Don’t invest your time. The writing is on the wall
They legit give you less than a month announcement before a major release.
Its a complete cash out.
47 Likes
The health of retail and classic era stuff is intertwined. The more retail tanks the more they must look to squeeze money from classic era players via store purchases, character services, etc. With no retail patch on the horizon they push up the TBC launch date to keep people subbed.
I think Blizzard sees the writing on the wall for retail WoW. The Dev team has mismanaged it so badly, attacked, alienated, angered, and drove off their player-base in their chase for e-sports and streamer clout and a narrow PvE design vision that at this point classic era servers are going to be Blizzard’s hope of milking this game and property for profits in the long-run. They increasingly realize this. They could try and fix their broken design philosophy for retail, say fire their incompetent dev team members, put together a decent story, decent systems, etc but it seems management either agrees with them or are resigned to it happening at some point in the near future anyways.
Cash shop and character services have in recent years made up increasing amounts of the percentage of the take for WoW profits as reported in at least one earnings call a while back. They’ve made up for subscription short-falls and helped keep earnings on target.
Alienated your player-base with poor design and caused unsubscriptions? Retask the design team to make some cute mounts and pets and slap them in the store quick to make up the quarterly short-fall, no problem.
With people now mass unsubscribing from retail they look to classic era stuff and see untapped value added, not-so-micro-transactions they can sell to people as a way to prop up profitability. It’s only going to get worse as retail gets less popular, they have to get those store sales to keep profits up. I think by Wrath classic you’re going to have straight up insertion of new store mounts into the classic era. Maybe they’ll have some compromise system where people can tick a box and it replaces new store models with wrath era models to please those who are angered by it but still allow reaping profits, maybe not as half the point to some people who buy these things is being seen on them.
This is just the way it is. Blizzard is hungry for money and no one is going to stop them (this might be fine if they were delivering exceptional writing, systems, design, support, etc but that Blizzard is gone and the price no longer matches the product). They’ve stopped delivering interesting product in retail so they have an increasingly shrinking customer-base there to milk for store purchases which they need to keep corporate happy. The solution is as obvious as it is unstoppable.
44 Likes
Long time employees leaving, mass layoffs, 29% drop in player base, no new IP in 5+ years, dead games…yep the light is at the end of the tunnel for blizz. This company obviously not doing well and they are milking it for all it’s worth while they can. It’s sad to see honestly
27 Likes
lol who needs a month? Naxx been on farm for how long? Everyone quitting in droves? Guilds falling apart?
Release TBC.
3 Likes
No… legit… read the writing on the wall
This is a forced cash out.
Its coming quick
We won’t even get Wotlk. Guaranteed
10 Likes
Zero chance they dont release Wrath. I dont like Wrath at all, but there is zero chance it isnt released.
See you in 2 years, for Classic Wrath.
I’m looking forward to ashes of Creation after tbc classic…
2 Likes
yeah, haven’t heard this one before. (eyesroll)
Have to agree they’re either releasing wrath or pulling the plug entirely.
There is no way the servers stay up and sub fees keep rolling in without wrath classic being made. It was the height of WoW’s popularity, had the most players, was the end of the original story from the RTS series being wrapped up and marked a departure to new lore and new horizons once it wrapped up. A lot of players like myself also have very warm feelings, many consider the writing of it among the best WoW ever had.
The real thing to watch is whether they release a Cata classic. Cata changed the old world, removed tons of things, changed others. For the most part the world we see in retail at present is the cata world with a few tiny changes, yeah the sword in Silithus but if you go to the bronze dragon and go back you’re being sent back to the cata era version of that zone. Pretty much all major zone changes post cata can be undone via bronze dragon NPC and that world of Cata experienced. So if they do make a cata classic either it’s because it’s really cheap and easy to do at that point or because they’re desperate to create a sense of progression to keep classic era players playing and subbed. Because frankly speaking you can still experience the Cata world for the most part. The feel of the game, the community as of Cata is the type of community we have now, a game with dungeon/raid finder, a game with cross-realm grouping.
Roughly speaking there are maybe three distinct eras in WoW that span more than an expac:
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There’s the “original” era with Vanilla, Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King that had a certain feel and lore to it as well as design philosophy and a more or less unchanged game-world (minus naxx moving to northrend and a few other tidbits), a world of continents/zones that were featured in the Warcraft RTS games (more or less) and with lore that directly originated from those stories (yeah BC is kind of off but I’m not going to put it in its own era).
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then there’s the post-cataclysm world, a world that’s changing, a world with new writers setting the lore and going off in a new and dangerous direction from the safe writing of the old RTS games and related matters and visiting places that were never really involved in any of the classic Warcraft RTS games and often not even mentioned. Cata gave way to Mists, which gave way to WoD. So Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor. This in many ways swept away not insignificant parts of the old world from dungeons revamped to items no longer available, questlines gone, zones dramatically altered and then iterated on it with the new continent of Pandaria and a kind of reverse Cataclysm for outland which gave us AU Draenor (albeit while leaving actual outland intact and alone).
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then you have the Legion and beyond era, the borrowed power systems, continued new zones but a different feel. This is Legion, Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. In a way this era has marked retconning of a lot of lore (really happened in WoD but pushed out as of Legion and BFA), a new history for WoW. Legion started out compelling but the story has really grown kind of weak and retreaded since then.
The question is, does Blizzard have another era left in them? Or will it be a dragging on this third era that most people have grown to dislike and the death of the retail game?
11 Likes
Retail is dead. Even the remnants are finally leaving.
9 Likes
Is there any hint ashes of creation will release in 2021? Alpha one was pushed back to June, they’ve promised alpha 2, beta 1, and beta 2 follow that. Based on the schedule thus far i think a late 2022 release date is a more reasonable dream.
Sounds bad. I wish I knew what it meant.
Oh well, it probably means nothing in the real world. It’s all about what companies “should” do or “should” be and stuff like that. Which is fine, for people that like that stuff. I’ll just assume that it means:
It’s a complete bamboozle-puppy.
I’d say it must be a little bad. I went 6 month sub again to level out before TBC, then the announcement all came. I requested a refund, but they said I expended too much to receive anything back.
Funny thing is, it’s been three weeks lol I have gotten refunds at multiple periods in the past for only two months game time. Now they locked it at five months? Ok…
Those of us who aren’t NEETs, obviously
People have been saying this stuff forever, though not completely wrong. People seem to forget, you really think wow is making as much money as say COD every year or Overwatch 2 or so forth. They just shifted away from this game sadly, the People who made the game in the first place understood that, and for a long time it’s just been filled with people to invested or stubborn to leave. OR came back for Classic BC / wotlk etc,
Neet or not, are guilds breaking up and accounts lapsing over how long naxx has been out?
I’m fine reliving TBC and WotLK era before I relive Cata era and relive why I quit Cata and played Rift.
1 Like
It’s because they’re desperate to keep sub money and players. Look at how they removed game-time options. They axed the 30-day purchase because too many people were using it, seeing the state of the game and leaving again, so now you have to purchase 60 days and no discounts for buying say 6 months, if you want those you have to sub so they can hope you forget about it and get dinged again before you think to cancel.
4 Likes
blizzard move in to secure the bag.
1 Like
Their attitude in development “Crap on Vanilla” basically is what did it… The further they departed form Vanilla / TBC / Wrath in terms of classes the worse the game has done.
The more they push the MTX the worse the game has done.
Sure the profits were up, but over time people are starting to see Blizzard straight up did not care Post Wrath, and even to some degree during wrath. All they cared about after a time was money, and nothing but that.
You can see it in the “wheel of class balance” where clasess are intentionally made crap or insane based on who’s turn it is to be at the bottom… Its not by accident or just bad luck, its designed that way to keep people re-rolling and playing for “engagement metrics”
You can see it in Classic and TBC too with the just pure lack of care to really nuanced details that flat ruin game play for some classes in a “classical” perspective.
1 Like