Warcrack lost 1.3M subscribers in 3 months...wow

[Zeus]

I know it's been a while since Cataclysm, but wow, that's a huge loss of subscribers in one quarter

http://www.gamespot.com/news/world-of-w ... ne-6408129

Other than lack of updates, is there any reason people aren't subscribing? I haven't heard of any other game taking over, am I missing something?

[Don]

There seems to be a general decline in MMORPG probably because nobody has come up with anything interesting.

I think it's a lot worse than what Blizzard reported which is why they have to announce this at all or risk getting sued by stakeholders. The WoW Census mods put the numbr of active users in NA+Europe at less than 800K. During the height of WoW, that number was 5 million from the same tool.

[Eric]

Blizzard's been pretty good with the updates this expansion actually, there's more to do in MoP then ever before. I think the problem is the game is just getting old, in addition, I don't think you need a guild anymore to see much of the content. I know for most of the addicts, that social element was pretty key in keeping them coming back for more. Want to raid? You need a guild to at least do 10-mans. Heroic dungeons used to be pretty exclusive to guilds running them. Now you can pretty much solo queue for dungeons, raids, pvp and you don't need a guild. You can be guildless and experience the entire game except for a token raid boss that only heroic raiders can see. If you don't need people, you don't need to interact with people, and you don't need to run things with people and you don't make those connections that make you hesitate before you unsubscribe.

In a way, Blizzard has kind of killed off the most important part of their game.

Guild Wars 2 kinda forces you to interact with people, so you get those bonds like that. SOTOR tried to force it by not having a dungeon queue system and making people type "LFG" in trade, but it didn't have a very fun or addicting end game to make this happen or an open custom UI to allow people to find other people easier.

[Shrinweck]

SOTOR tried to force it by not having a dungeon queue system and making people type "LFG" in trade, but it didn't have a very fun or addicting end game to make this happen or an open custom UI to allow people to find other people easier.

It has both of those things now, but the only guild incentive other than having an easier time to find groups (and the social aspect) is a 5% experience bump.

[Don]

Usually games that don't have a group finder are either deluded or they simply didn't have time to finish programming whatever's needed to get it working.

The social aspect of WoW is grossly overrated. When you run an Alterac Valley it's likely all 40 guys on your BG are from 40 different servers. There's no social aspect there but it's still better than waiting for 2 days for AV to pop otherwise. If social aspect actually mattered, EQ1 would still be the top MMORPG. It's hard to get tighter bonds in a game you need a group to kill a same level mob as you. LFR, according to Blizzard, was widely successful and there's obviously no real social aspect there either.

The downfall of WoW and sub-based game in general is because they're really not that much better than the whole mess of F2P out there that charges you nothing, if at all. It's not that $15/month is a lot, it's that $15/month is a lot to pay when your game isn't necessarily even better than the game that charges $0/month. Sure the F2P tries to nail you in other ways, but if you look at a game like say TERA, at least it looks better than WoW and it doesn't cost anything. Most people barely see the raiding stuff anyway (otherwise LFR wouldn't have been a hit in WoW) so it's really not that more limiting to go with a F2P compared to any sub-based game.

On the news of SWTOR, it seems like their subs declined a lot but reports double of revenue, though I suspect that's the usual stuff when you see a game go F2P they always say everything is better and then you never hear it from them again. To be fair, I see a lot of people with the legendary cash shop titles. Each of those title requires about $500 worth of cash shop stuff, so I guess that's where they're making their money. I have no idea if this is at all sustainable, though.

[Eric]

It has both of those things now, but the only guild incentive other than having an easier time to find groups (and the social aspect) is a 5% experience bump.

By the time they added this, they had already lost like what? 50-75% of their subs? Too little too late.

The social aspect of WoW is grossly overrated. When you run an Alterac Valley it's likely all 40 guys on your BG are from 40 different servers. There's no social aspect there but it's still better than waiting for 2 days for AV to pop otherwise. If social aspect actually mattered, EQ1 would still be the top MMORPG. It's hard to get tighter bonds in a game you need a group to kill a same level mob as you. LFR, according to Blizzard, was widely successful and there's obviously no real social aspect there either.

I disagree with this. Before we had cross realm battlegrounds, PvP was very personal on a server by server basis, running into and fighting members of the opposite faction on the server was common, and this intensified rivalries early in the game's life, obviously server populations made this impossible to sustain with queues and population imbal, but for a while it was fun/great to know exactly who the good players were and picking a fight with them just because you knew who they were(or running with your tail between your legs ). I made more friends in WoW during Vanilla and BC then through WotLK->MoP on both sides of the faction fence because people knew who I was on both sides. Even cross realm battlegroup wasn't too bad because you had "that group from Stormreaver" that ran a really good WSG PuG that you wanted to beat, or players in AV you'd see regularly that would help you defend and actually focus on objectives(Across like 9-10 servers?), NOW you have true cross realm and it's like possible to get grouped with anyone across 120 servers and never see the same person again. LFR is "widely successful" because there's no reason not to use it, it's free epic loot if you have a 30 min-1 hour of freetime., hardcore raiders have to use it to get 4-piece bonuses and/or weapons, normal raiders need to use it to fill in gear gaps because they're bad @ heroic raiding, and of course casual bads use it because they can't do the other 2, and with LFR they have no incentive to do so. LFR is also terrible for those same reasons, heroic raiders don't want to waste time running a raid they're already throwing themselves at, same with normal raiders, and the mouth breathing terrible casuals have no idea how to figure out even the simplest of mechanics so without the former 2 they can and do easily spend ours trying to progress between each boss for a handout that they don't really deserve.

The downfall of WoW and sub-based game in general is because they're really not that much better than the whole mess of F2P out there that charges you nothing, if at all.

This I however agree with, I don't think WoW has a very friendly curve for new players, you have to grind 90 levels to get to the end game, then grind you way through dailies and reputation to get to the LFR hand-out and you're not really given any incentive to join a guild like I said before, because you can do everything solo in the game and never have to get attached to any social aspect.

Why bother trying to get into WoW's 1-90 grind where you can grind in other MMOs that have better visuals and better gameplay.

[Don]

The social aspect of a MMORPG is far less significant than issues of practicality. It doesn't matter if you know all the guys on your server if there's only 15 of them left. You won't be able to get a game of AV to even pop so what's the point of knowing all these guys? Now if you have some way to ensure the population on your server never changes then you can have a community, but good luck getting that to happen. You can have a game of AV where all 40 guys are from 40 different servers. This implies there just aren't a lot of people on your server that's doing AV (of PvP at all) at this moment, so whether you know those 3 other guys on the same server doesn't help in terms of gameplay. They make the pool of the cross realms huge because they have no choice. If they restrict it to 5 servers you'd still be waiting an hour for AV to pop and that's not fun for anyone.

I'd say the reason to play any MMORPG on launch is so that you can be in that magical phase of early in a game's life where you can actually know people on your server and still have enough people to do stuff. That phase ends rather quickly though, and it's not something you can do about. Well, you can if you just set up your game to have like 5-10 servers to begin with, but invariably people get too greedy and spread them out on new servers due to some antiquiated model that a server cannot have more than 1000 people on it from the days of EQ1.

[Eric]

Yeah but WoW created those issues of practicality. Like, before it started adding dungeon queues and pvp queues and so on, it was just accepted that you headed to zone x y z. WoW championed the whole queue for anything from anywhere, and then the devs were shocked that nobody ever left their capital cities or interacted with people on their servers.

Population issues didn't become significant until Wrath of the Lich King, which is when we got dungeon finder to combat that as opposed to server merges(Which I remember them testing on the Public Test Realm and then abandoning for the dungeon finder). For Vanilla and Burning Crusade most realms had fairly even populations, at this point in the game's life though every server is lopsided for one faction or the other though.

[Don]

It's kind of inevitable that server population declines though. WoW does a better job at hiding it but I can guaranteed you if they stuck with the old 5 or 10 servers per battlegroup thing you'd be waiting forever for anything to actually happen, let alone without cross server.

The problem is that WoW started with the obselete EQ model of about 1000 concurrent people on the server, never mind that if 90% of those guys quit then you'd never be able to do anything on that server, and eventually those guys are going to quit or at least become inactive. If you look at census tools in general there's this trend of a game coming out with some kind of playing craze, and then population quickly drops off to like 1/3 of the initial craze after it wears off, and then in the lull between major content you've 1/2 or even less of that active players even if they're still paying a sub. A server with only 1000 concurrent population absolutely cannot handle the swing in population because the low end is going to be too small to work with even for a decent sized server let alone a low population server. I see that most F2P settle on just having like 5-6 really big servers and then just split people into zone (1) (2) (3) if you ever have too many people and that's probably the way to go. Heck, you can basically think of WoW as like 5 really big servers right now for all practical purposes.

[SineSwiper]

UO and EQ used to be the epicenters of the MMO world during their eras. I'll admit that WoW had a surprisingly long run, but that "license to print money" isn't going to last forever.

[Flip]

UO and EQ used to be the epicenters of the MMO world during their eras. I'll admit that WoW had a surprisingly long run, but that "license to print money" isn't going to last forever.

And what has Blizzard been developing in the meantime, knowing this money factory wouldnt last? A virtual card game and Diablo 3 real money aution house.................. . . . . . . . .. . .. . . . ...... yeah. Is MMO on a large scale done? The first company to say "NO!" and come up with an amazing subscriber based model game will make billions from the people looking for the next best thing.

[Don]

I saw an interview with whoever is now in charge in RIFT now that it's F2P, and although it's mostly PR, he does make a point saying people used to pay by the hour for some games too and that model doesn't work anymore. I think it's quite possible the subscription games just had their run (and probably for too long) but the days of delivering virtually no content for a subscription fee may be over.

[Eric]

Blizzard is going to eventually release Titan. I'm fairly sure when this happens they're gonna wrap the WoW & Titan subscriptions into one package, since it's all on BNET. You would think, "Why put 2 subs on one fee" but like Don's said, most people only pay/play one MMO at one time. Letting someone sub to Titan, and then have WoW in the pocket to keep them subbed with all of it's content is something they'd get away with, because people most likely aren't going to sub to both, and if they're not interested in one, and interested in the other they'll keep paying monthly.

[Don]

SoE had that All Access thing and I think it really didn't work that well because people only play one MMORPG seriously at one time anyway, though in the case of WoW it'd probably be smart to not cannibalize its own market immediately and do something like Eric suggested, because you don't want people to drop WoW to go to your new game and then decide the new game sucks and they're not coming back to WoW either.