You’re not the only one.
Fantastic news! Will Blizzard use this news to get their act together?
1 Like
Of course not. That isn’t how WoW or Blizz works.
Plus WoW has far outlived it’s expected lifespan. No reasonable person would recommend dumping a ton of resources into the game to “save” it at this point.
1 Like
Dont know if you’re being sarcastic or not but honestly, they will eventually have to. It’s going to just keep getting worse and worse until the only place left to go is back up.
Seems its going to take failure on the scale of Diablo III launch for Blizzard to act.
I’m not being sarcastic, I am happy 14 is doing as well as it is, but i also hope wow uses this to step it up cuz in the end only we will benefit from competition.
1 Like
Diablo 3 was a failure at launch and not 16 years old…
Like I said earlier, it would be foolish for Blizz to dump a lot of money into WoW at this point.
I actually kind of agree with you.
Dump a bunch of money “into WoW?” Yeah that ship has probably sailed.
But dump money into the Warcraft IP, they definitely should and will. What form will it take though? WoW 2? A WoW overhaul? WoW on mobile/console?
Side note though, I dont think fixing WoW requires dumping a ton of money. It requires a 180 shift in design philosophy and it pains me to say this, but a replacement of current dev leadership.
2 Likes
I rarely advocate for someone to lose their job, and I still think there can be adjustments without full on firings. But the current dev leadership needs to change. This is now three expansions with this newer design philosophy and only one was regarded positively. The other two are flailing under its own over abundance of work, balancing, and problems to fix.
FF14 is a good game. I won’t say it blows WoW out of the water, but it’s quite the solid experience. What really benefits it, however, is the fact the developers care about the players’ feedback vs. WoW’s developers who ignore feedback on everything. Over there, the game feels like a “fun first” type philosophy while the current WoW team is a “play time metrics first” philosophy. The attempt to force players to feel obligated to log in every single day to do something ends up having the opposite effect. I haven’t played either game in a few days but i feel more guilty not playing WoW because I’m missing out on anima than FF14 because I’m missing out on…what, Poetics and experience? Oh well.
As I said, I rarely advocate for someone to be removed from their job. But…Ion is not a good leader for this game. He was a great encounter designer, and raids are still very good in WoW (Castle Nathria is actually one of my favorites). But he designs the entire game like a raid where every little decision for each encounter is being controlled and suffocating the player’s freedom. It’s not…good. We need a change and we need it fast, or WoW might finally start to peter out of existence.
2 Likes
I don’t think those numbers are correct. I don’t believe FF has more players or subs than WoW, no way.
I think the trend it measures (Blizzard losing a lot of players, and players being very inactive in retail) is correct though, which should be source of worry for Blizzard if they care about their game. Although any patch this long would have this effect, nothing Blizzard can do outside of releasing 9.1.
1 Like
It’s been years since I played the game but I don’t remember ARR being that fantastic in terms of story. It did a lot of interesting world-building but in terms of actual story-telling, it was mostly like “Okay, the Empire is here and they’re bad, and their bad god-killing robot is really bad, so go beat up the Empire”. Seems like mostly a lot of justification to setup the initial raid, which is totally fine, but WoW does basically the exact same thing - all of the Revendreth lore leads up to Castle Nathria, and then you raid Castle Nathria.
why not? how many more platforms is 14 on? its very likely this article has truth to it.
Nah…don’t think that’s true OP
…but they still have the better game right now and will eventually.
WoW has much more mass appeal in Western culture though, on top of having been so big that it is part of popular culture. (South Park episodes, Mr. T, etc.) When the average gamer thinks “MMO”, s/he still thinks “WoW.”
I don’t think the Japan market is big enough to make up for that.
Not to diminish XIV’s success I know the game is bustling with activity right now and that popular WoW content creators have been looking at the game lately, but I think Classic TBC has a lot more to do with the current state of retail WoW than another game.
Regardless of all that, Wow is on 1 platform. 14 is on what? 3 currently? The ps4 install base alone is a huge demograph.
There is no surprise to me 14 would pass wow in active users if this article is to be believed.
Not a reliable source. Nothing is until the companies start reporting their actual metrics–which they won’t.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Play what you like and shush.
1 Like
I wouldn’t mind a fire being lit under a few 'hinds here or there.
This should be interesting.
This is going by a vague daily log in metric, but even using it I don’t understand how they say FF is #1.
Their own data seems to say otherwise:
FF - 2.50 million
WoW - 3.29 million
WoW classic - 1.46 million
Pretty sure 3.29 > 2.50 million?
They are already tracking retail and classic separate.
???
They don’t have X-box (yet?) if you’re going to go with platforms to support your point, so they only have Mac/PC and the PlayStation ecosystem.
But I don’t think platforms are as big of a game changer as you believe, especially for a genre that requires a keyboard and that is traditionally known for be bad or non-existent on console.
lol what article are you looking at?
It links to this mmo population website which you can then click on each individual game and see their daily players (however they determine that)
Retail WoW:
Final Fantasy
WoW Classic: