The farce is strong in this one.
Well that’s an interesting theory but there’s nothing to back it up. It does seem pretty clear that subscriptions are down but as many discussions as we’ve had there is still no conclusive proof as to why membership is off.
The game is aging, there is more competition, it doesn’t fit the social media / mobile trend, there is no proof at all that one of these other reasons is not responsible for WOW’s problems.
Yes the vocal people who love to hate the video games they play all believe they have good reason to hate the video game they play but apparently those are not the people leaving. They are staying around to complain.
As for why the people who don’t complain are leaving? We have no idea.
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Get bent.
There is every reason to believe that WoW will very likely be rolled into GamePass, and you’d better believe that MS wants as big of a return on their investment as they can get. That being said, they’re obviously watching every move and decision the current Management is making and probably taking notes of changes to be made when the acquisition is done.
Btw, the aquisition has been approved in the U.S. from the FCC. The only wait now is the United Kingdom, which generally follows whatever the U.S. does. Assuming that holds true, the aquisition is happening. Besides, don’t you think MS did every possible due diligence in their legal dept to see if a acquisition would be likely to be approved before they made the offer? If they didn’t think it would happen, trust me, they wouldn’t have made the offer.
All in all, the MS acquisition is the best chance we have to get actual leadership at Blizzard, and getting rid of the current group of incompetents running things now. So to reintegrate;
-Help us, Microsoft, you’re our only hope!
It was a joke instead of force get your panties out of a bunch .
Fair enough. Mybad.
According to the forums, since the game launched.
When they added LFR/group finder/etc and the players became out of touch with the players.
You identified the problem right here. When they were a small developer creating games they wanted to play, they were able to capture an audience they were connected with because they were the audience. By creating games for money, they are chasing an audience they can’t connect with, because they don’t share the same ideas of what makes a game “good.”
There’s more wisdom to this saying than most players would ever admit. 
Just look at some of the ideas and suggestions on GD. It’s mostly one sided and spoken without truly understanding the impact on the game. Voicing a complaint without suggesting a solution…or a solution without gauging the impact.
It is what it is, but it should be something else. 
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Eh it started it Wrath.
Blizz’s early intentions were admirable. The game was sacred to them, and it showed. Obviously, things didn’t stay this way.
I believe the actual shift began in the period of BC’s end to mid Wrath. Something changed in that period. It was a subtle but not unnoticeable shift. A little part of the game’s soul just wasn’t there anymore, as if it had been abandoned and left to rot.
So yeah… from end BC to mid Wrath is when it started imho.
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I was just looking recently at an All-Clad 2.5qt sauce pot and came close to getting it. That’s a sweet looking sauce pot, although the handle design catches a lot of grief in the reviews.
I ended up snagging a pretty sweet deal on a Calphalon Premier HA 2.5qt.
Sauce pots are the only cookware I’ll splurge on higher tier stuff. Most everything else I get borders on meh…
listening to players really ended when gold went on the cash shop and suddenly cash shop related metrics became FAR more enticing to bliz management
motivating and manipulating players for extra grind isn’t really a goal until you have a cash shop
motivating and manipulating players for extra cash shop buys isn’t a goal until you have a cash shop with gold on it
these things have been the focus of Ion’s leadership and control of wow, and it has utterly destroyed wow’s reputation from being player value focused to being shareholder focused
How many businesses do you know of, small cap, mid cap or large cap, that don’t care about making money?
Actually there are plenty. They are the ones that go out of business.
You’ve misunderstood me. There is a difference between making games you like in order to make money, and making games you hope someone else will like in order to make money.
We should be so fortunate.
If decisions about WoW were being made by people who cared about making money, they wouldn’t implement so many bone-headed design decisions.
Game companies that want to make money are GOOD for players, because it means doing things that are popular and fun. Give me a game publisher that wants to make money over an “I only care about my vision” publisher, any day.
All businesses aim to maximise profit, its just that Blizzards devs are just too arrogant to see that doing things their way and not listening to their customers doesn’t work very well.
If the dev team cared about making money, they wouldn’t have tried removing flight in WoD.
And they certainly wouldn’t have kept up with their insane War on Flying ever since.
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Around the time of the Activision merger back in 2009. It took a bit to really take effect after that point in most people’s eyes but if you sit and think about it, that was around the time the game was becoming more marketable because it was more of a mainstream thing that everyone was trying out rather than the game parents heard about on the news because some kid dropped out of school to just play WoW all day back when we were going through the gaming scare of the early 2000s post Columbine.
When the game, as well as other games showed they could be insanely lucrative which coincided with the social media boom more or less of 2009-2010, and definitely after Candy Crush, that’s when you started getting investors who didn’t know a thing about the market they just invested in, but knew it made money and wanted in on it. At that point gaming became about appeasing shareholders which is why gaming has been on a downward spiral of this nonsense since about 2012. Severe cuts to production, releasing half finished products, microtransactions, rehashing old games with a new coat of paint, etc, all in the name of the bottom line and quarterly reports. Blizzard released WC3R in an ABYSMAL state and later admitted they chose to make that decision because they were afraid of delaying it a second time because people refunded their preorders the first time and they didn’t want that to happen again. They were more concerned with keeping preorders than releasing a polished version of a beloved game for many.
I feel deep down there’s a fair few developers on any project who know their product isn’t good or what it should be but their hands are more or less tied because appeasing the players will always take a backseat to appeasing the shareholders due to legal obligations to do so. Look at Battlefield 2042 and how that game was in its beta before release, or even the release itself and a lot of the decisions they chose to make with that game. I imagine a lot of developers on that game were not at all happy with it or some of the changes like removal of voice chat entirely in a team focused competitive shooter, but the prospect of people might say mean things might have affected sales therefore it was removed only to later be readded when they realized removing it harmed their sales far more.
This is also why games in the Western sphere are heavily paying lip service to political agendas, WoW is no exception. They do not care about these ideas in the slightest, but realize if they slap some nonsense about diversity in the marketing that it will sell more because there’s a lot of idiots out there who will pay for things solely because they feel it has messaging that caters to their beliefs. I.E Kaepernick’s Nike shoes and people were buying overpriced garbage because “Nike cares about these issues!”
Yet we can look to Pelagos, or really any LGBT representation in any game that people think the company cares about. . . until you realize in any country where these ideas are taboo, namely China, they are scrubbed entirely because at the end of the day they care more about selling the product than the ideas they pretend to care about that are a marketing tool in the Western sphere. There’s an old meme about Bethesda’s twitter accounts and they are all showing off rainbow colorations of their logo for Pride month, except one, the one for the Middle East where they kept it just the standard black square. That alone should tell you how much companies actually care about these ideas which is to say they are nothing more than a marketing ploy for gullible idiots to buy their product to “support them” because they “care about the things I do.”
Oh, please. The WoW dev team was plenty arrogant long before that.
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