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

[Relapses]

Can discuss it all you want the fact remains WotLK only brought in 1M at best new ir returning players, while Vanilla and TBC brought in a combined 11.5M. It was definitely popular due to accessibility, one of the most casual expa signs to date, and Arthas, which WC3 was most of Warcrafts fans first Warcraft game up until WoW.

But WoW plateaued in WotLK.

If two million people left and two million new players joined in the same quarter, the subscriber graph would stay steady. That is definitely not a "plateau" which is why looking at subscriber numbers and deriving any kind of conclusion is faulty. We simply have no idea how these numbers were derived without knowing either how many players the game lost or how many new players the game gained.

Moreover, two years of roughly the same subscription numbers is a pretty good indication of market saturation. You see this same phenomena in other subscription services like cable television where certain providers will simply stop marketing in areas once they've reached the theoretical maximum number of subscribers.

[dryla1]

Putting my progress in your hands and your progress in my hands is bad game in modern WoW.

It is bad in any game, unless you only play with friends or at least with people that have zero toxicity.
I have found this even when playing games that have zero loot or progression to lose and still there are extremely toxic individuals.
This exact issue is making multiplayer games worse than ever, and making people run away from them.

[VMSmith]

I'm part of that 5% and I agree that catering to us is the worst idea ever, but I really didn't get that feeling from the reveal that they were going that route fwiw.

Honestly, based on the reveal I don't think that anyone could conclude that they're catering to anyone, the details were so incredibly sparse.

What did they really announce?

A new race/class. Well, that's just a thing that anyone might like or dislike. It's neither hardcore nor casual, everyone has a race and a class.

Dragonriding. Again, just a thing that you may enjoy or not. It's not anything that helps with progression or story or anything other than its own minigame that you can participate in or not. It doesn't even carry over past the expansion so it's not like it even provides cosmetics for casual players to enjoy in the future.

Other than those two things we're getting the typical new zones/dungeons/raids that every expansion has.

Really, it seems like the big selling point of the expansion at this time is the QoL changes to professions, talents, and the UI. And those are all patch-worthy items, not expansion "features".

This entire expansion reveal was, IMO, a big nothing-burger, but especially hardly a sign of catering to any particular demographic. Testing in the coming months will show where their priorities lie via reward structures and actual repeatable content.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Nah more ESO/GW2 tbh.

Horizontal progression is lightyears ahead of the competitive nonsense that's WoW.

Even FF14 has vertical progression but it's not so strict on how to obtain gear.

WoW is basically that guy who never wants to accept that 2009 was over 10 years ago and the party has to stop.

But hey if you want to be cruel to people and show you're better than by all means enjoy the pixels.

You can just play those games. Why does every game need to be the same?

I like to play ESO and GW2 casually sometimes. I just treat them differently and that's fine.

[Unholyground]

After six years of Ion as the game director, I don't think it should be any surprise that Ion is going to Ion. WoW won't change until he is replaced.

If any part of you thinks he has final say without board intervention you are silly.

[dryla1]

Stuff like r.io already helps a lot to separate the chaff from the wheat. That's actually the entire reason it became a thing during Legion, so if bad players ever make their way into your groups it's purely and exclusively your fault.

How so? is it not possible to get a good rio paying for it despite being a bad player?
So if you happen to meet one of these players in your group how is that your fault?

[Triginhil]

to anyone complaining that this game doesnt cater to casual players. i present to you, a casual player....myself

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ch...eras/triginhil

so quit complaining and get playing

[DeltrusDisc]

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.

Not true at all.

Raiding was mostly for the top % in the Vanilla and TBC days and people like me who couldn't raid? Still loved the game. I had some reverence for raiders back then because I couldn't get what they could and I was fascinated and curious. I wanted to see what they saw. I thought the Amani War Bear was awesome, the occasional Phoenix? Holy shit.

Making a few things truly rare is GOOD for the game.

When everyone can access literally everything, it's kinda dull and loses the special factor. Meh.

[Soon-TM]

How so? is it not possible to get a good rio paying for it despite being a bad player?
So if you happen to meet one of these players in your group how is that your fault?

Boosts buyers are very easy to identify. Hopefully I don't need to explain you how.

[dryla1]

Boosts buyers are very easy to identify. Hopefully I don't need to explain you how.

i do not have the slightest idea of how do you identify them, i am sure you are right and it is very easy but i do not know how.

[Kagthul]

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.

Uh.. kiddo? Wrath China launched in 2010… TWO YEARS after Wrath released, almost. Those sub numbers that get quoted? They dont count the Chinese market, because the game wasnt even active in China at the time

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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.

Not how you think, either.

Dude thinks WoTLK content being a year delayed in China

... a year? It was delayed until less than 3 months before Cata launched.

meant they didn't include their player totals in the reports WoW still existed and player totals combine with it,

They didn't. You can go back and look at the financials. Theyre public. The profit and numbers from China are listed under a "foreign markets" heading - which Blizz reserved for markets where it worked through intermediaries.

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.

What were their giant costs again? ... dont worry, well wait.

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.

You uh.... are aware that as a publicly traded company, their financials are available? His numbers are almost dead on. The Chinese "subs" were categorized under a different category back then ("foreign markets"). They were not included in the sub numbers that were commonly shown.

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Anyway, wrath sucked because 2 of its 4 tiers were awful, had a 13 month content drought at the end, had bad features and was too casualized. Nowhere near as bad as mop, but still

About 12 million people disagreed with you. Also... i love that content drought complaint. TBCs was all of 3 1/2 weeks shorter. You seem to have this problem with confusing your opinion for anything resembling facts or consensus Anecdotal bullshit is still bullshit.

The market saturation with garbage like aion and warhammer? Did they even last a month before being completely abandoned by bandwaggoners?

That isnt what market saturation means, you dolt.

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Raiding is WoW's bread & butter. Without raiding, I don't think WoW would still be a thing. Just saying, 'cause it appears you are complaining about WoW focusing on raiding.

It has literally never been WoW's bread and butter. Not once, in the entire history of the game. Pre-LFR, no more than 14% of players EVER saw endgame raids (and that was in LK). Even post-LFR, is still hovers below 50%, and i'd hardly call LFR actually raiding. People who do Normal+ is still low double digits (sub 20%).

Same with rated PvP. Single digit percentages since literally forever. I think the highest it got was about 11% in MoP... because PvE required it. IIRC.

Casual PvP is the most participated in single activity in the entire game and has been since day 1. Its the only activity other than finishing the zones/quests that has ever breached 50% of the playerbase.

Otherwise, I'm not sure what you statement has to do with anything. It doesn't have to be a zero sum gain. Not sure why you folks always have to argue for that. Stop trying to destroy what makes the game fun for others, that won't increase the fun you have in the game. Instead, try to focus on arguing on adding parts to the game that would be fun for you. Wouldn't it be crazy if WoW could be made in such a way that both raiders & solo players could enjoy playing?

It can be and got pretty close during Legion. You could (eventually) as a complete casual, hit Heroic-Raid iLevel. Hardcore raiders and PvPers would always have that last bit of advantage, but casuals could also do just fine. There were still some problems (casual PvP was an absolute shitshow, the Template system was a complete farce), but the game was rewarding to both casuals and hardcores (Warlords was actually pretty close here too, but the skipped raid tier kinda screwed that up).

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it was NOT.

subs grew like a weed in vanilla and BC. sub growth went flat in wrath. then in cata it began its descent.

So... by your own words, Wrath was the most successful expansion Blizzard ever released. Most subs, with no substantive drops.

Wrath was where WoW started to go wrong and started bleeding subs, there were just enough new players coming in to keep it from tanking outright.

Facts not in evidence. Got a source for that ASSertion? Im guessing no.

Wrath had all the core problems and was a very damaging expansion.

lolwhut. "All the core problems" - doesn't say what any of those things are, or why the game retained a rediculously high sub rate if it was so bad, but... you know, he knows.

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You completely fail to understand what happened. Blizz outright attacked the in-game community in late BC and tried to destroy it. They annihilated the LFG channel. They added dungeon finder in Wrath for cross realm grouping where no-one talked. Without personal relationships in the game, it started bleeding subs. They have NEVER fixed this damage, allowing sub counts to bleed all the way down until the game is a shell of itself.

Youve got causes and effects ALL screwed up. Remember that LFG didn't come into Wrath until the Icecrown patch. It was put in BECAUSE subs were starting to stall and people were leaving and the feedback showed it was because they couldn't find groups.

Now, you can debate wether the fix (Cross-realm LFG) was good (i happen to think it wasn't; the LFG tool was fine, it should just have been confined to your server), but the REASON it existed was exactly backwards to what youre claiming.

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Oh, I thought you were implying there were some actual data about sub numbers. Most seem to just pull info out of the armory, warcraftlogs or raider.io these days to try to argue it's valid.

The Armory is valid as far as characters are concerned, just not total players because you dont know which toons belong to which accounts. But its fairly good for figuring out which % of the population does what activities since if they do an activity on one toon, they tend to do it on all toons.

[Revamp Man]

I'm part of that 5% and I agree that catering to us is the worst idea ever, but I really didn't get that feeling from the reveal that they were going that route fwiw.

no no no dont you get it

making craftable gear equal to mythic raids is totally catering to the 5%

[Kagthul]

You think Wrath classic is going to be bigger than Wrath itself was? How delusional is that?

More popular and culturaly relevant does not mean "bigger".

[Hibiki]

So many ppl don't understand simple thing : solo activities should be rewarding SAME ilvl as M+15 or mythic raid. Gear progression can be slower, but same ilvl.
Casuals need proper, very hard solo challenges like mage tower / horrific visions / thorgast with top tier rewards. Not cosmetic, just best ilvl gear and tier sets. Even M+ and raids can have solo mode. This will give casuals freedom from toxicity and freedom of using time.

[Segus1992]

More popular and culturaly relevant does not mean "bigger".

Eh? Do you English? What else could I possibly mean by "bigger"?

[chiddie]

to anyone complaining that this game doesnt cater to casual players. i present to you, a casual player....myself

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ch...eras/triginhil

so quit complaining and get playing

I’m not sure I understood what you’re trying to demonstrate with the armory link.

This is me (well, the actual me): https://worldofwarcraft.com/it-it/ch...zenedar/amadir .

So?

[Adamas102]

If two million people left and two million new players joined in the same quarter, the subscriber graph would stay steady. That is definitely not a "plateau".

That's... exactly what a "plateau" is. It doesn't matter WHY the graph remained steady, the term simply describes the visual that you get when line doesn't move up or down (in this case, because subs in began to closely matched subs out).

[Relapses]

That's... exactly what a "plateau" is. It doesn't matter WHY the graph remained steady, the term simply describes the visual that you get when line doesn't move up or down (in this case, because subs in began to closely matched subs out).

It isn't a plateau in the sense that growth suddenly stopped in WotLK as multiple people in this thread have incorrectly stated (including the guy I quoted).

[Kumorii]

It isn't a plateau in the sense that growth suddenly stopped in WotLK as multiple people in this thread have incorrectly stated (including the guy I quoted).

How is that considered growth?
Growth is that you gain more players than you lose. 2m+- is stagnant. Confused tbh.

[Razaron]

In terms of difficulty, I believe heroic raiding is hard enough to justify having the highest ilvl. Mythic raiding, apart from over gearing the first few bosses later in a patch, it is extremely challenging. It’s very hard to get in to mythic raiding because of the difficulty, as a player I like to try and improve my character to the best it can possibly be and mythic raiding is not realistic. My only real option is weekly chests by doing m+ and trying to get specific gear from the chest is horrendous, but because the ilvl is at a mythic level, it just makes even heroic raiding redundant for upgrades.

What I would do,

Gear should only progress from Normal to Heroic. Heroic should be the highest possible gear you can attain, in wow many years ago there was something satisfying from attaining some sense of BiS, it took weeks and months but it was doable. These days for the majority it’s just a dream.

Mythic raiding can still exist but it should be cosmetic rewards.