because they’re fixating on small details to try to conclude simple cause/effect predictions.
The list of items given for the outline is based on what they don’t know: hots only revealed brief segments of numbers (beta key invites and bowder dropped some numbers, but the ‘community’ called those figures lies) some blues, iirc, like matt, have occasionally said some things are in effect ‘fine’ or good enough and things continued with long-term plans.
The biggest issue with stock/investment concerns for value is the basis of expectation and growth. On the one hand, hots has show signs that it isn’t ‘growing’ by the usual conventions, but on the other, we don’t have any clues on the expectations of HotS. Some of the ways companies deal with cost and profit displays is how it re-invests in itself; if a company doesn’t continue to have projects, it doesn’t keep a steady staff, and if it can’t keep a steady staff, then its hard to continue to have projections in line, one after the other. So in some regard, what HoTS did/has done for blizz may not meet the expectations or demands for investment outside of being apart of the whole mau figures used to estimate player engagement with blizzard services as a whole.
The other part of concer is the focus people put into the stock, esp in regards to the aftermath of blizzcon. Blizz isn’t alone in the stock dive, and rather, things have fallen with other companies as well. a few of the posters from the reddit link point out they do actually delve into stock/investment and soem of the stock value in these companies had been considered bloated and grew too fast; a crash was inevitable, esp in the field of games and gaming; interests are fickle – which i part of the reason some companies have switched to ‘service’ based designs to continue to streamline content and cosmetics and dlc packs as a means to support one specific product for longer terms than needing to already be working on a sequel before the first hits shelves.
So on the one hand, not having solid figures can make hots seem like a liability, at least as far as costs go. On the other hand, its revenue source may be steady enough that it may not effect some of the current trends of the game. If its an mau bolster to help maintain engagement numbers between spikes of interest in blizzard’s other games (ie, between wow patches, and game seasons) then it may still be doing its job, it just might not be paying off on the e-sports & spectator scene.
Granted, stuff like steamers and the like leaving hots doesn’t look good, and frequent posts of people having qm problems looks bad as well, but some of that comes from visibility. I haven’t posted much in matching posts cuz what games I’ve gotten have been fine; I still got (mostly) quick queues, though I am riding some of the ‘call of the nexus’ hype. One of the hardest aspects of appraising how ‘well’ something is is based on the assumption of similar experiences: if things are good enough, then I just play and don’t care to come to the forum to see if people are having the same experence. On the other hand, if queues or long, or a game is bad, etc etc, then people will come out to complain/critique/ or otherwise check if others have the same experience as them, and demand something get fixed.
Part of the issue of ‘bad’ concerns is some stuff gets super exaggerated, and sure, if nothing is done, people may leave, game fails, whatever. When I’m at an arcade, if a person has back-to-back issues with a game, its not “oh, it wasting working” the response becomes " all the games broken!" For my perspective, that sort of exaggeration is not only demonstrably wrong, but what they conveyed (and thus expect to ‘fix’) isn’t the issue.
However, in the case of my personal annecdote, a personalized experience with the person of concern can dispel their issues with communication: I can show them how to not have ‘broken game’ issues. With hots, the communication and interaction with staff and blues has been very hit and miss, more miss than not. Its to a point some posters literally clamor for blue responses to coddle their need for personalized attention to ‘fix’ the problems they have with the game, or at least to have assurances that something might be done.
So in that regard, the lack of direct word from blues for much of the game’s life hurts some of the image it has, esp from some of the same groups of people that come back off an on to raise their hand and ask for a hug.
so tl;dr there:
there’s a lot of uncertainty for an audience that doesn’t like uncertainty. Because they thrive off of phases of ‘hype’ to fuel themselves, when it isn’t fed to them directly, they’ll slack at whatever crumbs catch their interest and try to figure out some sort of reason for the lack of comfort as doomsday.
Part of the funny thing about the lack of WoW numbers (and the cases of pointing out good numbers) is not all good number seasons were reported either – some waves of WoW were better than others, some even having news articles to point out how good they were, but blizz didn’t personally offer that info as part of their ad base.
Cuz really, were’s all the fun celebrity campaign commercials for blizzard’s games these days?
Clearly hots/hgc is on the bad end of things because mr t didn’t hack the game and bring us mohawk grenades in the nexus 
