Dear Activision, Blizzard, Microsoft, and Shareholders
Hear me out, charge people a $5 / month fee to bring the Devs back, please. I’m sure there’s profits to be had, and the loyal playerbase can get a new map everyone once and a while, a new hero 2-3 times a year, and much needed balance updates.
It will be profitable. heck, you could probably charge $12 / month and people would pay!!
No the vast majority of the player base wouldn’t pay a subscribtion fee to play this game.
Nothing is stopping you buying gems monthly as a pseudo subscribtion if you feel so inclined.
As an option, sure, I can see a subscription working out alright as it would just making it easier to maintain the xp boost for as long as someone wants rather than going through pots. Maybe tack on some additional bonuses such as a 5-10% increase chance to increased quality (be more worthwhile if loot was more difficult to get like it was pre-2.0) but required? Oh Fel no. That would most likely do more harm than good.
A subscription does not mean the quality would improve. Go over and take a look at World of Warcraft. That game has been steadily sinking in terms of quality–story and gameplay wise–for years with more and more cash shop items tacked on as the years went by.
They’d rather make inferior games that people with short attention spans will impulsively purchase and then quit. Lousy people make games for other lousy people.
no point making new maps when olds need fix
Not to mention at the current player numbers, that’d mean like $5000 more revenue a month for the company, assuming 50,000 active players of whom 10% would like to pay a subscription fee.
(I think that number is extremely generous, I doubt there are more than a few thousand active SL and QM players across the regions)
Not enough to hire even a single basic programmer in the US.
It comes up sometimes.
In general, having a Blizzard (heck, Xbox) sub that is allocated carefully by accounting for hours spent in each game, or partially my own choice, could work.
As suggested, it could give a little bonus, like XP, shards, or double chests. Either way, to earn stuff we want. (Perfect matchmaking and delightfully competent teams! 
)
A sub to pay a couple dozen matches a month isn’t quite worth it, especially when it adds up with other subscriptions. That’s why I only have WoW every once in a while (although they are clearly tryhard now between WLK, Cata, SoD, TTW and MoPR), and I only have Youtube and (HBO) Max (Disney) but not Netflix or Spotify or even Soundcloud Pro. I simply can’t make good use of them all.
Hots Reddit got 390k members so 50k active players might be too small.
True, but I wonder how many of those have been inactive for years. I have a Reddit account that I haven’t posted on the HotS subforum in years. Though I do log into HotS every week.
Many pros, regulars and community contributors who are among the subscribers have quit 5+ years ago.
A better indicator would be the amount of posts on the HotS subreddit weekly, but I don’t know how to bring up that data 
When I check now there are only about 120 online out of those 390k so its mostly like this forum. But it could be fun to know how many active players Hots got now world wide.
That’s an all time sub count though. The vast majority of those subscribers subbed during 2014-2016. I’m one of those Reddit numbers even though I didn’t play the game at all for 4 years. Even these days I play like once a month.
Even playing so little, I see the same usernames over and over at least in Quick Match, in middle MMR. Has to be a pretty limited player base.
But if I had to make a guesstimate, there are at least a few thousand people online rather than a few hundred at any time.
If a blue poster would ever give out that info, that would be awesome, but I think they forgot about this forum.
It’s probably like YouTube.
One of the vloggers I follow has 4 or 5 million subscribers. Her video views are 10% of that at most. At the same time “only” 20-25% of the videos I watch are from subscriptions - I don’t want to flood my feed and the algorithm remembers my choices well enough.
So, 100k out of 5m - my guesstimate is 2% of subscribers (members) are actively involved.
My consequence is, the correlation can be very weak.
Thats a good example. I’m subbed to one who regulary shows who watch his videos at the end of his videos and only about 2% of his subs are watching while he got 98% non-subs who watch him.
Bro, I think if they introduce a paid subscription to this game in its current state - most players will just drop it, their interest is hanging by a thread as it is.
And the game itself is outdated to be honest. Just need a new game from Blizzard, if they ever release anything else lol
Most HotS players are freeloaders.
Remember when people complained that with the 2.0 system, some new players MIGHT get more stuff than them (which was bullcrap btw) and demanded compensation for the stuff they get FOR FREE?
I would pay a fee to play Ranked only with people who also pay, since it would improve the games. But not to simply play the game.
If you were a long time loyal player to a game you spend alot of time trying to get what you have now just to watch new players get it all handed on a silver plate. How would you feel ? Its about that most companies dont treat thier loyal players as they deserve to be treated and just change focus on the new players they can now milk dry while you are out of the picture/became irellevant to the company.
Don’t ever play WoW. That happens at the end of EVERY. SINGLE. EXPANSION. PACK.
The devs introduce “catch up” mechanics/quests/areas/magical lava lamps that allow people to just gather everything that previously took weeks or even months to get in a few days or a few weeks. This allows returning players or people who did not play when that particular expansion pack was the thing to gear up significantly faster than those that were there at day one. Though in the case of Warlord of Draenor it wasn’t a bad thing as those Fel awful crystal quest areas sucked.
It is not necessarily a bad thing, but if you slog through that particular expansion pack from beginning to end, it may leave a bitter taste in your mouth that you spent so much time doing what someone returning can accomplish with significantly less time and/or effort.
I am a longtime player, and I did get veteran lootboxes. How I feel is that I’ve enjoyed my skins/mounts for months to years, before these new players came, so I got enjoyment out of them. I can’t pretend that that’s not worth anything. And if I kept playing, I would get more on top of what I already have. I never saw what I needed to get compensated for.
My enjoyment of the game is not tied to how many loot boxes I get.
If I hadn’t gotten the veteran’s boxes. It would not have made a difference to my gameplay experience in the slightest. Also, as a player, I want as many new people as possible to join the game. Because we need people to play with.
Every company needs to put more effort into attracting players, because attraction is more important than retention. That’s why you get new customer deals on internet, massages, Uber, you name it. That’s why WotC put most of their effort into into attraction for Magic the gathering.
But then again, I am a creature of logic . I don’t make emotional decisions or have emotional reactions, so I’m probably a minority. And people probably feel like I’m not making sense and I should be outraged.
But I’ll never have a good time if I’m always worried someone else might be having more fun than me. If new players are happy, then I’m just happy for them. I don’t lose any of what I already have.
It’s like in mod nation racers, every player complained that the challenges to unlock parts were way to hard (Which they were. It was stupid). And then when they patched the game to make them easier, people complained that new players would have an easier time doing them. Like wtf?
But you could choose to wait though. You have to decide if getting what you want right away is worth it or not. I mean, I never played WoW, so maybe it makes sense if getting the stuff is just boring and tedious. But in that case, why play the expansion at all?
Also, if you put yourself in the company’s shoes. Would it make sense to force players go at the same pace for old content, and have less people purchase the content?
Early access usually has a cost, so I think I’d be fine with it. I had fun dancing the macarena years ago. If someone wants to do it now while learning twice as fast, fill your boots 
Old content is no longer “The hot thing” so you need to give people incentive to pay for it.
I am going to ask you to stay awhile and listen.
It never really bothered me before I left, more like “oh, okay, that happened” and just kept playing which back then I was a hardcore grinder that was not above watching paint dry. I spent something like 6-8 months in Cataclysm digging in the dirt to level up archaelogy, played chess with Medivh every week for a chance to get Gorehowl, and farmed old content for rare drops.
Though, and this is my take on it, but the tacking on catch up mechanics was one of the many things that had caused the downward spiral that WoW has been struggling against (along with corporate greed) where in addition to those features level up boosts, 6 month bonus purchases, and other incentives to sort to bum rush content have steadily appeared over the years. Also today’s mindset of “I need it now!” has not helped.
Back in old WoW up until about…I’d say about Cataclysm, you did not get anywhere fast. It took lots of time to get anywhere, and you couldn’t fight entire swaths of enemies. Think of old WoW like going against experienced players in HotS of equal or greater skill than you. You can comfortably or struggle against one player, but if you draw the attention of more than one–or wrong hero–or Nexus forbid drew an Elite (grand master playing a hero you cannot deal with at all) sucks to be you because you are respawning.
Quests took forever (you also did not level up fast at all), raids required a spread sheet and organization on par of a football coach as well as a weekly schedule that you better not breach. Current dungeons required a lot of thought. Everything required a lot of time and energy to accomplish. Professions were just as time consuming as leveling as gathering resources required you to get out there and get them yourself. Unless you had the in game currency to buy them off the market that is, and back then not many people were walking banks leveling up.
If you got to end game content before the next expansion pack you basically had a second job playing WoW. If you got all geared up from Heroic Raids you were in the small minority. You were a god amongst peasants. Fel, just getting into a raid group back then was not easy. Getting everything done in an expansion pack, or vanilla, was about as much of a time killer as a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game.
Then they started making it easier and easier each expansion pack–during them as well–until everyone in HotS terms went from playing in League against highly skilled teams who would delete you if you screw up to playing against A.I…with the bot difficulty steadily dropping.
What this resulted in is people sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the next content drop, even if those people such as myself who sat in front of nearly every wall to watch the paint dry. The one thing that did get harder was getting flying mounts due to the introduction of journeyman quests. But I never did them. I enjoyed running everywhere exploring even if there was nothing of importance.
I feel this is why so many people wind up just leaving WoW for long periods of time. The content is both not difficult (save for extremely tedious bits such as the one dungeons in Legion) while also not taking long to accomplish. Dailies slow people down, but that just has people logging on a couple times a week, and they do not take long to finish so…eh. Warlords of Draenor gets flak for the faction hubs where you had followers that did everything for you to the point people started calling it Farmville. They expanded upon it in Legion. Though even those daily/weekly blocks become negated with catch up stuff. The content simply became less time consuming to finish with less involvement from the players to get stuff done. It was actually counterproductive going out in the world and doing it yourself instead of sending your army of minions to do it for you while you did something else.
The ever expanding cash shop also does not help. You can just buy levels, though it does not give any amount of gratification, and is an instant reward without any work. For me my greatest achievement in WoW was getting the reins of Invincible off of the Lich King after 88 attempts to get it to drop. Runner up–would have surpassed if I finished it–was working towards the legendary quest to get Shadowmourne, but I both lost interest and could not get anyone to help me at the time.
They’ve also released some really dumb stuff that had no impact on player retention at all. One such item was the S.E.L.F.I.E camera that lets…ughhh…you can take selfies with in game. I am not making that up.
Throw in some really dumb story decisions and, well, that is current WoW right now; struggling to keep players. The game went from being a time sink to a Facebook game, though from what I have heard Dragonflight was alright, though I do not know if it still suffered previous expansion pack problems of letting players zoom through content.