WoW Lost 300k Subscribers, Patch 4.3 this year, Blizzcon 2011 Tickets, Blue Posts

[Warrax]

I do wonder what's going to be in 4.3 though =O!

Probably just Deathwing raid dungeon and Abyssal Maw 5man dungeon. Then next it's gonna be 5.0 with the new expansion.

[Deleted]

Once Activison took over, WoW was no longer driven by creativity, rather it was purely profit based. I realized the overall goal of any company is to make money, but Activision has sacrificed a lot of what made WoW enjoyable in the name of lowering the operating costs. All the major changes in the game over the last 3 years are built around the concept of providing content as cheaply as possible. Class homogenization means reducing the need to hire developers to balance 9 completely unique classes. Achievements are essentially a free way to create a reason for players to keep subs active so they can grind things already in the game for the reward of seeing a little box pop up. Recycling old content is a great way to keep players busy for very low cost. Selling mounts and pets in the store for real money (something Blizzard said they would never do before their merger), another easy way to make fast money. The real money based AH in D3 is really sickening, no question at all that their next MMO will have that as well. Absolutely blatant money grab. I loved Blizzard as a company, but I no longer want to support them because of their affiliation with Activision. Im glad WoW is losing subs and I hope it continues. Activision's greed should not be rewarded.

This is stupid on so many levels.

Exactly where have you learned that Activision now "Rules over Blizzard", what I know Activision have no power over Blizzard at all. It's still the same team at blizzard doing the same thing, they know that the game is going to die however and of course as any company would do is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. There is a reason why they're developing a new MMO.

Also the Real Money AH in D3 is a good addition, it would happen anyways so why not have it through Blizzard? You don't have to do it if you don't want to.

When did Blizzard say they would never sell pets/mounts in the store for real money? I'm only sure they've said that they were never gonna sell items that would affect your gameplay, for example armors/Weapons etc etc.

Activision Blizzard was a merge of two companies, just as much as Squaresoft and Square-enix. One of the companies doesn't "buy and take over" the other one. You should learn this before speaking.

Also, how are blizzard recycling new content except ZA/ZG (Which they remade in quite a funny way imo). Cataclysm is the best of the expansions imo, and it's clear that they put more time and effort into it than they did TBC/WOTLK. Much more creativity and variation were added, the COMPLETE remaking of most of the zones (not all ofc) are amazing. Saying anything else would make you a sad individual.


About Cataclysm "Being to hard", if you can't beat the normal raid content after a 25-35% nerf and have been given more gear than the raiders who did it before the nerf...I've got some sad news for the people who's whined about it on this board. Stop playing games.

WOTLK Sucked at so many levels, all the content was far to easy and provided few gamers with a real challenge and insisted on giving free loot instead. I'm not sure what goes on in the head of the people who whines, but what satisfaction do you get out of overcoming a truly easy encounter?

Now, I rarely write on this forum (even had to retrieve my password) 'cause I see no point in arguing mostly. But the way people think and argue here disgusts me, I really had to reply.

PS: MMO's are purely made for challenging/farming content, and some lore. If you want casual then go play casual games.

[Sanctioned]

This is stupid on so many levels.

Exactly where have you learned that Activision now "Rules over Blizzard", what I know Activision have no power over Blizzard at all. It's still the same team at blizzard doing the same thing, they know that the game is going to die however and of course as any company would do is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. There is a reason why they're developing a new MMO.

Also the Real Money AH in D3 is a good addition, it would happen anyways so why not have it through Blizzard? You don't have to do it if you don't want to.

When did Blizzard say they would never sell pets/mounts in the store for real money? I'm only sure they've said that they were never gonna sell items that would affect your gameplay, for example armors/Weapons etc etc.

Activision Blizzard was a merge of two companies, just as much as Squaresoft and Square-enix. One of the companies doesn't "buy and take over" the other one. You should learn this before speaking.

Also, how are blizzard recycling new content except ZA/ZG (Which they remade in quite a funny way imo). Cataclysm is the best of the expansions imo, and it's clear that they put more time and effort into it than they did TBC/WOTLK. Much more creativity and variation were added, the COMPLETE remaking of most of the zones (not all ofc) are amazing. Saying anything else would make you a sad individual.


About Cataclysm "Being to hard", if you can't beat the normal raid content after a 25-35% nerf and have been given more gear than the raiders who did it before the nerf...I've got some sad news for the people who's whined about it on this board. Stop playing games.

WOTLK Sucked at so many levels, all the content was far to easy and provided few gamers with a real challenge and insisted on giving free loot instead. I'm not sure what goes on in the head of the people who whines, but what satisfaction do you get out of overcoming a truly easy encounter?

Now, I rarely write on this forum (even had to retrieve my password) 'cause I see no point in arguing mostly. But the way people think and argue here disgusts me, I really had to reply.

PS: MMO's are purely made for challenging/farming content, and some lore. If you want casual then go play casual games.

Right there, you should learn before speaking. Since Activision is technically in charge because they own Blizzard now. Which in the end means Activision is calling the deadlines that Blizzard has to meet. While Blizzard still might have complete creativity control over their game but with the strict deadlines that Activision puts out you can't honestly sit there and say that won't effect the game at all. It's a major trend with Activision games and it doesn't look like they'll stop because people will just flock to the next major title they push out that's unfinished.

[Deleted]

This is stupid on so many levels.

Exactly where have you learned that Activision now "Rules over Blizzard", what I know Activision have no power over Blizzard at all. It's still the same team at blizzard doing the same thing, they know that the game is going to die however and of course as any company would do is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. There is a reason why they're developing a new MMO.

Also the Real Money AH in D3 is a good addition, it would happen anyways so why not have it through Blizzard? You don't have to do it if you don't want to.

When did Blizzard say they would never sell pets/mounts in the store for real money? I'm only sure they've said that they were never gonna sell items that would affect your gameplay, for example armors/Weapons etc etc.

Activision Blizzard was a merge of two companies, just as much as Squaresoft and Square-enix. One of the companies doesn't "buy and take over" the other one. You should learn this before speaking.

Also, how are blizzard recycling new content except ZA/ZG (Which they remade in quite a funny way imo). Cataclysm is the best of the expansions imo, and it's clear that they put more time and effort into it than they did TBC/WOTLK. Much more creativity and variation were added, the COMPLETE remaking of most of the zones (not all ofc) are amazing. Saying anything else would make you a sad individual.


About Cataclysm "Being to hard", if you can't beat the normal raid content after a 25-35% nerf and have been given more gear than the raiders who did it before the nerf...I've got some sad news for the people who's whined about it on this board. Stop playing games.

WOTLK Sucked at so many levels, all the content was far to easy and provided few gamers with a real challenge and insisted on giving free loot instead. I'm not sure what goes on in the head of the people who whines, but what satisfaction do you get out of overcoming a truly easy encounter?

Now, I rarely write on this forum (even had to retrieve my password) 'cause I see no point in arguing mostly. But the way people think and argue here disgusts me, I really had to reply.

PS: MMO's are purely made for challenging/farming content, and some lore. If you want casual then go play casual games.

The only think that i could say to you is that casuals are the 90% of the wow community seeing the progression on firelands only 750k raiders have downed at least 1 boss in firelands. Well thats the point casual are casual and because more and more casual ppl are stoping playing this game you're gonna see more and more firelands raids because less money=less effort to put in the game. I would like to bring up Tbc raids sedule when actually epic items was epic items and was require time to get those items.Then we didnt know what the F@$ was casual all ppl were raiding not like now show your achiev to see who you are.

[Deleted]

As one of the 300,000, it was pretty simple for me:

The content ins't worth the the subscription cost.

I actually came BACK for 4.2 after having been away for 4 months. Let's just say the only department doing their job is marketing, because Firelands sounded like it was going to be awesome. Unfortunately it only took a few weeks to discover it was all malarky and just more daily quest grinding for sub-par rewards, re-hashed dungeons that destroy cross-server pugs, and a 7 boss raid with way too much trash and no interesting new boss mechanics.

What the "F" are you talking about??? Ragnaros got legs for the last 30% or so, of his fight in heroic mode!!! And you have to do more dailes to meet him!!! That's what "innovative" means!!!!! You are just not thinking outside of the box, my dear... stranger-on-the-internet!

[Azuri]

Dear Blizzard, if you want to keep me and my guild playing, just keep releasing awesomeness like 4.2. Thanks. That is all.

Lol, not sure if serious?

[Deleted]

Right there, you should learn before speaking. Since Activision is technically in charge because they own Blizzard now. Which in the end means Activision is calling the deadlines that Blizzard has to meet. While Blizzard still might have complete creativity control over their game but with the strict deadlines that Activision puts out you can't honestly sit there and say that won't effect the game at all. It's a major trend with Activision games and it doesn't look like they'll stop because people will just flock to the next major title they push out that's unfinished.

Activision does NOT own Blizzard.

Vivendi games still owns blizzard and Activision merged (or rather, was bought by Vivendi games if I'm not COMPLETELY wrong?) with Vivendi games. It's still the same shit, Activision don't go in and say "NEXT EXPANSION SHALL BE FINISHED THEN!". Even if they had the power to do so, they wouldn't dare. Because Kotick and the rest over at Activision knows shit about PC gaming (Which they are aware of) and wouldn't dare interefere because they'd lose huge amounts of money of they fucked it up.

[Kaeleena]

Activision does NOT own Blizzard.

Vivendi games still owns blizzard and Activision merged (or rather, was bought by Vivendi games if I'm not COMPLETELY wrong?) with Vivendi games. It's still the same shit, Activision don't go in and say "NEXT EXPANSION SHALL BE FINISHED THEN!". Even if they had the power to do so, they wouldn't dare. Because Kotick and the rest over at Activision knows shit about PC gaming (Which they are aware of) and wouldn't dare interefere because they'd lose huge amounts of money of they fucked it up.

Blizzard and Activision didn't merge. Vivendi and Activision merged. Vivendi put Robert Kotick in charge of Activision Blizzard. Kotick was in charge of Activision prior to the merger. Blizzard Entertainment is a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. They are owned by Activision Blizzard. If Activision Blizzard goes out of business, Blizzard Entertainment will go out of business. They didn't install Mike Morhaime as CEO of Activision Blizzard. Robert Kotick is Mike Morhaime's boss. Blizz is a subsiary of Activision Blizzard. Vivendi doesn't exist as an independent company anymore. L2 understand the difference between an indepedent business and a subsidiary, plz and ty.

[Psii]

Bobby Kotick wouldn't dare interefere because they'd lose huge amounts of money of they fucked it up.

And yet, here we are, 6 months passed and they've lost 900k subscribers.
I wonder if someone is meddling a little too much.

[Deleted]

patch 4.3 i wont get to play 3-4 new Battlegrounds/arenas and I bet there wont be an option to learn triple specialization.

[Deleted]

And yet, here we are, 6 months passed and they've lost 900k subscribers.
I wonder if someone is meddling a little too much.

Because they haven't lost that many before, they've also got alot of old ones back. This has all happened before and the same speculations (except then Kotick wasn't involved anywhere near Blizzard) was though up.

World of Warcraft IS NOT dying yet, not until Blizzard decides that it needs to die. World of warcraft would die if they lost 6-8 million players.

[Acerus]

i remember the good old days when trade discrict was overcrowded D:

[Lazertrooper]

I like how you people hate wow SO much, but you're still checking up on it often enough to comment within 24 hours of this news.

Oh we don't hate it, trust me. Most people on here have spent a significant amount of time in the game, there's no hate. There's only disappointment in how the game/class balance/community has gone.

[Zechs-cenarius]

I like how you people hate wow SO much, but you're still checking up on it often enough to comment within 24 hours of this news.

Simmer down there fanboi...people are voicing their opinions here and merely discussing the future state of the game and how it came to this.

As far as all this is concerned...screw it all. Cata is by far the worst flaming pile of shit I had to endure for the sake of family and friends. Im I guess semi hardcore. I raid on set times but no true hard push on progression. The current state of the game disgusts me. Between all the idiotic balancing that gets reverted back and forth and the idiotic Ghostcrawler comments Im jumping ship once a new game comes out and my little friends and family core swaps over. YAWN ZA/ZG FTL GG. SWTOR and Guildwars2 cant come soon enough.

[bbr]

http://media.mmo-champion.com/images...1436_small.jpg i love it. Absolutely amazing. If anyone knows this guy's artist page, please send me a PM.

[ewhenn]

World of Warcraft IS NOT dying yet, not until Blizzard decides that it needs to die. World of warcraft would die if they lost 6-8 million players.

You know what they say about snowballs rolling down a hill? Once it gets started it's hard to stop.

You have to remember, 600k was lost in Q1, 300k Q2...which means that it will be less and less each quarter - assume 1/2 each time:

150k Q3
75k Q4

All in all, you will have a million subscribers lost through gripes and rage quitting. However, new accounts are opening - and guess what - more will open once the next release comes out. Blizzard really has nothing to worry about...

Not sure if serious.

You can't just keep dividing by 2 to predict losses.

I'd imagine it will be even more in Q3, I wouldn't be surprised if they lost another 300K+ subs. Reasons:
-They lost 300K subs in Q2, without any real game competition. Later this year big titles like BF3, etc. will be coming out.

-They increased the number of trials, and new subs from trials, but they STILL had a NET loss of 300K subs. This is really telling, this means they lost people who were "vested" in their product, already being customers. Yeah, they attracted new ones, but they are generally less "devoted" to the game. Lots of people pick up a game, and play it for a couple months then shelve it. When you lose lots of your bread and butter customer who have been with you for years, that really hurts.

-As above, it's like a snowball. Once lots of established long term people start leaving, now the friends of these people have less of a reason to play, guilds break up, etc. This causes those people effected to quit, which effects the friends of those people.... and so on.

-The game is stale and they have no direction with it. Content is getting released slower than ever. MMOs need fresh content to persist, it's a HUGE part of the "ever changing world" experience people expect. That's why subs pay you $15 a month... to run the servers, and make content. On top of that, the content hasn't been very good either, lots of rehashed mechanics, etc.

-It's not the Summer Quarter results. WoW tends to lose players in the summer. Q2 is actually the spring Quarter. Q3 (July, August, September) is the summer quarter. However, because of the issues above (primarily content, and people friends leaving/more and more guilds perm. disbanding) I'd wager they won't get as many of these subs back as in the past. Yeah, when I'd quit for a couple months in the summer I'd come back to my guild and keep going. Now with more and more guilds disbanding forever, people don't have a reason to come back. If I were to come back now, I'd have to start all over, etc. It's just not worth it to me to do that, so when I think about coming back instead of thinking, "Cool I'll get to talk do some stuff Jay and Steve again", I think, "Shit my friends list has nobody on and my guild is empty, screw it, not going to bother". I think you'll see a lot more of this.

[Leodegrance]

WHATS THAT? THERE ISN'T A DUNGEON SET? Gee imagine that. They could put in a dungeon set for people like me to work for. instead they give us hand me down raider gear with half the set locked away behind raid end bosses.

This is what I could never understand.

Why the hell Blizzard removed the dungeon sets after TBC.

That was a nice goal and good enough for me as a player to go after since I never did raids.One set for normal 5-man dungeons and another for the heroic 5-mans.

I am one of the ones who quit back in February and have not looked back since.

I do not hate the game,in fact I loved it,but after so many years of playing(since right before TBC) the game got stale and really nothing they added was able to bring back that joy I had playing and it was time to move on to newer pastures.

I like checking in now and again to see if anything is going on that could spark my interest in the game again.Unfortunately nothing has yet.

[Felaful]

Or Ranikotar it was people that are just bored of the content/pace of the game. That and the high initial cost to start playing and be able to do everything right now is over $100 so new subscribers are very wary of joining. All things die in time and it's not like WoW's really all that dead. 300k/12mil = 2%. Not much of a real loss. Other MMO's would kill to have half the subscribers that WoW has.

Uhm... It's been 900k/12M, not 300k. It was just 300k this quarter, 600k last quarter. Thats almost 10% not very good when they were so proud of their 12M players. That's what happens when you let someone like Ghostcrawler take control of the game. That's what happens when you've only got 3 people working at Blizzard Headquarters at a time, especially when one is a CM and the other two are artists.

Trust me, I have plenty of friends inside that building, and it's not the Disney World ride everyone thinks it is. It's very quickly falling apart.

10% of their player base in less than half a year is not good. And the majority of those people are either going RIFT or Runescape. Yeah, Runescape...

[arphir]

It's really quite easy to understand why this game has lost almost a million subscribers. It boils down to two factors:

1. There's very little to do in the game these days unless you schedule a large amount of time every week to play with your guild or friends.

2. The number of people who're interested in scheduling that much time to play is dropping as the game gets older. Sorry guys... the game's seven years old and the core mechanics are getting stale. Fewer people are gonna want to "work for it" every year.

The latest content is hard to access without pretty high playtime -- say 15+ hours a week, with most of it being scheduled raids. Subs will decline until they hit some floor that consists only of people who want to invest that much time. Past that point I think they'll decline more slowly.

The Wrath philosophy was that the content should be accessible. It worked to maintain WoW's highest subscriber levels ever. In Cataclysm they've really moved away from that. Maybe they figure the game's getting so old that only diehards are going to keep on playing it anyway.

Vanilla/TBC were arguably WoW's best years -- but back then WoW was a new game. No one had gotten sick of it yet and they didn't have any real competitors. Unfortunately, the market is different now and WoW isn't the new hotness anymore. Anyone who's interested in MMOs has at least given WoW a try. That model wouldn't work again if it was adopted today.

The only thing that puzzles me is how bad some of the design decisions are these days -- namely the fact that the easy VP comes from running two rehashed, several year old 5-mans over and over again. And waiting in a 45 minute queue to do it. Are they crazy? Who would want to play this?

They should make it worthwhile to run the heroics AND raids that shipped with 4.0. Make them all puggable through the dungeon finder, and increase the rewards. They're newer, and comparatively fewer people have seen that content -- if people can get into it easily, they'll come back to check it out.

And I do think they're going to have to step up the rate at which they release new, original, creative content if they want to stop the bleeding... or lower the sub cost. It costs almost $200/yr to play this game excluding expansion packs. With $200 you can buy three brand new games at retail and a couple indie games to boot. What did WoW subscribers get for their $200 in the past 12 months?

ZA, ZG and Firelands. 200 bucks for three instances, two of them rehashes?? Are you kidding me? In what alternate universe does Morhaime think that's good value? It's probably the worst value Blizzard has offered you for your money since they founded the company!

The question Blizzard has to face now is whether they want to consign an aging game to a shrinking audience of diehards, or try to re-broaden its appeal. So far it seems like they're going down the diehard route. Or maybe they've lost the plot and the game's suffering a lack of attention from the senior devs. Who knows.

[huldu]

I'm one of the guild leaders for the biggest guild on the server. Yeah, a real casual guild in other words. We do a little bit of everything but the goal is to give players an option to be in a non-elite attitude guild. Anyways basically you have people leveling from lowest to highest level. Many do dungeons a few don't do dungeons at all while leveling. They level and have fun as long they are "progressing". The problem begins once they reach the highest level. They try to gear up through dungeons but the majority of players dislike the long wait time. A few PvP but in reality they aren't many to begin with. You have a few people that "want" to raid but don't fully grasp what it takes to actually do it. The point is the game is way too linear and you don't have that many options once you reach 85 as to what to do with your time. At that point people either reroll a new character or just quit playing. This is a big problem with the game in it's current state. It tries to be old-school but fails to realize that the game is too old and no longer has the "fresh" feeling attached to it. It's the same crap over and over again. The game adds nothing new after X years of going.