Darmalus wrote:I'd have to disagree on #4 there. Aside from a few buggy spots, WoD was shipped flying-complete, just minus the ability to fly on your mount. Using the Aviana's Feather item (launched you high into the air and gave a 2 minute glide) it really shows just how damn tiny the world is. They use the trick where you can't travel in a straight line most places to make it seem bigger a lot.
Fair enough. The meandering pathing and mob density was another complaint I had heard.
bilateralrope wrote:Or maybe Blizzard has decided to ignore the players who have left and focus on the players who remain. Which means more of the same, because Blizzard thinks that's what the remaining players like.
Even with "only" 5.6 million players, that's way to many to "focus" on. Blizzard did best when they were going with a shotgun spread of content. Dailies, questing areas, rep grinds, dungeons, raids and the subscriber count tended to reflect that. A vast majority of players, even up to the peak at WotLK did not raid. But they stayed anyway because the earlier expansions gave them numerous ways to progress their character to never feel like they
had to go one direction to continue that progression.
Pretty much starting with Cata, you got to max, did dungeons, then heroics, then you either flailed away with the few daily hubs (pretty sure only launch hub was Tol Barad, and that was PvP), or you dove into raiding with a playerbase that really wasn't ready for that kind of difficulty spike. The general community in no way was prepared for Cata heroics, but that's what you were pushed into if you wanted any kind of progression what with the Tabbard rep grind and Valor system. Cata really did suck. I enjoyed it because I could raid and WPvP was actually fun for me back then. But I am not surprised, even later in the expansion they hemorrhaged subs. That said, I quit in Cata twice.
Pandas fixed a lot wrong with Cata, but many mistakes were made and I guess people weren't willing to come back after the launch.
Civil War Man wrote:It makes sense, because barring some kind of miracle, a product as old as WoW is not going to experience the same kind of long sustained growth it had during Vanilla to Wrath, so a strategy that's designed to capitalize on long term growth in subscriptions would offer a poor return on investment compared to one that focuses on slowing the loss of the customer base and incentivizing spending money on additional services.
I think the biggest problem is Blizzard just makes too much fucking money. Even if WoW closed shop today, they have enough hands in different projects that
smaller games (development-wise) are outearning WoW. At 5.6 million subs, we've got about 84 mil a month, 252 mil per quarter. Vs 383 mil (in 2014) for Diablo and Hearthstone (a considerably cut-down Magic card-game). If there's enough people willing to dump hundreds of dollars on electronic data, there's no reason to pander to people demanding content for their $15 a month. Release an expansion for $60, hype the shit out of it, roll in the money, go into maintenance mode as quick as possible, lay off people and shift the rest into the next expansion.
WoW isn't the golden boy at Acti-Blizz anymore. It doesn't matter that it's still hugely popular and makes them shit-tons of money. They can fleece money in other areas and spend a lot less doing so. I'm not going to say WoW isn't important financially to Blizz, but it damn sure doesn't mean what it used to. Since they likely feel they won't ever be able to brag about 10+ mil subs again, they aren't even going to try to get back there. Even though Blizzard has to know what it would take to do so.
WoW's dead and as much as trolls like to blame this on casual players or those that complain about about lack of content (or flying, whatever): this is solely on Blizzard for sleeping on a pile of money and claiming "we'd do more, but we lack the resources." Fuck em.
