World of Warcraft Loses 1.3 Million Subscribers in 3 Months

[tyriless]

90% of this forum is expecting WoW to die at any time in the near future and that is Un-freaking-likely. The number of current players is so overwhelmingly higher than any other current MMO, that they can loose 4/5 of subscribers and still remain profitable. I expect this MMO is still going to be thriving for another five years.

 

[tyriless]

World of Warcraft is almost 10 years old. That's practically a lifetime in this industry.

I'm sure Blizzard-Activision have a follow-up in preproduction phase, but I do hope they make Warcraft 4 to bridge the two games (please?)

I second the call for a Warcarft 4. It would be epic to return to a strategy game format, burning and trouncing villages and cities your pc previously visited and quested in.

 

[NortherWolf]

tl;dr Talents were changed for the better.

No, they really weren't. They were dumbed down and, maybe it's because I've sicne played better games but when I went back to wow for a short stint the talent system just screamed: "LOOK AT ME ! YOU DON'T NEED BRAINS TO FIGURE ME OUT!!!!"

[link]https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wow+paladin+ret+spec&aq=f&oq=wow+paladin+ret+spec&aqs=chrome.0.57j0l3.5268j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8[/link]

There we go, that's how you found out your talent spec now and then, lots of brainpower needed there. Some people crunched the numbers and said what the best spec was in order to perform your job, you would look it up and copy it. Aside from 1 or two points, you didn't deviate because it would gimp your performance. Sure there were lots of places to click, but in the end you had no choice but to choose the same spec as everyone else in order to perform properly.

So? 60 points(or 30 after Cata) was still more chances to make something interesting than 6x3. And you could really make a stinks-to-high-heaven build before. Rather than;
"CHOOSE OPTION A, B OR C!"

 

[theultimateend]

World of Warcraft Loses 1.3 Million Subscribers in 3 Months

Activision Blizzard isn't worried despite a significant decline in subscriptions between the months of March and June.

I think your months are off a bit unless time travel was involved. I think one of the biggest mistakes was removing the old world. I miss old unfinished zones to explore.

What they really got wrong was not mentioning that most of the loss was in the East.

These losses aren't because of some sudden drop in wow quality. The market in China and its neighbors is saturated to near boiling point with F2P games.

Their drops in the west are considerably smaller. But that headline/news post would not be as exciting I guess.

They can have my sub if they provide legacy servers for previous expansions and vanilla.

Until DayZ Standalone/World of Darkness/Star Citizen anyway.

IIRC Catacylsm was as a result of them no longer having any of the original code. They couldn't make improvements to the vanilla content as it was so they decided to have a big event to explain redoing it all.

At least I vaguely recall that being the cause.

 

[DugMachine]

tl;dr Talents were changed for the better.

No, they really weren't. They were dumbed down and, maybe it's because I've sicne played better games but when I went back to wow for a short stint the talent system just screamed: "LOOK AT ME ! YOU DON'T NEED BRAINS TO FIGURE ME OUT!!!!"

[link]https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wow+paladin+ret+spec&aq=f&oq=wow+paladin+ret+spec&aqs=chrome.0.57j0l3.5268j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8[/link]

There we go, that's how you found out your talent spec now and then, lots of brainpower needed there. Some people crunched the numbers and said what the best spec was in order to perform your job, you would look it up and copy it. Aside from 1 or two points, you didn't deviate because it would gimp your performance. Sure there were lots of places to click, but in the end you had no choice but to choose the same spec as everyone else in order to perform properly.

So? 60 points(or 30 after Cata) was still more chances to make something interesting than 6x3. And you could really make a stinks-to-high-heaven build before. Rather than;
"CHOOSE OPTION A, B OR C!"

And nobody chose the "stinks to high heaven" talent builds because they didn't work. You would severely gimp yourself if you put points in every single talent tree.

 

[DugMachine]

tl;dr Talents were changed for the better.

No, they really weren't. They were dumbed down and, maybe it's because I've sicne played better games but when I went back to wow for a short stint the talent system just screamed: "LOOK AT ME ! YOU DON'T NEED BRAINS TO FIGURE ME OUT!!!!"

I also like how you ignored the rest of my post. y'know about how I change my talents constantly for PvP depending on team comps. From what I remember I maybe changed talents 2 times in wrath. I got the cookie cutter dps spec and the cookie cutter tank build and never changed them. Because to be viable in endgame PvP or PvE you had to follow the strict builds.

 

[Jimmy T. Malice]

Do we really need a new thread every time WoW subscriber base fluctuates? Number of subscribers is a sine curve with new content patch at every second π. It has large player base so fluctuation is also large, this isn't any major drop, most of them will come back next patch, probably even more so since it's going to be summer by then.

Why are you using a radian scale for this sine wave? Radians suck.

 

[acosn]

Bring back burning crusade.. that's where WoW peaked.

This stupid, mind-numbingly simple makeover they have given wow with the talents and gear is just so boring - it's as if blizzard wanted to expand their player base to people without higher brain function.

BC wasn't a high water point. Stop drinking the koolaid.


And the idea that an MMO almost a decade old that hasn't undergone any major change to it's core game play, is losing it's player base is not at all surprising. It's unusual in the modern game market of proverbial "fuck n' chuck" games for sales, let alone subscriptions, to stay stable for the first year, let alone looking 5, 6, 7 years out.

 

[Saviordd1]

Say what you will about WoW, it's still pretty much the best MMO on the market.

...
Presenting opinions as fact.

Seems legit.

OT: "I'm so surprised!" said no one, even diehard fans are going to start getting burnt out by now, its an old game and the cracks are turning into huge gaping holes that have tentacles and pandas in them.

 

[Random Argument Man]

Seeing Bobby Kotick speak for Blizzard reminds of just where this company is now.

Made me feel a touch ill in my stomach honestly.

Anywho, this game will come to an end, someday.
I'm not in any hurry to see it, it will come in it's own time, which will probably not be any time in the foreseeable future. (Despite this recent dip in subscriptions)

I'm more surprised that Kotick hasn't said remotely controversial in a loooooooong while. Probably the PR has been working hard in the last few years.

OT: Yeah, it was going to see a big decline at some point. Besides, how old is this MMO again? People have been calling the next MMORPG-to-be "the WoW killer". The only thing that will kill WoW is itself.

 

[Zac Jovanovic]

People who log on to an internet cafe were counted as subscribers.

I'm not sure I get your point, you can only log in in an internet cafe if you have an active account, in other words if you are a subscriber. If the internet cafe has an account it lets people log in to its still one subscriber.
Not that the numbers are not heavily bloated, by Recruit a Friend abuse like many other games.

Blizzard are no angels.

Compared to Activision they are

That could mean anything like 649,000 west to 651,000 east subscribers. So we really need the proper numbers.

Last time I played, majority of the subscribers WERE in the east, so it's only logical that majority of the lost players are in the east too. Still, to say there are no losses in the west would be ridiculous.
I played on EU servers, last time they spammed me with a free week I log in to see 2 real ID friends online at peak time, out of ~170.
I know 3 people IRL that play WoW today and I've known hundreds of them over the years.

 

[Terminate421]

Why do people want this game to die?

We humans crave destruction but if it died tommorow, more than half the doomsayers wouldn't notice.

Hell, I'm one of those few people that LIKE the Pandas! Shocking that I have an opinion!

 

[Vhite]

Do we really need a new thread every time WoW subscriber base fluctuates? Number of subscribers is a sine curve with new content patch at every second π. It has large player base so fluctuation is also large, this isn't any major drop, most of them will come back next patch, probably even more so since it's going to be summer by then.

Why are you using a radian scale for this sine wave? Radians suck.

I don't know, that's what we use here for trigonometric functions. But at least I roughly know how much their values are for various angles without memorizing.

 

[triggrhappy94]

I hear everyone's switching over to that new MMO, Sim City.

 

[Glaice]

Let's see if this trend continues downward..

 

[Gatx]

Didn't KOR lose that many in like two months after shipping?

I'm not gonna say WOW is dying or anything but releasing expansions seem to not being having as much effect as they used to. Eventually they're going to have to start work on WOW 2 or something similar and honestly I think that would be pretty damn cool since with all the expiernce they've gotten with MMOs imagine how good a WOW 2 could be.

I was going to say no, but after thinking about it a bit, I'd look forward to it if they tried. Since most new MMO keeps trying to copy WoW (at least in terms of end game content being focused on raiding), they're probably the only ones with enough security to make a drastically new game. At least then the world won't be filled with WoW clones (it'll be filled with WoW 2 clones).