The Shrine

Warcrack is down to 7.7M subscribers

http://www.gamespot.com/news/world-of-w ... on-6412086

That's a huge drop from the almost what, 13M they had before?

WoW probably always floated between 2-5M outside of China but they're more willing to lie than other MMORPGs. To be fair the guys claim to have a million probably only have 100K, so it's not like other companies don't lie. NA numbers is almost certainly below 1M for quite some time now. It's just the numbers have gotten so bad that they've to tone down the lying since Blizzard is publicly traded.

WoW just got chipped away every time something newer came along. That, along with your standard exhaustion as players just find something better to do with their time.

I imagine between Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online, we're going to see Blizzard do something interesting to maintain the subscriber base in the (near?) future.

Wildstar is my latest frothing at the mouth, can't wait for this MMO to come out game. It seems like it incorporates everything that I've liked about a ton of MMORPGs that've come out lately except without dropping the ball on everything else. Namely, active combat like TERA, a pick-your-own-adventure 'path' system that's kinda like the class story quests in SWTOR or the main quest in GW2, etc. etc. I like the path system the most since it tailors quests to MMO personality types, so if you want to level a character doing something you like and skipping shit you don't then they (potentially) allow you to.

ESO's most interesting mechanic that I've heard about is this sort of game plus mode where after you complete your faction's quest you're able to take the same character through the quests for the other factions. I forget how they tweak it so that you can still participate in PvP and whatnot but it certainly sounds like an interesting way to get people to play each character longer, while not potentially missing out on 30-70% of the game like in other faction-heavy MMORPGs. Still.. it's Elder Scrolls Combat which is... So. Shitty.

Blizzard's WoW successor has apparently gone to hell. Read some PC Gamer blurb about them firing everyone down to a thirty person team and throwing out a great deal of the design and tech work that has already been done.. I really feel like Blizzard is the Microsoft of game companies these days. You want them to do better than Apple (Valve?) but they just can't seem to do it, no matter how much money they keep throwing at it.

WoW got chipped away by F2P. Or, more precisely, competitors started figuring out that making 10 million an year is still better than 0 million an year even if you started out thinking you were going to make 100 million an year. If you look at the price you pay and the money that goes back to the game, $15/month is clearly way too much. I mean seriously do you really believe it takes 100M or whatever WoW pulls in a month to develop an encounter that a bunch of armchair developers can do? And yet WoW usually needs like 6 months or more to come up with new stuff despite the whole system must be really modularized and easy to develop (or one would hope).

WoW is probably signficantly worse than the recent sub MMORPGs but it's difficult to overcome WoW's momentum, and quite a few games bizarrely didn't implement very large servers or cross server queueing which led to their demise. WoW's decline is mostly saved by the fact that WoW is more willing to lie than other people so the 'millions of players can't be wrong' deal kept the game going a lot longer than it should. Though of course to lie like that they definitely have to be the #1 (which is obviously undisputed). That is to say I suspect WoW dipped below 1M in NA for quite some time now but they can still lie about having 12M because they still have around 1M while no other game is close. I mean, if consider the original EQ1 peaked at 500K and had like 20ish servers, and that no game besides WoW even sustained the kind of activity with 20 servers for any extended period of time, I think you can argue no game was even close to sustaining 500K for any nontrivial period of time. That is, in the oriignal EQ1 you can see that people are everywhere when they peaked at 500K. I really can't recall another game besides WoW that can claim the same. Yes everyone lies about how successful the game is but you can just step into a zone and find you're the only guy there to know that it's definitely not working.

Shrinweck wrote:Blizzard's WoW successor has apparently gone to hell. Read some PC Gamer blurb about them firing everyone down to a thirty person team and throwing out a great deal of the design and tech work that has already been done.. I really feel like Blizzard is the Microsoft of game companies these days. You want them to do better than Apple (Valve?) but they just can't seem to do it, no matter how much money they keep throwing at it.

That happened a long time ago. Blizzard got so popular that they became the AOL of gaming companies. The tipping point was likely StarCraft, and then finally WoW just sealed their status of "lowest common dominator".

Just look at releases like StarCraft II and Diablo III. Decent games, but games like these could have come from any other gaming company and not done nearly as well. Blizzard now realizes that the brand name is a license to print money. Why try harder when you can put shit in a box and sell millions?

Though, companies like EA are much worse, thanks to The Sims, sports games, and just being a shitty company in general. Blizzard tries to put out something good, but their corporate instincts refuse to let them apply risk to the business model. No risk, no innovation in game design, and thus an appeal to the LCD of audiences.

I disagree about Starcraft 2, it's as solid as the original Starcraft and improved upon the first in every single way possible.

The barrier of entry to learn how to play it however didn't decrease, which makes it hard to draw in a new crowd if you aren't already a fan, but it's still a highly successful e-sport, and one hell of a fun game.

Eric wrote:I disagree about Starcraft 2, it's as solid as the original Starcraft and improved upon the first in every single way possible.

That's not saying much, considering the two games are 12 years apart. Improving on everything at that point is a requirement.

I'm not saying that it's not an enjoyable game, but it just didn't seem to grab my attention as much as the first one did.

Eric wrote:I disagree about Starcraft 2, it's as solid as the original Starcraft and improved upon the first in every single way possible.

Except for the story. Chris Metzen has fucked the lore for all of their major series pretty well over the last 10 years.

SineSwiper wrote:

Eric wrote:I disagree about Starcraft 2, it's as solid as the original Starcraft and improved upon the first in every single way possible.

That's not saying much, considering the two games are 12 years apart. Improving on everything at that point is a requirement.

I'm not saying that it's not an enjoyable game, but it just didn't seem to grab my attention as much as the first one did.

I didn't know you were into Starcraft 1 as an e-sport. x_x

Anarky wrote:Except for the story. Chris Metzen has fucked the lore for all of their major series pretty well over the last 10 years.

I agree with this, the first game was about 3 races that were radically different going to war with one another because of their given natures.

SC2 is about the 3 races eventually uniting to fight Sargeras, err I mean Amon.

That being said I enjoyed WoW's lore until Wrath of the Lich King, killing the Heroic Lich King is something I look back on quite fondly. Cataclysm was boring, Mists of Pandaria was entirely too focused on the Pandaren. I'm not the "LAWL PANDAS R STUPID" crowd, I liked them, but they should of had a level 20 starting area and joined the Alliance, not be the entire focus of an expansion. x_x

Eric wrote:

Anarky wrote:Except for the story. Chris Metzen has fucked the lore for all of their major series pretty well over the last 10 years.

SC2 is about the 3 races eventually uniting to fight Sargeras, err I mean Amon.

And a really cliche love story that reads like bad fan-fiction.