Content to remedy the intolerable Night Elf and Forsaken situations

Lore Story Forum
827

No one claimed that they were going to go under. The question here is whether burning Teldrassil was good for this product’s ROI, and whether the product itself can be said to have improved - and the data’s nowhere near granular enough to tell us that. The best that we have is the continuing decline of Blizzard’s Monthly Active Users - although we will see what happens to that figure in the fourth quarter.

So, should we be concerned? Probably. The question here isn’t whether ATVI is going to go under - that would be pretty ridiculous. The two questions in my mind are these:

a) Will Blizzard be restructured?
That’s possible, and they’ve already undergone some restructuring. I believe as well that ATVI is folding a “fixer” team into the entity - that’s not a good sign.
b) Will WoW continue to provide an ROI sufficient enough to justify ATVI’s resource spend on the product as opposed to another project?
That we don’t know, and should all be very concerned about. This is the matter that gets obfuscated when you look at highly aggregated data and try to make assumptions that it doesn’t allow you to make, especially if you ignore the six factors that I mentioned previously as you appear to be doing. The risk isn’t that ATVI is going to break apart, the risk is them saying that WoW’s resources are better spent elsewhere.

828

That’s precisely my feeling about it BUT I wasn’t RPing in Darnassus all that much.

829

I think the other factor that people miss is that Teldrassil wasn’t the first time we went through this. It happened in Cataclysm too - which took a lot of care to show the Night Elves as being in an overall losing position, and as not being capable of holding back the Horde, even though canonically they were winning. The presentation was humiliating, and the demands for a resolution started up and went for four years.

Back then people were optimistic that phasing technology would mean that the wins in Ashenvale would be depicted - they weren’t. Then we moved on to MOP where they introduced the High King and had him show up Tyrande during a patch where the Night Elves are the ones responsible for just about every failure the Alliance has. We get a “crack team” of Night Elves that get taken apart by the Horde player and a blademaster just before its leader gives away military secrets. Darnassus is successfully infiltrated (the plan apparently was to actually ring the bell in Darnassus and cause all this carnage, but backlash canned that idea). That’s okay though because we have scenarios, right? One of them could depict Ashenvale - but even though the Alliance had fewer of those in the infamous robot cat patch, they couldn’t even bring themselves to do that.

So, MOP winds down with a whimper. Ashenvale’s awful questing is locked in forever, the faction war is over. What this episode demonstrated is that the Night Elves were never going to be allowed to meaningfully hit back onscreen. If memory serves, we learned that we got Ashenvale back in a tweet. Yay. Too bad Blizzard couldn’t bring themselves to invest at all in showing us beating our faction rival there the way they invested to show our faction rival beating us in our own house, in what again wasn’t even a victory for them.

So bringing this to Teldrassil, how exactly am I supposed to feel motivated when I feel like I’ve seen a watered down version of this movie before? We know by now that Blizzard will not give us a meaningful way to hit back against the Horde - and that prediction turned out to be absolutely correct - so why bother? What’s the point? If all I can do is lose or at best have my victories stuffed in the deepest darkest corner where no one can see them, how is that motivation to me?

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830

Is your imagination really that limited? That sure wasn’t how I spent my time. My RP was as a vengeful hunter sticking it to the Horde every chance I got. My present RP is a followup to those events. Drahliana has been fighting in the Alliance armies since Vanilla she’s quite aware that there are battles you win, battles you lose, and battle in the future that has your number on it.

For all the touting of how intense an RP player you’re supposed to be, I expected better than just an absolute binary approach as to how to play your character.

5 Likes
831

I’m going to add something here to further address Collmean’s comments on WoW’s relative success.

First, sharing this:
http^s://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/acqhph/i_estimated_subscriber_numbers_using_google_trend/

This demonstrates a relationship between search trend data and subscriber numbers - intuitive when you think about it. Now, here is Warcraft search data from 2004 on:

http^s://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=warcraft
http^s://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=warcraft,world%20of%20warcraft

Let’s zoom in a bit:
http^s://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=warcraft,world%20of%20warcraft

Legion really confuses the data here, but we can pick out a few things. We can see a spike before BFA’s release, there’s another one around the classic release, there’s SOME movement. But I decided to download this data into a CSV and just run some conditional averages. I pulled 6/5/2016, 6/12/2016, and 6/19/2016 because these were extreme outliers. I came up with the following search interest averages:

Year - Warcraft - World of Warcraft
2016 - 17.96 - 9.36
2017 - 10.06 - 5.68
2018 - 9.83 - 7.98
2019 - 7.98 - 4.75
2020 - 8.46 - 4.85
2021 - 7.00 - 4.00

By expansion (release dates used as cutoff)

WOD - 19.03 - 9.92
Legion - 10.47 - 6.00
BFA - 8.38 - 4.82
Shadowlands - 7.93 - 5.07

But, let’s take that outlier out and zoom in again:

http^s://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2017-01-01%202021-02-05&geo=US&q=warcraft,world%20of%20warcraft

Pasting that into my little spreadsheet:

2017 - 46.91 - 26.26
2018 - 45.87 - 27.54
2019 - 37.21 - 22.15
2020 - 39.63 - 22.40
2021 - 31.40 - 18.4

Legion - 47.05 - 27.27
BFA - 39.18 - 22.48
Shadowlands - 37.27 - 23.47

Overall the trend is pretty clear here I think. There is a marked overall interest decline, and based on the relationship described earlier, that should translate to lower subscriber counts.

@ Drahliana

I’m sorry that after being demoralized for as long as I was that I didn’t feel like lying to myself over what Blizzard was presenting. I shouldn’t have to imagine a better story - a better story should just exist for me to feel good about immersing myself in.

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832

No it’s because that no one was in Darnassus when I was there unless I was running my guild meetings over at the Gate Pavillion.

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833

No… you made the decision to take what came as an excuse to give up. So apparrantly did most of the people you Role Played with. I on the other hand went the John Paul Jones route… the guy who with his ship sinking from underneath him uttered those famous words when the Brits called for his surrender.

“I have not yet BEGUN to fight.”

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834

I mean, that’s great, but we don’t change outcomes. We have no agency at all. Blizzard decides who wins, what goes onscreen, and in the end, they drive player perceptions - and those perceptions drove people from the story - a lot of them. That’s an indication about the product quality, which I’m not going to pretend is better than it is on the assumption that such somehow makes me “tough”.

If you want RPers like myself back, or if Alliance PVP teams want PVPers like myself back, then Blizzard is going to have to make a better product. This is a sales proposition, and if you are going to be Blizzard’s sales rep, give me something better than this.

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835

You soiund like that’s some sort of change with BFA, as if that wasn’t the case since Day One of the RTS. This never was a sandbox game.

RP of course is what you do that’s SEPARATE from the game storyline. You have the agency to make what you will of what’s provided.

836

RP of course is what you do that’s SEPARATE from the game storyline. You have the agency to make what you will of what’s provided.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCuBh7VwRHs

You’re tiptoeing around the issue of motivation, which was impaired well before BFA, and was demolished with BFA. Again, you’re doing a remarkably poor sales job here.

1 Like
837

teld was two years ago, no one does this

838

I mean you can rp being sad, the rest of us are rping fighting the scourge, trying to hunt sylvanas, rebuilding, Imagination and all that, and blizzard already gave us story reasons to do all this, which you would know if you actually kept up with the story.

839

I shouldn’t have to. You’re the great RPer and you couldn’t find any role for your NIght Elf in BFA other than to be in you own words “a crying refugee in Stormwind”.

That pretty much sank any gravitas you might have had in your argument.

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840

Yeah, this was disingenuous before, it’s gotten even more ridiculous now.

“Sell me this pen.”
“WHAT ARE YOU? WEAK!? So who cares if it can’t write and is bent in six places!? ARE YOU NOT THE GREAT PENWRITER!? Do you not have the raw skill and power to force this pen to give you ink!? Can you not scribble for 20 minutes on the page and get that ink out!?”

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841

Missing the point again I see. Drahs point is there is nothing stopping you from rping anything but a Crying Refugee in SW. The options are limitless.

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842

Sort of.

When you RP in an MMORPG, you have to accept its rules. One of those is that the runner of that MMORPG dictates what the material facts of the world are. As RPers, we get to play with immaterial facts. We also have to accept the material facts otherwise you’re creating parallel worlds in which you can’t interact with other people - because you have to bring them up to speed with the little world that you created for yourself.

If you want to create that world for yourself - that’s what Discord is for, and that’s an arena I’ll jump into.

Otherwise, I have to accept RPing in a world where the Night Elves pretty much suck and lost everything, where my claims to competence are met with what the game is telling me, and where it increasingly looks like the character that I want to play is little more than a lie.

And again, I can’t be motivated to do that. The world doesn’t appeal to me anymore to RP in. Speaking to a lot of my fellow RPers as well? It didn’t appeal to them either. I know people who threw up their hands and said “yeah, my character died”, before they left the franchise, likely for good. That’s demoralization at work.

But hey, maybe you can jump in and try to be Blizzard’s salesperson here. Maybe you can tell me why I should funnel a portion of my entertainment budget their way instead of towards a world that actually wants my engagement, or to a different video game entirely? I’ll give you a hint - trying to shame me or imply that I’m a weak person for not wanting to bother to see more in this world than is there isn’t going to work. Explain why this world should appeal to me, why it should deserve my entertainment dollars.

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843

Well since you’re implying that you’re going to ignore the near limitless rp potential because you want to be the victim, seems you already made up your mind. So not going to try and convince you otherwise.

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844

Micah, you can do better than this. But if you’re going to just shove disingenuous denialist trash then I’m not sure why you bother, or why it’s so important to you to tell Night Elf fans that their concerns aren’t real.

845

You just love to put words in my mouth don’t you? No one said their concerns weren’t real. And this isn’t the first time you replied to me with something that I never said. I just said the RP potential is limitless.

846

I’m aware that you haven’t explicitly said it, but you’re doing it.

I don’t think I would ever catch you pushing back on Horde concerns on the basis that they could have picked the rebel option or that they could have simply pretended that they were a good person despite the direction that the Horde was taking. I’ve seen you instead rush to highlight the very real issue of Horde motivation - and that is a real issue. But when we flip that treatment to the other side, we can see what you do. My motivation to RP isn’t an issue because the possibilities are limitless! Just ignore the impression that the story is leaving you with!

Now I get it - your heart is with the Horde, that’s what you like. I would not expect you to sympathize with people who don’t share your interests - but there’s a difference between that and actively showing up to dismiss people’s problems and concerns in the way that you do.

So again, if you want to sell this franchise, tell me that things aren’t this bad and that I’m complaining over nothing - then sell it. Otherwise, I’m not sure what the point of this is.

1 Like