That’s basically all WOD was. The arrogance of Ion on full display.
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“How much can we trim and phone in before the playerbase notices, and complains” the expansion.
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A publicly traded corporation wouldn’t respond (rise to the bait) unless it affected the stock price or the c-suite. Otherwise, at most they’d say they disagree with the research report.
When Blizzard used to release sub numbers, they didn’t have to worry about share price. Were people really tracking Vivendi stock based on WoW? Digital was a small part of the Vivendi conglomerate back then.
Modern era Blizzard wants people to focus on corporate metrics like revenues, player engagement, etc. Iow, something they have more direct control over. Sell more pets. Roll out a six month sub deal for a free mount. Generate more WoW token sales. Bring back a retro game. Stuff like that.
The current wow situation is like this.
You send your buddy with a car to the store with 15 bucks to get some beer for your Superbowl party and he comes back with Mikes Hard Lemonade.
You tell him… “dude… we wanted beer. What the hell? Nobody wanted that.”
He tells you “Try it, You’ll like it. It’s so much better than what you wanted.”
You try it and you immediately hate it. So you tell him to get some beer before the game starts. You give him another 15 bucks and he drives down to the market a second time.
He comes back with STRAWBERRY mikes hard lemonade and says “See, it’s different now! It’s now way better than what you wanted.” And… of course it’s terrible. So the games already started and your kind of stuck with it now. You try the new one and also immediately hate it. Now your friends at the party hear that your friend Fred Finch in apartment 14 down the hall has beer so they start leaving to watch the game there.
As they leave you yell “No, don’t go down to 14, I promise things will be better soon” and some of them stay, but about 41% of your friends either abandon you for the great party at 14 or just leave to do other things.
At half time you explain to your buddy that he HAS to get it right this time. If you don’t have beer the whole party will fall apart. You tell him it doesn’t matter what kind… just regular normal beer. So he takes another 15 dollars and makes another run. Everyone at your party is waiting on the beer. Texts and videos are on snapchat and facebook of the great party down the hall in 14. A few more leave but some of them feel they just have too much time invested in your party and decide to stick it out.
Your buddy gets back and puts a brown paper bag on the table. Everyone runs up expecting a budweiser or busch… at this point nobody even cares, even some PBR would work…
…And he pulls out a pack of Mikes Hard Black Cherry Lemonade.
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Why are you surprised? I’ve watched numerous people here who used to complain simply disappear as their subs have run out. You don’t see their complain posts anymore because they’ve all left and moved on. The forums isn’t a clear indicator of player sentiment because of this fact. I’ve given up complaining myself and am just waiting for my sub to expire, another month and that’s it, I won’t be here anymore either.
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I would be far, far more interested in Classic if we could transfer those characters to the Retail version of the game, like they are evidently allowing with the BC Servers, in that players will be allowed to clone their characters and boost.
The whole tired argument they made for why they would not allow that; ie: “Preserving the challenge and prestige of legacy items” went out the door the moment they decided to do BC Servers (unless they did the unheard of and disabled Classic Raids on those BC servers), to the rage of the Classic crowd.
Now everyone and their mother will be doing Naxx 40 at level 70, and you better believe when they get bored they’ll ask for Wrath Servers, then Cata, then MoP. etc. till they outright demand transfers to retail, which Blizzard will give them. I mean it’s the same people that threatened to release Blizzard’s source code for World of Warcraft if they didn’t submit to Nostralius’ demands, so…
I think my biggest issue is they tend to cater to the Classic Crowd, and have ignored those of us who want to play the retail game. The time that the Developers have spent polishing Classic, is showing in the subpar product that retail is becoming rapidly.
Allowing us to play our characters we’ve played for over a year at this point into TBC is not at all like allowing you to transfer it to retail.
The vast majority of players were hoping for TBC and will be playing them.
What a completely dumb argument. Blizzard has said it’s not only easier to develop for Classic - given 95%~ of the game is already made - it’s cheaper too. Retail gets the vast majority of the time and effort, and the dev team that is solely working on Classic is very small. Devs don’t work on both, it’s one or the other.
Imagine blaming a tiny dev team that doesn’t work on retail for the failings of retail, just because you’re jealous of the people enjoying Classic.
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We are still here…but we are playing Classic. Playing to get our characters ready for the first, but not best, expansion to WoW. When WotLK classic is released, I will be happy.
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WoW isn’t a game that really supports whales, we aren’t a game like FFXIV or EvE Online where there is literally hundreds of store items or in-game real estate to dump literally thousands, tens, or even hundreds of thousands of real money on to. you can literally buy out the entirety of the wow shop for just a couple hundred.
Rather WoW is kept afloat by the sheer number of players making many small transactions. a token here, a token there, a random one time pet or mount purchase, etc, ontop of the base game/expansion cost and monthly or 6 month sub. Not whales.
Yes.
No offense to people who play WoW as if it were their job or people who actually make money from all their WoW playing, but the “professional” WoW players have different needs and interests than people who play it like an actual game when they are done with work and personal obligations.
I don’t need to be stimulated and engaged and challenged constantly, but I don’t want to farm anima mindlessly either. I don’t devour content for 12 hours a day when it is released, but I kind of expect to have something meaningful to do when I do log in.
I know that I sound like Goldilocks and the playerbase as a whole is diverse and fickle, but in the case of SL the devs did this to themselves.
WoW’s first 10 years or so were amazing to such a wide variety of players, but the newer devs thought they could invent a new, better wheel rather than reiterating on what had made WoW the biggest MMO. Either that, or they ignored statistics on player completion rates of different content and thought they could force players into grinding hungrily for gear and anima for an entire patch cycle.
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Streamers make money for saying that wow sucks.
why would you be surprised? it’s normal as seen in all past post-expansion launches, there’s always a sharp drop off after the first month or two. even the Neilsen mentions that it’s the same as seen for other past post-wow expansion launches
half? I dunno about that.
mostly all blizzard is looking for with beta testing is game breaking bugs/glitches and to test the launch experience, essentially anything that would prevent players from questing and reaching max level or would hurt/crash the servers, etc… as these generally always get fixed prior to launch… As for complaints about systems, requests, nitpicking, or “constructive feedback” blizzard always ignores these, even going as far back to the Cataclysm Alpha/Beta and Mist of Pandaria public Betas.
make first patch horrible but also delay is the way
remember when a wow expansion launched and it not only retained players but it kept growing? those were good times. blizzard should go back to that instead of normalizing 40% post-launch dropoffs.
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I like Mike’s hard, and the Black Cherry is the best flavor.
Beer is sour water that doesn’t have the decency to get me drunk.
And that real life anecdote is the problem with these kinds of threads. You like beer. I like hard cider and hard lemonade much more.
Neither of us make either of those things, we simply consume them.
Neither of us speaks for everyone else, and you don’t notice the guy at the party who’s being quiet and watching the game and enjoying his lemonade.
A player who buys enough tokens to do a full round of +15’s every month is by definition a whale.
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Ewwwwwwww…
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I was only playing SL to fill time until TBC.
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