Do you believe Blizzard has the strength to pull WoW back at it's place?

[Luxeley]

I'm torn between a flat out "nope" and they can restore WOW back to grace with major changes to the Dev team. The reason I lean toward the former and not the latter is because Blizzard is owned by Activision. I've seen the strings, massive changes to WOW dumbing down the game and making the game more accessible to the casual player. Activision is clearly the puppeteer. So I believe, even if they changed the Devs, the Devs would still be harnessed and controlled by Activision's impeccable scent for the quick $$$. I don't know if the current Devs need to dust off their resume just yet, but they most certainly are in need of some new blood and new ideas.

[gamingmuscle]

You'd be wrong, since the game isn't dying.

Nah it is. May take a long while more but churn is slowly killing it.

Maybe they can find some combination of features/content/price point/whatever that can breathe some new life into it....but that will not last.

[Eternal Ice]

Yes, but only if they change direction, the problem I think is that they are giving way too much decision power to the dev team, in this expansion the development team took decisions that no sane manager, marketer or business man would ever take, just look at what they did with LFR, or with valor points or world bosses, they went out of their way to make them irrelevant, to make the gear look bad on purpose, wasting time and resources that they clearly don't have, and all for what? to make a small minority feel better? that is not the kind of decision that a business man would take, that is the kind of decision that a gamer would take.

Makes sense I guess, if you want to develop a game you put in charge a gamer, someone who is passionate about games, but when the gamers start to develop the game based only on their personal feelings and likings without giving a f* about the financial impact, and without giving a f* about the sector that don't enjoy the same things as them, sector that happens to be the vast majority of your customers, then things like WoD happen, then the game starts to lose subs faster than ever before.

The game can recover but they need to change the management and they need to do it ASAP.

[Mad_Murdock]

ah nah, they just lost 3 million subs, and if 6.2 is going to be the content that lasts for a entire year. You don't need a prophet to see how many subs that is going too lose.

My bet is 5-6 million towards the end of WoD. Maybe even less.

They gained 3 million and 6 months later they lost that 3 million. They are technically sitting at a higher sub count than we had at the end of MOP. That's actually pretty good with all things considered.

I do agree with your overall prediction. WoW has been bleeding players since 6 months into Cata and I don't see anything stopping the bleed out. Depending how long WoD last, I see end of WoD subs at 6 million. I do expect 1 or 2 more major sub drops, probably 6 months into the next expansion as well.

[gamingmuscle]

I'm torn between a flat out "nope" and they can restore WOW back to grace with major changes to the Dev team. The reason I lean toward the former and not the latter is because Blizzard is owned by Activision. I've seen the strings, massive changes to WOW dumbing down the game and making the game more accessible to the casual player. Activision is clearly the puppeteer. So I believe, even if they changed the Devs, the Devs would still be harnessed and controlled by Activision's impeccable scent for the quick $$$. I don't know if the current Devs need to dust off their resume just yet, but they most certainly are in need of some new blood and new ideas.

LOL game is more accessible...but easier is a bit misleading. There have been a lot of convenience changes...which have their good and bad aspects.

[Noomz]

Just as the title goes,

Do you believe Blizzard has still the capablilty and mind set to please the majority of the crowd and reduce the decline by a big amount or to the point where they actually start to gain subs again each quarter.
Or do you believe WoW will just go on decline from now on (outside expansion releases) and will die out in the course of what 10 years?

Will WoW get dethroned soon? Or will it pull itself up again?

I'm of the mind that the golden era of MMO's is over, along with the golden years of WoW itself. No MMO will take it's place in a long time and WoW will not recover to WotLK numbers.
The MMO market is saturated and incredibly stale. No western MMO will get +10 million subscribers again, for a long time. But +10 years with several million subscribes is still damned good as MMO's go.

[notorious98]

Change is hard and that's why a large percentage of the posts on how to fix the game are to go back to this or that. Besides nobody agrees on what "good changes" even means. Your good change may be unwelcome by most people. That's just how it goes. Going back by itself isn't the answer.

Besides fighting the fact that the game is now over ten years old another thing they have to deal with is the great era of huge sandbox MMO's is largely past. It's a lot like real-time strategy games which were huge for a lot of years and now are just a small niche. Trends happen. Games and gamers change. PC-only games aren't anything like the market they used to be.

The only expectations that Blizzard really needs to meet are their own. "Can they come back" is too simplistic and affected by a large number of things outside of their control.

All of this is completely spot on. I don't play WoW anymore and I won't play WoW no matter what they do to it. No matter how much they "retrofit" the game. I just don't have much interest anymore for MMOs in general. I think a good portion of the population probably feels this way as well. The fact that they still boast 7 million people is pretty impressive with the other options out there that are cheaper or free. The game came in at the exact right time and used its name to, nearly, monopolize the market. The game will never sustain 10 million subscribers again. It'll never be what it was during its heyday. And no amount of reverting it back to previous iterations will change that.

[Mission]

we need real content like we had once upon a time.

[gamingmuscle]

we need real content like we had once upon a time.

You mean content you like?

WoD is full of real content. I just don't care for most of it =P

[Mr. Smith]

I've been getting the impression lately that they're entirely capable of it, but they just choose not to in favor of focusing their efforts on their other games.

[Barnabas]

Just as the title goes,

Do you believe Blizzard has still the capablilty and mind set to please the majority of the crowd and reduce the decline by a big amount or to the point where they actually start to gain subs again each quarter.
Or do you believe WoW will just go on decline from now on (outside expansion releases) and will die out in the course of what 10 years?

Will WoW get dethroned soon? Or will it pull itself up again?

Warcraft already got dethroned. Tera has 20 million active players.

[crazygamer420]

No, I don't think they do. They have a lot of things to fix before I would even consider resubbing.

[Fang7986]

we need real content like we had once upon a time.

will never happen again because most of the player-base isn't patient enough to wait for it. Blizz will never be able to put out enough content fast enough to keep all the player's happy

[bryroo]

Blizzard absolutely could turn WoW around if it were inclined to.

I don't feel that is the case. Blizzard isn't conveying that they're passionate about making WoW a great game

If anything WoD is setting up the infrastructure for the future of WoW and cries to amend it's design will be ignored

- - - Updated - - -

will never happen again because most of the player-base isn't patient enough to wait for it. Blizz will never be able to put out enough content fast enough to keep all the player's happy

Plenty of players waited 14 months for WoD. That's bullshit

[blehmeh]

When I see all the feedback regarding something like ability pruning being overall a bad thing, and then they make a statement saying its "good at to expect more", I have to say no way. They have a blatant new direction with the game and its going to continue in that direction.

[Seriss]

Biased poll is biased. Where's my "Blizzard still has WoW in its place" option?

[Haselden]

They gained 3 million and 6 months later they lost that 3 million. They are technically sitting at a higher sub count than we had at the end of MOP. That's actually pretty good with all things considered.

I do agree with your overall prediction. WoW has been bleeding players since 6 months into Cata and I don't see anything stopping the bleed out. Depending how long WoD last, I see end of WoD subs at 6 million. I do expect 1 or 2 more major sub drops, probably 6 months into the next expansion as well.

Yep, I only see WoW gaining subs during patches, and mainly ((Expansions.))

What brought so many players into WoD gaining 3 million was actually no surprise for me. The expansion, was hyped, and it sound like blizzard got their crap together. However, in all reality it was just a major let down for 3 million people. My bet is people were just getting the "Exclusives" from the wow tenth anniversary. ((Since their here.)) Then all just un-subbed when the tenth anniversary ended. The game has no reason for players too stick around. No more purpose, no friends, and the new generation of WoW players are about as toxic as we were when we were 16.

Heck, i'm probably going to be doing the same thing unsubbing until next expansion. After I finish up my "Challenge mode gold runs." I actually havn't made any new friends in the game since cataclysm. When blizzard started using xrealm features such as LFD, and LFR, and making the game far to "Accessible."

[unbound]

You mean content you like?

WoD is full of real content. I just don't care for most of it =P

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

[Granyala]

Continuous growth like in the TBC / early wrath days is out of the question.
WoW is simply to old for that now.

Best they can hope is stem the tide so they only lose a couple of 100K per quarter until the next expansion creates another short term peak.

[TheFuse]

I believe they have the power to bring it back, but I don't think they will.

They'd rather let it bleed out in the back room and focus all of their attention on F2P micro transaction titles.