Wow dude really did you even read at all almost ALL the subs came from china cmon now it's right infront of the website sigh...

[Deleted]

Honestly, I don't think they can. WoW is old. The engine is old. The graphics are old. The story is old. The class mechanics are old. Young people who've never played before are less likely to go to WoW as their game of choice than they used to be. Older people who've been playing for a long time are finding better/more important things to do with their time.

At this point in WoW's lifecycle, it's simply not a good value to as many people as it used to be and I don't think anything thing they could do in game could change that. They could increase the activity of the game by getting rid of the Pay to Play model, but then they lose most of their incentive to keep working on the game.

100% Sign, nice post, i think this sums it up perfectly! But i still think young people try the game but the number of players who leave after only a single or two months is way larger than back in the early WOW life. There are more and more MMOs out there every year, its more difficult nowadays to bind players for a longer period. However, WOW is still the number one out there and most likely it'll be the #1 as long as Blizzard keeps on releasing Addons and content for this game.

[mikencarly]

This is what i find rather funny they lost 1.3 million which almost all came from china yet they made already a INCREASE in income of almost 100 million so far this year compare to Cata so these sub loses didn't effext them whats so ever most of the money comes from the west not east maybe 5 dollars a month at best they go to cafes timed ext.

[Lethey Alexandros]

What wow needs is competition. It dosent need a wow killer but it needs a game that can compete with it. I dont think there has really been a game able to accomplish this. Everything has sort of fallen to the side. AoC, ToR, Aion, DnD online, Rift. They have players but nothing detrimental to wow's health and most of them have gone F2P becuse they could not keep a healthy chunk of players to even pay for the games production.

[Deleted]

Care to explain your silly little insult?

Yes, you can't do math (14% (rounding up) isn't nearly 20%) and you can't read because it clearly says where the loss is 'mainly'.

You really can't read anything else into that statement because there are no details, you can say there's a loss from the west, because they say there's a loss from the west, but you have no idea how much, you also can't get it from the financial reports because there's more that just subs in the subs line:

Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties, and value-added services, and revenues from Call of Duty Elite memberships.

Oh and just because this is in the reports:

The subscriber decline was primarily attributable to the East, with a smaller relative decrease in the West (where the “East” includes China, Taiwan, and South Korea, and the “West” includes North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America). Subscribership has declined since the September 2012 release of the latest expansion pack, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria® , with casual players in the East playing less.

[Flaks]

I feel like the game is better than it has been in years so I'm not sure why it doesn't reflect that in sales. Aside from dailies being mandatory in 5.0 I though they did well this expansion. Especially considering how bad Cata was content wise.

I do hope that updated models will be something they can try to show off for the next expansion, that should at least bring back some people.

They added a rather hefty amount of grinding to a game that had been moving away from grinding for the past 2 expansions. It was a ridiculously asinine move and anyone could have seen that it was going to lose them subs and interest.

[hablix]

I think faster expansions with more of the content up front. 1 year expansion with maybe 2 patches.

Instead of continuously adding new classes and races they could spend more time ensuring there's plenty of endgame content out of the gate, and of course, content that is not just dailies. At this point, I think they should be aiming to keep longterm players rather than hoping for a lot of new ones, and new races/classes tend to be alts and diversions for many players who have spent years investing tens or even over a hundred days of playtime on their established mains.

Take all that work they put into the Pandaren starting zone for example. How many people have played through that more than once? (In b4 the inevitable "that's my favorite I've done it 10,000 times" exception.)

[whatthefudge]

The only thing right now is I think the gateway of entry is too high for new players that might want to play the game. Make every expansion aside from the current one cost one bundle of 20 dollars, and then the current one cost 40 dollars. That's generally the price of a new game.

Other than that, they aren't doing anything wrong to lose subs, the game is just old and getting older. The people who have played since launch or even WoTLK have grown up and moved on with their lives and its harder to get new blood to play an 8 year old game.

For starters, get rid of fluffy pandas. This is Warcraft for ffs, not Kung Fu panda. If this would ever happen you'd see this alone would help the sub numbers a lot.

Can't tell if troll or really stupid

[Vincent]

One thing has also changed heavily, there are fewer and fewer constantly subscribed players. More and more subscribe for a couple of months, drop off for a while and come back at a later time. This will obviously affect subnumbers, so the actual amount of players playing can be hard to determine fully.

This is certainly one aspect. I've a number of folks in my guild who are around for about 8-10 months after an expansion then they go dormant.

Another detrimental aspect (and this affects me personally) is that so much of the late-game is a bloody grind. I don't log in to "play WoW" I log in to "do Dailies" to get beans to turn into database entries to let me LFR to get more entries to raid 10man to... you see? The whole bloody game is a treadmill but it shouldn't feel so much like a treadmill.

The game offers other amusements as well. I'm not terribly fond of pet-battles personally but it's something to do that's amusing and you can play who you like since it's account wide. The problem with that, and the other distractions, is that they are distractions. If you have a few chars, just keeping up with dailies can be a cast iron bitch, esp if you'd like to raid on more than one character.

I'm not talking about faster advancement so much as why aren't these distractions usable to advance central goals?

A serious flaw in the game is LFR / LFD. Yes, sitting around in the LFG channel rather sucked but when you got in a group, you got in a group, it wasn't a full of sociopaths (usually) -- and if it was, you knew that they weren't long for that server b/c no one would group with them again. You got to make friends b/c you saw the same names over and over or you'd invite them b/c you had a couple of great experiences with them, etc. Even sitting around in /LFG, you could chat with folks and socialize -- or add to your /ignore list, depending. In short: it was a social game with social rules. I played a dime-a-dozen class (rogue) back in vanilla but never had a problem getting a group and was frequently cold invited -- DPS is always easy to scrape up and rogues on my server were lawyers at election time -- b/c you got to know people and knew who you enjoyed playing with.

Cross-realm LFD/LFR KILLED ALL OF THAT stone dead. Zero social responsibility; they're a breeding ground for sociopathic if not sadistic behavior. I now play a tank as a main so I can easily queue up. I tried one day to see if maybe it was just me, so I greeted new groups, LFD after LFD, asked questions about quests or this or that, specific questions about the instance ("everyone been here before? anyone need X quest done?", even a basic "hello") and my efforts rewarded me with 70% of the instances where not a single person said a word, the rest evenly split between minimal-conversation and utterly bitching someone out for being slow, not knowing a fight, not "pulling their weight" (even though barely geared), and generally other unacceptable behavior. Nothing positive about them; nothing social.

LFR I can barely set foot in anymore, to the detriment of my gear/VP. Tanking in the modern era is about knowing the fights: dps and healers can, in large measure, figure-it-out-as-they-go but tanks, no such luck. I get into an instance try to talk to the other tank: generally it's silence. Sucks when you have taunt off or coordinate a pull and you're ignored. Other times these sad tanks have never done anything else and they have no idea how to work as a team, which often leads to wipes or bitching from the healers. The way tanks get treated in LFR, esp given that you can wait a long time to get a replacement, is still astonishing. "Failtank" is shouted at the first misstep. Even when the tank isn't at fault, it's a shit-fest (you taunt, they taunt back, you can't retaunt for X seconds, clueless-tank dies, suddenly you're 'failtank') (my personal favorite: someone single-target nukes the living shit out of a non-targeted AE situation, overnukes a taunt, gets killed, then bitches you out in /ra -- and several people do this, sometimes in the same damned AE pack)

These aren't social events, they're things that make running for public office seem take by comparison. "Screw your dirt-digging lawyers, I've done LFR!"

WoW has been optimized around progress to the point that they now have to put in artificial barriers to overcome their optimizations. It's just not 'fun' anymore. Yes, it sucked doing only 2 instances a night b/c you couldn't get X class but you HAD FUN for those 2, you got to chat with people you know, form relationships, yadda yadda. 2 fun instances with friends or soon-to-be-friends or even people-you-can-group-with-but-don't-want-to-burn-alive >> 6+ in the silence zone.

I look back at the amount of sheer pain, blood, sweat, tears, crying, bitching, and death-threats-to-blizzard that Shadow Labyrinth gave (BC Expansion) as the tuning of that ball-breaker, esp on heroic, was harsh. So, so, so many deaths. And I look back on that place with fondness b/c I spent hours in there with friends and making friends, dealing with yet another corpse run, working out what we did wrong, and even in the bad groups, you still tried to work together, largely b/c getting another group was such a pain. While being able to dump someone at a whim is, at times, damned nice, it removes any social requirement to actually be a nice person yourself, and so people don't. And that is pretty shitty for a "social game." It's not a "I'm quitting b/c of this" thing, it's just a slow degradation of joy in the game that leads people to find more interesting things to do.

And it'll never get fixed b/c people will smack themselves in the balls with a hammer if it'll get them an extra bean a day. Even if you gave a boost to "local" groups in LFD/LFR (my-server-preference) sort of thing, people would still argue that X of Y > waiting for a good Z and pull out their hammers.

[whatthefudge]

For starters, get rid of fluffy pandas. This is Warcraft for ffs, not Kung Fu panda. If this would ever happen you'd see this alone would help the sub numbers a lot.

Can't tell if troll or really stupid

[Chudah]

I'm a casual and I do not want WoW to move to F2P. It's $15 a month, it's budgeted, that's that. I don't want to be nickel and dimed to death and end up paying more, nor do I want to get outspent by others. I just feel like if Blizz moves to F2P they might as well just sell gear in the Blizzard store and be done with it. Maybe I'm narrow minded. Someone explain how it would be better.

If WOW ever went F2P, I could see them having tiered sub options, just like other games out there. You could choose to continue your monthly sub and get everything you do now, but there will be lesser expensive options (and of course, the full on F2P ones) that lets you pay for perks that regular subscribers get automatically. Of course, those who go the F2P route can nickle and dime themselves to death, but I still think it'd be a good way to bring in players and revenue without screwing the people that have paid subs for years and years, or those who don't want to deal with the micro-transactions. Hell, the smarter players may just sub up and save themselves some money in the long run.

Outside of the world crying that WOW is officially dead, I do think a model such as this could bring in quite a few players. Despite what many people claim, the game can still be addictive. And even though the graphics don't stand up as well as other games out there, free is free, and the gameplay continues to stand up well.

[Pann]

Yes, you can't do math (14% (rounding up) isn't nearly 20%) and you can't read because it clearly says where the loss is 'mainly'.

You really can't read anything else into that statement because there are no details, you can say there's a loss from the west, because they say there's a loss from the west, but you have no idea how much, you also can't get it from the financial reports because there's more that just subs in the subs line:

Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties, and value-added services, and revenues from Call of Duty Elite memberships.

Oh and just because this is in the reports:

The subscriber decline was primarily attributable to the East, with a smaller relative decrease in the West (where the “East” includes China, Taiwan, and South Korea, and the “West” includes North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America). Subscribership has declined since the September 2012 release of the latest expansion pack, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria® , with casual players in the East playing less.

If you cared to notice I said almost 20% in six months, the sub count for Q3 2012 was "...more than 10 million subscribers" the sub count for Q1 2013 six months later was 8.3 million. As we do not know the exact number of subscribers in Q3 I said the loss was almost 20%. It is most certainly not less than 14% as you state.

Going on to my, apparent, inability to read, I'm not sure why you have copied the definition of a sub as it is not relevant. I said that the subs in the West were not stable and indeed Kotick states that there were losses in the West during the earnings call. It is not possible for the subs to be stable whilst they are declining, they are either stable or they are not.

I can only suggest that you take the time to read someone's post before insulting them about not being able to read or do math.