"Catering to 5% of your player base will leave you with 5% of your player base"

[Halliax]

I consider myself part of the 5%,and current wow definitely dont cater to me or my friends. Im even unsubed, cause dont have enough time to "enjoy" the game. My dream would be an expansion like WoD with M+, I dont care about story, outside world or anything like that. I would love to loggin in my base (garrison), check my mission table, raid with my guild, finish raid time, go sleep. On weekends I would do the same, but do some M+ or arenas with my friends. See? Happy expansion.

[Soeroah]

I do wish they'd said more about solo/casual play but they did at the very start say Zereth Mortis design concepts are going to be moving forward in future content, which implies they're still thinking about us.

[Diaphin]

Gimmick that will be forgotten, just like class order halls, mage tower, warfronts, island expeditions, covenants, and chorghast.

Considering that it is core to traversing the open world, probably not for solo players. And come on dude, stop trolling, you have a FF14 icon. That game has basically no solo open world activities outside of beast tribe quests and gold saucer.

So? Legion introduced new races and classes too and didn't stop it from being a raider's expansion.

If Legion was a raider's expansion for you, then maybe you should stick to singleplayer games? Legion set quite a standart when it comes to open world solo activities.

So far that just amounts to being able to post buy orders on the AH like in GW2 or EVE Online. Nothing about actually revamping the gameplay of crafting, let alone making the stuff created by it relevant.

Only that they also introduce different quality levels to crafting, making it more viable to dedicate yourself to your professions

I'll see it when I believe it, but the post-WoD zone design of WoW is anti-exploration.

The expansion where you stayed in your garrison all the time outside of going out to your raid with nothing else to do was indeed highly pro-exploration

Which look incredibly bland and claustrophobic.

Didn't you praise MoP, which was mostly valleys?

Because they're not addressing the abysmal lack of casual content. You'll do the four questing zones over a weekend and then all you're left with is mythic dungeons and doing the latest raid for 9 months.

I mean, what even is your standart for casual content? Classic basically just had gathering mats and world buffs and nothing else to do outside of raiding or pvp, it was the novelty of being everyones first mmo that made it appealing, Bc had some daylies and heroics, Wotlk had basically nothing outside of the argent tournament, Cataclysm had nothing outside of the molten front, Mist of Pandaria initially was all daylies until it introduced max level zones which were fairly bare bones up until they introduced Throne of Thunder and afterwards the timeless island which set some standart for zones in the future, WoD had nothing until Tanaang, while Legion introduced World Quests, a scaling dungeon mode for every kind of player, the Suramar Campaign and activities like the withered army. And from that point onwards you got a max level zone with lots of daily activities and opportunities to progress your character even solo and collect transmogs, mounts and pets with every major tier patch.

[Video Games]

Yeah, it kind of does. People aren't going to pay money for something they don't find value in.

Call of duties some of the best games of all time and avatar the best movie of all time confirmed

[Diaphin]

Honestly. This. FF14 does a great job at catering to a great solo experience. Where the MMO part of the game is more the social side of things, the amount of time I spent in Gridania chatting to randoms, or watching a bard perform for example, stuff I would NEVER do in WoW, where its viewed as a waste of time that could be spent in queue for...group content.

Not to say having a strong raiding and dungeon scene/design isn't a bad thing, but I would love to see the social aspects of what WoW is capable of come forward a little bit more.

To be honest, not that much if you aren't basically using it as a second life. There isn't really much content for solo players, outside of goldsaucer and beast tribe daylies. There, there are the relic weapon zones, but even those are fully designed around grinding with a full party of players. Other than that you have the expansion release story that keeps you busy for a while and afterwards you can wait for a few months for a hour of gameplay when you are just doing the story.

[Goat7]

The game is anything but solo and casual friendly bro, what are you on about????

I said it is more solo and casual friendly now then it ever has been, which is true. See looking for raid, normal mode raid, see normal and heroic and mythic dungeons, see all the content that you can do on your own, leveling, the achievements, queue for battlegrounds.

With that being said it is a MMORPG, not supposed to be solo at all (massive multiplayer online) and its a RPG = grind + time consuming which will always go against people with less time then others. But again, Retail WoW is way more friendly to these crowds then Classic or Classic TBC.

[Diaphin]

I do wish they'd said more about solo/casual play but they did at the very start say Zereth Mortis design concepts are going to be moving forward in future content, which implies they're still thinking about us.

It was all about casual content, there was nothing about raids, dungeons or pvp and they barely touched on the talent rewamp.

[RobertMugabe]

TBC exposed a lot of people as larpers who said they liked TBC but really didn't looking back, or just never actually played it

Wrath is different, for the most part it was much more laid back and casual than TBC, which is good for classic as that gives itself to long term commitment - the fact Wrath had some objective problems and is still seen as favorably as it is should tell you it was special

Yeah I totally agree that Wrath is special and despite its many flaws, I absolutely love this expansion. I, quite ironically, like Wrath for the reasons many people hated it, which is easy content (still somewhat challenging, but really fun) and being able to over time get high end gear ("welfare" epics).

I truly believe that Wrath will have a much higher player retention, as in more people will play it much longer, simply because it's so accessible and alt friendly.

However I just don't think that it's gonna achieve the same amount of hype and player numbers as Classic initially did. The reason for this is simply that Classic was in a way a totally new game mode and it brought back content that was removed and overall just an almost entirely different game. TBC, Wrath and basically every other expansion are when you really look at the core principles and gameplay are almost the same in most ways. The "formula" hasn't changed dramatically since TBC, so that's why TBC already felt quite similar to retail in many aspects. And Wrath is just gonna feel even more like retail in certain ways.

- - - Updated - - -

"Waaah! WoW does not cater to the casual players!!!!!!!"

Meanwhile the game has gotten more casual friendly throughout the years. Honestly this discussion is getting silly. In my opinion if you do not like to play WoW casually you just do not seem to like the game at all. Same with all the "yea but Final Fantasy does this and does x". Then go play Final Fantasy?

If they only catered to a smaller percentage of the player base; this would have been a PVP only expansion. (No hate to the PVP players, but WoW is a mostly PVE based game, please don't hate me)

I actually disagree with WoW getting more casually friendly over the years. Like sure, LFR is a thing and all that and heroic dungeons are a thing, but these game mode's rewards and challenge is always almost instantly invalidated just after a few weeks of an expansion/patch launch. And LFR in particular is content that designed for having ~15 players be AFK.

Nowadays if you want to get into dungeons (mythic+) and raiding it's actually much harder compared to what it was in past expansions. There's just so much more competition and parses, weakauras etc. are even important for normal mode raids and low m+ keys. It's also quite noticeable just how much harder the raids have gotten over the years, so the ceiling for entry for casuals and pugs has only increased.

[shadowmatrix]

This is just like your opinion man.
A lot of good MMO's, like FFXIV, are primarily designed for solo play despite being an MMO.

While on one hand I completely disagree with them about MMOs being played solo, never use FFXIV as an argument that others are solo friendly. The MSQ forces players to group up which is why they are now expanding the trust system to cover some of that forced grouping.

[Lollis]

When has wow every really done much for casual/solo players? Aside from tossing some scraps here and there it's basically always been raid or die.

Never. Which begs the question: why do casual/solo people still fucking play it? Seriously, when was the last time that WoW truly had a solo experience? The Farmstead in MoP? Pet Battles?

WoW has ALWAYS been dungeon and raid focused. It's ALWAYS been group focused.

So many people whine on and on about lack of casual stuff in a game that has never really had casual stuff as its concern, what the fuck do you want? Will you people finally shut up if they add player housing? Or would that not be casual enough for you?

Do you want to be able to get loot and gear by playing WoW Peggle?
Do you want to complete storylines with a quick game of Gnomish Soilitaire?

You people talk about nothing for casual players, what do you want?

[Kallisto]

So? Legion introduced new races and classes too and didn't stop it from being a raider's expansion.

Legion a raider's expansion? The expansion where loot dropped pretty much anywhere and could forge to mythic levels a raiders expansion? If there's an expansion that's a raiders expansion it was WoD. Where you logged in to raid or just don't bother logging in cause there was fuck all else to do.

Hell pretty much every expansion prior was raid or die too.

[Relapses]

Actually I read you pretty clearly lets look at it again.



#1 it did not make them the most money
#2 it did not make them the most money from even just sub revenue because such a large portion of it was chinese subs they made almost no money on. Like seriously, look up how chinese subs worked in WoTLK(like literally 1 day subs and crap blizzard made tiny cuts on) and come back to the big boy discussion later.

Don't try to back track now and claim you didn't say this it's too late for that friend.

Yawn. More nonsense half-arguments to disprove something that isn't even controversial take. WotLK was peak WoW and a lot of that had to do with the accessibility that it garnered. It certainly wasn't the beginning of the end which is what the person who I quoted originally had suggested. I dislike fanfiction which suggests that if Blizzard had just kept the TBC model from now until the end of time WoW would have 97 billion subscribers and Bobby Kotick would be president of the universe.

[WowIsDead64]

I'm very disappointed with whole announcement. No single world about casual and solo players.
Imo Ion again will focus on raiders and make ppl quit fast.

Too hard to say now, because we haven't seen content itself. Recent xpacks had bad tendency. Lack of content and content overstretching via making it more hardcore. I call it "Good idea, but bad implementation". I really hope, that future merging with M$ causes them to change their stubborn "We'd better bury this game than make it casual" hardcore mentality. See? We finally have flying at release. Not 100% sure for now, because Blizzard can say "Your dragon is small and can't fly at release - level it for X months first", but it really looks like we WILL have flying at release. And it's big mentality shift towards casual game.

[rogoth]

Sub numbers = quality? I don't agree

the fact that WOTLK not only grew the playerbase to the highest number it ever reached, and was able to consistently hold it there over the entire lifespan of the expansion meant that the content of the expansion was good enough to not only hold player retention extremely highly, but also was good enough to entice new players to pick up the game in record numbers so that those who did want to leave because they didn't enjoy it were replaced by someone who did, so yes sub numbers does = quality based on this time frame, it's an immutable fact backed up by the numbers themselves, if the game wasn't a 'quality' product then how is it not only fondly remembered by 10's of millions of people, lauded as the greatest expansion in the history of this game franchise which next year will be old enough to vote, and is loved by the vast majority of the people who like myself played it at the time despite its shortcomings and flaws, which at the time were so minor and inconsequential that it was easy enough to look past them and see a great bigger picture.

[Video Games]

the fact that WOTLK not only grew the playerbase to the highest number it ever reached, and was able to consistently hold it there over the entire lifespan of the expansion meant that the content of the expansion was good enough to not only hold player retention extremely highly, but also was good enough to entice new players to pick up the game in record numbers so that those who did want to leave because they didn't enjoy it were replaced by someone who did, so yes sub numbers does = quality based on this time frame, it's an immutable fact backed up by the numbers themselves, if the game wasn't a 'quality' product then how is it not only fondly remembered by 10's of millions of people, lauded as the greatest expansion in the history of this game franchise which next year will be old enough to vote, and is loved by the vast majority of the people who like myself played it at the time despite its shortcomings and flaws, which at the time were so minor and inconsequential that it was easy enough to look past them and see a great bigger picture.

Avatar best movie ever made cause made the most at the box office, got it. And for the record, wrath was pretty stagnant all things considered. It barely grew at all

[rogoth]

Actually I read you pretty clearly lets look at it again.



#1 it did not make them the most money
#2 it did not make them the most money from even just sub revenue because such a large portion of it was chinese subs they made almost no money on. Like seriously, look up how chinese subs worked in WoTLK(like literally 1 day subs and crap blizzard made tiny cuts on) and come back to the big boy discussion later.

Don't try to back track now and claim you didn't say this it's too late for that friend.

i can't believe i'm gonna do this but i'm actually defending Relapses statement, for starters, 'China' as a region didn't get access to WOTLK content until a year after it was already launched in the 'west', furthermore, this notion that blizz didn't make record levels of revenue during the WOTLK era is laughable at best and just downright misinformation at worst, blizzard had so much extra cash they were literally falling over themselves to spend it, they couldn't spend it fast enough and were making so much money that every team was so well funded relative to the market average that it was seen as a severe outlier.

and lets just get something straight here, all the times the lying little cunt that is bobby kotick talks about 'record breaking years' in terms of profits, he never talks about that in terms of actual revenues, over the years the company has streamlined their processes so they have significantly less staff than they used to have in support roles, all of the character services that are available today that were around back then required some degree of human input and oversight, now they are 100% automated, the vast majority of costs incurred back then was staff wages related, today the majority of costs are associated with other things, and as such the company makes a much larger percentage of revenue as pure profit, if you fiddle the numbers well enough you can make anything look good from the right angle, and that's precisely what was and is being done at blizzard.

just on pure numbers alone lets take the 12 million total players as a static value, the number of people who actually purchased the expansion would have significantly higher due to the high player turnover at the time, lets assume for sake of arguement a rate of 5% purchasing the collectors edition of the expansion with the remaining 95% buying the standard edition, that equates to the following totals:

CE: 600,00 people purchased this edition at a cost of $70, that's $42 million on expansion box sales for this edition.

SE: the remaining playerbase of 11.4M players purchased this edition at a cost of $40, so that's $456 million in box sales for this edition.

subscription fee: was a static $15 per month and based on the consistent playerbase level that equates to $180 million per month, over the span of the expansion life cycle that equates to $5.2 Billion in subscription fees for the entire expansion

adding all of that up comes to approximately $5.7 Billion in revenue for just the duration of the WOTLK expansion life cycle assuming the static 12 million total playerbase, based on the last investor calls disclosing revenue for the ENTIRE ActivisionBlizzard corporation, they made as revenue in 2021 $8.8 Billion and in 2020 just over $8 Billion in revenue if it's assumed the turnover of players during the WOTLK expansion life cycle could have pushed the total revenue level up to $6 Billion, World of Warcraft ALONE during the WOTLK era made approximately 33% of what the entire corporation is capable of making in modern times, that's call of duty, candy crush, all blizzard titles combined.

if you can't see how utterly fucking stupid your statement is from these numbers being laid out for you, then i can't help you, but please, continue to tell me how blizzard didn't make quite literally the most money from a single IP in the history of the company during this time period to date, i'm curious to know what arguements you will use to disprove these readily available points of data.

[Unlimited Power]

This announcement talked nothing of either instanced PvE or PvP.

If anything this is one of the most casual friendly expansion announcements in recent times as everything announced can be enjoyed by all players alike.

[uuuhname]

I really don't understand this casually friendly = bad. it's pretty obvious to me things only went down hill when the devs decided borrowed power systems were somehow fun. and that is about as unfriendly to "casuals" as the game has ever gotten.

like in BfA if you were a WW monk and wanted to be viable in raiding... you had to do rated BG's. not skirmishes, not "casual" PVP but you need to spend hours each week doing fucking rated PVP where you have to win a certain amount JUST so you could perform better in PVE...

[cparle87]

Spicy hot take circa 2008. Catering to casuals in wrath was what made wow start being bad in the first place

Or did you forget vanilla became big in part because it was the casual alternative to things like UO and Runescape?

[Tech614]

snip

Thinking half of the player base even purchased the base game or gave blizzard $15 a month to play it was your first mistake. China didn't have to buy the game or xpac and only had short duration subs that mostly went to the chinese distributor and not Blizzard.

Your second mistake was making this post and trying to sound smart.

Again how does chinese numbers work, numbers go brrrrrrrrr.

Dude thinks WoTLK content being a year delayed in China meant they didn't include their player totals in the reports WoW still existed and player totals combine with it, it was only offline for June of 2009 as they transitioned to a different distributor in China. Holy shit I can't even with this post. Secondly record profits literally mean profits, that is revenue minus costs.

If you honestly think WoW made the most money in WoTLK well, let's just say that's not how the financials work. 12 million subs all paying full price nice kapp bro.