Blizzard is not acting like BFA is failing

[Katchii]

Millions of active players...click to doubt.

At this point, 500k subs would be realistic. 1 mill is possible. 2 mill is outright delusional hopes that even their corporate quarterly reports paint as impossible.

Plus, if WoW was doing great currently, they wouldn't be doing this QnA's every day to put out the fires, and we wouldn't see so many mounts, pets and now toys on the store.

It isn't just WOW though to be fair; ATVI's whole portfolio is struggling in 2019 with player count, and player engagement.

Outside of WoW classic, or wow in general... ATVI has a dismal 2019 ahead of it.

Monthly active users for the entire suite of Blizzard games was ~37 million 6 months ago. That doesn't seem at all dismal to me. I'm not delusional enough to think that the majority of that is WoW, but to think that not even 1-2 million of that number is WoW is just as delusional, IMO.

Classic enthusiasts simply don't outnumber the number of Live players. I have no doubt it will be successful, but I find it extremely unlikely, and borderline blind zealotry for people who preach it, that Classic WoW is going to somehow out perform/ populate Live servers. What information is this assumption based on?

[justandulas]

Monthly active users for the entire suite of Blizzard games was ~37 million 6 months ago. That doesn't seem at all dismal to me. I'm not delusional enough to think that the majority of that is WoW, but to think that not even 1-2 million of that number is WoW is just as delusional, IMO.

Classic enthusiasts simply don't outnumber the number of Live players. I have no doubt it will be successful, but I find it extremely unlikely, and borderline blind zealotry for people who preach it, that Classic WoW is going to somehow out perform/ populate Live servers. What information is this assumption based on?

It is based on how popular classic is amongst the older players, and how unpopular BFA is with current wow players.

MAU of 37 mil sounds high, but when you dig into it its down something like 60% from the year before... which itself was down significantly year over year.

Again, i'm not singling BFA out as the cause because that's just not true, or fair.

Blizz games (and activision tbh) games are dying all across the board. OW peaked years ago, SC2 is dead, Diablo3 only has activity at new seasonal starts, HOTS is gone, BO4 (bnet) is pretty dead because of their overly greedy MTX practices (not blizz's fault) WoW hasn't had a lower player count since the early days of vanilla, etc...

honestly the hottest blizz games currently are the ones they are dropping on GoG like wc2/diablo 1.

I'm a blizz fan, but honesty is important if they are gonna dig out of this hole they are in, but i won't single out BFA as the cause of blizz's decline because it's not fair to blame a small piece of the pie that's still more successful than the others, for all of ATVI's woes

[Onikaroshi]

- In BfA there are no communities, no realms. Classic is completely opposite.

Hate to break it to you, but you're never getting that back, communities were a product of the time, they can lock us all to one server in Classic but you're never going to get the same feeling.

Aside from that.... Vanilla sucked, TBC and Wrath were miles better in comparision. Game isn't great now, but it's fixable.

[justandulas]

Hate to break it to you, but you're never getting that back, communities were a product of the time, they can lock us all to one server in Classic but you're never going to get the same feeling.

Aside from that.... Vanilla sucked, TBC and Wrath were miles better in comparision.

Disagree entirely. Did you play vanilla or tbc? The communities will be back, and be better than ever with modern tools like discord at their disposal.

The community was forged by the games SYSTEMS, not because it was a different year on the internet. Vanilla wow forces you into social activity to get anywhere, and there's no tools to find them so you have to be social, and on top of that server reputations will exist once again based on actions/inactions good bad and ugly.

It's the same reason older MMO's still have community or even older MUDs still have people who pay to play them... because the game forces an organic sense of community that current wow does everything in it's power to discourage.

You can be a solo player and do it all and get everything you want done in BFA. Try that in vanilla

[Onikaroshi]

Disagree entirely. Did you play vanilla or tbc? The communities will be back, and be better than ever with modern tools like discord at their disposal.

The community was forged by the games SYSTEMS, not because it was a different year on the internet. Vanilla wow forces you into social activity to get anywhere, and there's no tools to find them so you have to be social, and on top of that server reputations will exist once again based on actions/inactions good bad and ugly.

It's the same reason older MMO's still have community or even older MUDs still have people who pay to play them... because the game forces an organic sense of community that current wow does everything in it's power to discourage.

You can be a solo player and do it all and get everything you want done in BFA. Try that in vanilla

I've been playing since Beta... I have a better community now than I ever did in Vanilla, and I raided 40 mans in vanilla.

Now you have a tight nit group who plays together (unless you want to play solo) instead of being required to have 40 people and you'll only ever know a couple of them, most are just faceless nobodies.

People speak of server communities, well US Mannoroth was nothing but a toxic cesspool, most people stayed within their guild, just like now.

Community is what you make of it, there's just as much community in wow now as before if you look for it, there's just not the "rose tinted" server communities that didn't widely exist anyway beyond knowing who the top dogs were on your server and the people to avoid.

[Melsiren]

Yeah, and they should never act like it is failing.

Panic is the last thing they need.

I think we all know things are not going so well, and time will tell if Blizzard gets it or not.

[Mellrod]

Because Ion is too arrogant to admit that BFA is bad or might have issues.

I mean he can't even admit that there are games out there that might do certain things better than WoW so good luck getting him to actually tell the truth on anything.

What are you on about mate? If anyone talks about how better a rival game is than their own they'd get chewed the fuck out. They don't pay Ion to talk about other games. It's the same reason why you see so much tiptoeing and nervous sweating whenever hosts or speakers at E3 mention a similar game during their presentation.

[Qnubi]

Hate to break it to you, but you're never getting that back, communities were a product of the time, they can lock us all to one server in Classic but you're never going to get the same feeling.

Aside from that.... Vanilla sucked, TBC and Wrath were miles better in comparision. Game isn't great now, but it's fixable.

I can only share my experience on "other servers" prior to Classic servers. But 2 years ago, the community still exists as I remembered it. The game just pushes you into the habit to form a community because it was built to have them. Retail does not push you into that at all, everything is automated, even the dungeon applications for m+ is automated by associating a artificial score. Instead of talking and making bonds with players you can just look at a score and invite someone to grasp his potential and skill. Retail is forcing you to not have a community whereas classic is pushing you to make a community on your server because there is nothing that can force you to become a anonymous robot with a score.

[Katchii]

It is based on how popular classic is amongst the older players, and how unpopular BFA is with current wow players.

MAU of 37 mil sounds high, but when you dig into it its down something like 60% from the year before... which itself was down significantly year over year.

From the article I read and other sources on the official forums and such, there was a drop from ~46 million from the same time point in 2017 to the ~37 million. That's ~a 20% drop, which is significant, but not even close to the 60% you're saying.

Yes, there are less people playing, and yes there are FAR fewer players playing WoW than in the past. I'm still not seeing what information people are using to outright say that Classic will have a higher population than Live. I'm not trying to defend Blizzard or preach that they're doing fine and are super successful and that BfA was a huge success, or anything like that. I'm specifically only speaking to that talking point: What metrics are people using to say Classic will have a higher population than Live?

[Onikaroshi]

I can only share my experience on "other servers" prior to Classic servers. But 2 years ago, the community still exists as I remembered it. The game just pushes you into the habit to form a community because it was built to have them. Retail does not push you into that at all, everything is automated, even the dungeon applications for m+ is automated by associating a artificial score. Instead of talking and making bonds with players you can just look at a score and invite someone to grasp his potential and skill. Retail is forcing you to not have a community whereas classic is pushing you to make a community on your server because there is nothing that can force you to become a anonymous robot with a score.

I mean, you're forcing yourself not to have a community in Retail, not the game itself. You don't have to automate anything in M+, we do ours weekly as a set group (and the score isn't blizzards fault, it's people doing what people do).

You can easily have just as much, and better, community in retail if you bother to try, but most people just want to whine about it. My Vanilla guild had maybe 10 active people and 30 nobodies we never talked to, because the game FORCED us to have large communities. Now you can have 15-25 people you actually want to play with.

Not to mention if you played on a bigger server with decent guilds, like I did back on Manno with Macabre and the original vodka, server communities were incredibly toxic because big guilds like that were far more negative then they are today. They were super "elitist" in vanilla.

[Poppincaps]

MONTHS after people told him the issues.

Oh he's just acknowledging them now? Hardly helps considering there's been a mass exodus from the game.

It helps the people still playing or the people who may want to come back but are unsatisfied with the game...

Also, don't move the goal posts. You said he didn't admit the game's faults. He has. Multiple times. So are we just gonna keep shitting on him even though they are aware of the problems and have confirmed that they are working to address them? Seems like a hater mentality to me.

I'm not exactly thrilled about BfA right now. I just log on to raid with my guild, but they know the issues, they've stated they're working on them, all that's left to do is wait and see if 8.2 is gonna improve the game. Anything else is just mindless hating.

[Wildpantz]

Because bfa is still making tons of money its in the top10 most grossing pc game still in 2019. Success means making money and bfa is making money.

[Onikaroshi]

It helps the people still playing or the people who may want to come back but are unsatisfied with the game...

Also, don't move the goal posts. You said he didn't admit the game's faults. He has. Multiple times. So are we just gonna keep shitting on him even though they are aware of the problems and have confirmed that they are working to address them? Seems like a hater mentality to me.

I'm not exactly thrilled about BfA right now. I just log on to raid with my guild, but they know the issues, they've stated they're working on them, all that's left to do is wait and see if 8.2 is gonna improve the game. Anything else is just mindless hating.

Well, thing is people have been telling them these issues are issues since alpha/beta, but they don't listen, at all. They claim azerite failed because they didn't get it in our hands sooner on beta, but why bother if you're not going to listen to feedback anyway?

The little bit of time that people did have with Azerite on beta they ALREADY saw it had issues, fell on deaf ears. And people say it was all whining, but the issues that were brought up in beta are the same issues they're talking about fixing NOW.

[Poppincaps]

Well, thing is people have been telling them these issues are issues since alpha/beta, but they don't listen, at all. They claim azerite failed because they didn't get it in our hands sooner on beta, but why bother if you're not going to listen to feedback anyway?

The little bit of time that people did have with Azerite on beta they ALREADY saw it had issues, fell on deaf ears. And people say it was all whining, but the issues that were brought up in beta are the same issues they're talking about fixing NOW.

Overhauling such a major expansion feature takes time. Just because they weren't outlining their plans throughout the expansion doesn't mean they weren't listening and trying to figure out a way to address the Azerite problems. By the time they got Azerite into the hands of the testers it was probably too late to fix the problems before launch, hence why they said, they need to get major features in the hands of players sooner.

[Onikaroshi]

Overhauling such a major expansion feature takes time. Just because they weren't outlining their plans throughout the expansion doesn't mean they weren't listening and trying to figure out a way to address the Azerite problems. By the time they got Azerite into the hands of the testers it was probably too late to fix the problems before launch, hence why they said, they need to get major features in the hands of players sooner.

Then delay, releasing with such broken features drives people away, at some point you have to balance it out between how many you loose if you delay (not many) vs how many you lose over a bad feature (a lot). They released in mid Aug (Aug 14 to be exact) they had over a month more they could have played with, hell, they could have even delayed the September thing if need be too.

Good companies know when a product is not going to go over well with the customers, they know when to delay to fix issues. Blizzard used to know this, they didn't used to give preorders so early, they didn't used to give estimated release times so early. They need to give themselves enough to to fix things.

[justandulas]

From the article I read and other sources on the official forums and such, there was a drop from ~46 million from the same time point in 2017 to the ~37 million. That's ~a 20% drop, which is significant, but not even close to the 60% you're saying.

Yes, there are less people playing, and yes there are FAR fewer players playing WoW than in the past. I'm still not seeing what information people are using to outright say that Classic will have a higher population than Live. I'm not trying to defend Blizzard or preach that they're doing fine and are super successful and that BfA was a huge success, or anything like that. I'm specifically only speaking to that talking point: What metrics are people using to say Classic will have a higher population than Live?

The 60% may be total loss from the years overall, not just last year. It's been awhile since i read up on it since i sold my ATVI shares.

That said, my feeling about wow classic outpopulating it is just based on forums, talk in game, talk out of game, and a gut feeling. I've got no cold hard metrics to back it up, other than me saying wait and see.

Some will eye roll, some will agree, some will call me crazy, but i'd bank on classic out populating BFA no problem. The expansion post BFA though, i doubt it as they will come out swinging to win back lost fans over the last few expacs. I hope so at least, it isn't like i want WoW to fail i adore the series and want whats best always for them and hope the expac after BFA is the best ever. fingers crossed

[Zachsophone]

Is it just me or is Blizzard just acting like everything is fine?

Outside of Classic forum communication is non existent, only info we have is directly from Ion with vague promises, 8.2 PTR is not up for a MAJORRRR game changing patch, Lore has been dead silent except insulting people on the forums, devs have been afraid to communicate bugs when reported/confirm them.

The list just keeps going. Every single thing I see Ion listing out was reported far prior to BFA even launching but how many had to quit and get fired before he decided to put his hubris aside and admit something is broken?

Nowhere in his interviews is he addressing the casino that is BFA right now and if anything has embraced it even further in dev Q&A's which are few and far between. Where in the hell are the class devs? People are beyond pissed right now about class design and the pruning but there is nothing. Who in the hell looks at prot warriors in MDI right now and does not thing that is just broken and crowding out other tanks that need buffs?

Guilds have been turned into glorified raid log communities as people are just disillusioned at what is going on right now. Where is the 8.2 hype on the PTR? Atleast then you could get people motivated to stay with the game and not just give up.

Let's assume BFA actually IS a "failure", that's another topic for later. They shouldn't say that outright, that's a terrible business practice lol. I think its healthy and respectable for the devs to say "Yep this isn't working, we're going do what we can to make it better" which they have been saying that, well through Ion they have.

I'm a teacher, and not all of my lessons go as I think they would. But I'm not going to see my students the next day and say "Sorry guys, I was a total failure yesterday and you deserve my most humble of apologies". Most of the time when that happens, I'll know it personally and make changes behind the scenes for next time. At the most, I'll say "Ok, yesterday didn't go as planned so we're going review it again today with a different approach."

Another analogy would be mentioning all your business failures in a job interview. Even if they were complete and utter failures, you shouldn't admit that, that's just bad branding for you as a potential employee.

Even if the game is a total "failure", they shouldn't admit that to their customers. I'll give a you a third analogy. Imagine having a business on a street and some customers come in and say "Are you guys qualified? How is your business?" And you say, "Well our last job we did was a complete failure, we admit that but we're going to do better next time, we promise." They're walking right out that door and probably even telling their friends to look elsewhere for that service.

I think I've made my point.

Also, I'm not being facetious but what do you define as a "failure"? Legit question. Thanks.

[Relapses]

The 60% may be total loss from the years overall, not just last year. It's been awhile since i read up on it since i sold my ATVI shares.

That said, my feeling about wow classic outpopulating it is just based on forums, talk in game, talk out of game, and a gut feeling. I've got no cold hard metrics to back it up, other than me saying wait and see.

Some will eye roll, some will agree, some will call me crazy, but i'd bank on classic out populating BFA no problem. The expansion post BFA though, i doubt it as they will come out swinging to win back lost fans over the last few expacs. I hope so at least, it isn't like i want WoW to fail i adore the series and want whats best always for them and hope the expac after BFA is the best ever. fingers crossed

If Blizzard wanted Classic to compete with retail it would have a separate subscription. It doesn't. Any argument you make in favor of Classic "overtaking" retail is pure conjecture and borderline insanity.

[Fred Skinner]

Only because some streamers and some people in an online forum think it is failing does not mean it is failing.

[Feral Druid ist Op]

No
Noooooo
Noooooooooooo

Do you want WoD??
Because if you leave the expansion alone that is how you get WoD

I do take wod over bfa on any given day. At least i had a functional class back then