World first raid, good or bad?

[NerdAssassin]

Streaming viewership is basically irrelevant.

Heh. Pretty wild asspull in 2025. Have you actually been near any modern brand marketing for the past decade?

[Jastall]

Also probably underrated how this helps to attract devs. You're going to get people who want to design and work on cool shit!

ANyway I'm not worried about the resources at all lol. We just got a patch with a raid and a new dungeon plus a new season of delves (which they clearly put a lot of effort into) and now we're getting housing stuff. they have more resources committed to wow than ever.

Not just that, but more resources committed to non-raid content. Used to be that main content patches were a raid, sometimes a dungeon and mayyyyybe a zone if Blizzard was feeling generous once per expansion. We've had several expansions where raids get as much love as the rest in terms of content, rather than obviously being the stars of the show that get the lion's share of every patch's budget. It means we get fewer and smaller raids, but that is IMO an acceptable trade-off.

The marketing impact of the RWF very, very easily justifies it, and Mythic's, place for Blizzard. It's free real estate and all they have to do is design overly hard bosses that they promptly nerf to shit when other guilds get to it. Compared to the investment in actually making the art assets and design work for the raid itself, that's peanuts.

[NineSpine]

Heh. Pretty wild asspull in 2025. Have you actually been near any modern brand marketing for the past decade?

If you think anyone is tuning in to the RWF that isn’t already part of the wow customer base, you should return your PhD in marketing.

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Not just that, but more resources committed to non-raid content. Used to be that main content patches were a raid, sometimes a dungeon and mayyyyybe a zone if Blizzard was feeling generous once per expansion. We've had several expansions where raids get as much love as the rest in terms of content, rather than obviously being the stars of the show that get the lion's share of every patch's budget. It means we get fewer and smaller raids, but that is IMO an acceptable trade-off.

The marketing impact of the RWF very, very easily justifies it, and Mythic's, place for Blizzard. It's free real estate and all they have to do is design overly hard bosses that they promptly nerf to shit when other guilds get to it. Compared to the investment in actually making the art assets and design work for the raid itself, that's peanuts.

It used to be that expansions came with significantly more content up front. All they did was stagger the availability by making it part of patches. It’s not more content.

[schwank05]

How much dev time is being invested purely into the RWF, and what's the cutoff point for how much dev time is okay to invest for what proportion of players?

Surely you're not suggesting they only work on the things at least >50% engage with and ignore everything else. So what's the % where you say "those people don't get dev time", and how did you arrive at that number?

It's easy to just make wild claims about how "the devs" invest so much time into "0.01%" but do you have actual numbers on the actual state of things, or are you just ranting that there's people who get something that you aren't getting, irrespective of how much it really is and how much you're really missing out on?

WoW has a massive player base that's incredibly diverse. There's tons of things devs work on that only really ever directly affect or engage with small parts of the player base. But that's what being diverse means - it means you DON'T only care about the majority and leave everyone else hanging. Everyone gets a little bit. Even the small groups. And it's all, at its core, a zero-sum game.

I myself will never forgive the Pet Battle players for robbing me of content by eating MY PERSONAL DEV TIME. How dare they.

And See I loved everything about Pet Battles in MOP and collecting all the Pets, farmed the Minfernal for Months. It was the fastest way to level with the Safari hat for a while and anything to reduce leveling is a huge + in my book. But then again I am not a Retail Player I have not touched Retail since I killed the last boss of Dragonflight on Normal once like a year ago. I am stoked for MOP, Best version of Disc Priest ever, best Version of Monk ever. Most classes are viable and feel good in general.

[Caprias]

If you think anyone is tuning in to the RWF that isn’t already part of the wow customer base, you should return your PhD in marketing.

You're either crazy naive or just that stuck up on your classic andy agenda.

People check out random categories on twitch out of boredom like others swap channels on tv, and being at the top get's you more chances to be seen.

[NerdAssassin]

If you think anyone is tuning in to the RWF that isn’t already part of the wow customer base, you should return your PhD in marketing.

Even lowballing it. the positive marketing effects of Twitch streaming, even for already established franchises end up somewhere around +15%. Which marketing department wouldn't take that deal, for the measly price of couple of overtime hours of dev time fixing bugs?

You sound like a a know-it-all in your post history, but clearly you've not been paying attention in the past decade.

[azshanna]

I dont watch splits or early hours of progress on each boss. the rest is fun for me because liquid stream is fun. Kinda hate echo going dark the moment they are only one step ahead, and they are boring to watch.

[NineSpine]

Even lowballing it. the positive marketing effects of Twitch streaming, even for already established franchises end up somewhere around +15%. Which marketing department wouldn't take that deal, for the measly price of couple of overtime hours of dev time fixing bugs?

You sound like a a know-it-all in your post history, but clearly you've not been paying attention in the past decade.

"Positive marketing effects" is not a metric, let alone a metric you can apply a percentage to. ROI is a metric. CTR is a metric. CPC is a metric. CAC is a metric. RAOS is a metric. "Positive marketing effects" is not anything, and it's definitely not something you can apply a percentage to. How is that percentage even derived? Do you get 15% just from "Twitch streaming" as a concept? It doesn't matter who is streaming or how many viewers? Twitch exists so this concept of "positive marketing effects" goes up 15%, whatever the hell that means?

Let me instruct you on an actual marketing concept: Over-targeting. This is when you are wasting resources advertising to people who have already decided to use or not use your product, rendering the spending completely wasteful. Any resources spent on people who are interested in the RWF race is over-targeting. The people who are watching a RWF stream are already invested in WoW. Not only that, but it is the segment that is going to be MOST invested in WoW.

The main benefit of getting your product on Twitch streams is to get people playing it on channels that expose it to new people, such as Tyler1 playing classic hardcore. Do you think the audience of Maximum is not already deeply familiar with WoW? Do you think people are logging into Twitch, seeing their favorite streamer Maximum, and saying "Oh, what is this new game Max is playing? It's called World of Warcraft?"

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You're either crazy naive or just that stuck up on your classic andy agenda.

People check out random categories on twitch out of boredom like others swap channels on tv, and being at the top get's you more chances to be seen.

I don't know what this has to do with Classic. Classic kills retail in Twitch streaming numbers during any time that isn't an RWF. I've seen times where the top 10-15 WoW streamers were all playing Classic.

Have you watched a RWF stream? It's completely arcane nonsense if you aren't already familiar with the game. The people watching it are already the most dedicated WoW players. It's like thinking you are going to get new Marvel fans out of the audience that is already attending the Marvel presentation at comiccon.

[NerdAssassin]

such as Tyler1 playing classic hardcore

OnlyFangs was another fantastic marketing opportunity for Blizzard for effectively zero effort. They only had to spend relatively small amount of dev time making hardcore.
So you understand the concept. Shouldn't be that hard to connect the dots.

But I guess you just hate retail that much. Sad.

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just that stuck up on your classic andy agenda.

I think that was pretty firmly spot on analysis

[NineSpine]

OnlyFangs was another fantastic marketing opportunity for Blizzard for effectively zero effort. They only had to spend relatively small amount of dev time making hardcore.
So you understand the concept. Shouldn't be that hard to connect the dots.

But I guess you just hate retail that much. Sad.

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I think that was pretty firmly spot on analysis

The concept is more complicated than made-up "positive marketing effects" metrics, which I went to great pains to explain, but you ignored my point so I'm not going to bother repeating myself.

[NerdAssassin]

The concept is more complicated than made-up "positive marketing effects" metrics, which I went to great pains to explain, but you ignored my point so I'm not going to bother repeating myself.

To be honest, I didn't ignore it. I laughed at it quite a bit.

[THEORACLE64]

I've never cared for them either. It was always a nice community thing if a guild got the "first" kill, but the whole event style thing they have towards them is so OTT - getting the "first" kill quite literally means nothing bar that.

[NineSpine]

To be honest, I didn't ignore it. I laughed at it quite a bit.

You referred to 15% of "positive marketing effects", not due to a certain amount of viewership, but rather the broad concept of "Twitch streaming". You are in no position to be condescending. Why don't you embarrass me and explain this magical metric and how the percentage for it is derived?

[Osmeric]

You referred to 15% of "positive marketing effects", not due to a certain amount of viewership, but rather the broad concept of "Twitch streaming". You are in no position to be condescending. Why don't you embarrass me and explain this magical metric and how the percentage for it is derived?

It's a product of his magnificent oracular posterior.

[Soon-TM]

It's a product of his magnificent oracular posterior.

I must admit I laughed a bit louder than I should ... I'm at work, and this has been a very slow day.

More OT, the RWF thing is almost unintelligible to me. There is so much visual noise going on that no one is going to even understand WTF is going on, unless they are (or have been) mythic raiders themselves, which kind of defeats the point of the oh-so-vaunted free publicity. I prefer to watch streams of CS, Dota 2 or even chess, i.e. games with a high skill ceiling but that don't drown you in visual diarrhea and where you are not beholden to 48274817491 addons to even start making sense of what's happening.

[NerdAssassin]

You referred to 15% of "positive marketing effects", not due to a certain amount of viewership, but rather the broad concept of "Twitch streaming". You are in no position to be condescending. Why don't you embarrass me and explain this magical metric and how the percentage for it is derived?

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/a...urnalCode=mksc

[NineSpine]

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/a...urnalCode=mksc

You really should have read that before posting it:

We find that the number of people watching a game in live streams increases the concurrent number of people playing it with an elasticity of 0.027, a moderate effect that dissipates within a few hours.

0.27 is really bad. Having an elasticity of less than 1 means that the action doesn't have much impact on demand at all. Not only that, but this effect dissipates quickly according to this article.

Investigating the mechanisms behind live streaming effects, we find evidence that live streams make consumers aware of games by lesser-known publishers and reveal the quality and match value of games to consumers.

Blizzard is not a lesser known publisher.

Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that, despite the general excitement about live stream promotions in this industry, only about one sixth of all games profit from sponsored live streams

Not only did this not contain a single word about your nebulous "positive marketing effects", not only did it not contain your precise 15% number, but this entire article is downplaying the marketing value of Twitch streaming, indicating that it only helps 1/6 games at all.