I’ll have to give it a read when I get off work!
5/22/2015
Blizzard announces no flight ever again.
6/10/2015
Blizzard changes mind - will return flight
http://www.polygon.com/2015/6/10/8761289/world-of-warcraft-warlords-of-draenor-flying-update-mmo-pc-mac-blizzard; Dev Water Cooler announcement on Blizzard website reveals Pathfinder Achievement without details or release date.
During that 19 day interval, servers emptied, guilds folded, long-time veteran players left the game in droves. For the first time, Blizzard employees solicited, online, cancellation reasons from departing players. These forums were flooded with over 150,000 posts, hundreds of threads in protest.
That’s 19 days where nothing else happened.
Before they killed flight, WoW was losing almost 1 million subs a month. Once they decided oops, OK FLYING… the sub loss fell to only 33k per month.
Math ? Hard.
6 Likes
I spread my wings and fly away!
The Flying Wardens pull me down and ask for my reputation levels. I then mount my dead horse and lead them on an illegal flying horse chase. They end up losing me because I’m a death knight and so I go faster than them.
The tone deaf double punch of the no flying announcement was that shortly after the interview they announced a new mount for the cash shop, the Arcane panther, and the advertisement showed it flying over Shadowmoon Valley.
3 Likes
It’s all about time gating and making this game stretch to keep subs only.
5 Likes
Ummm… okay.
Not what I was referencing though.
Ummm… neither of the articles you provided document any of this.
In fact, I have never been able to find any reputable articles documenting any of it anywhere on the net, just player declarations and speculation.
But regardless, none of your assertions have anything to do with the two sentence post I made that you are replying to.
Reading comprehension? Harder apparently.
The only thing you can do is unsub. Not logging in for a few days won’t hurt them any if the monthly subs are still comin in…
The documentation exists. You just need to do a search for Activision-Blizzard earnings calls for 4th quarter 2014, and 1st & 2nd quarters of 2015. Then you have to find the sub numbers for WoW by month… it’s a lot to go through. But the hit they took in the week following Memorial Day 2015 was the largest ever.
Up until the earnings call after the events Velara discussed, (which began at Blizzcon 2013 when Mike Morhaime accidentally let it slip during the Directv live broadcast that there wouldn’t be flying at the release of WoD, and they planned to release it sometime later in the expansion - which I personally witnessed because i was watching it live - was the beginning of everyones heads exploding…), Blizzard used to release monthly WoW sub numbers every quarter, so at the time it was easy to see how fast the exodus was, and when 1 million per month changed to around 33k (which was actually low for a year into an expansion but that was due to some players returning because flying was back.)
The Nov 2015 earnings call was the last time Blizzard released WoW sub numbers.
Great article on WoW losing 44% of its subs in only 6 months:
~https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/08/05/world-of-warcraft-has-lost-44-of-its-subscribers-in-six-months-but-thats-okay/?sh=1f22753527f6
I would love to know the play-by-play of whoever it was in finance that finally caught on to the historical subscription hemorrhaging going on for WoW, took it to their boss who then went to Alex Afrasiabi and Tom Chilton and demanded to know what the [heck] was going on and demand they FIX IT IMMEDIATELY.
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One I posted above is from before WoD even launched.
1 Like
Yea? Try this one I posted and it wasn’t hard to find. I don’t know what you searched for, maybe how to be a blizzard shrill saying this never happen? Flying... Here's the truth - #2377 by Chriarcy-nesingwary
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My post directly relates to your topic: the history of flight in wow, which any competent historian would agree necessarily includes Blizzard’s efforts to get rid of it.
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AHAHHA yeah, I’ve not been able to get in game in forever, I just got back in and am still in this thread…
As I’ve said and simply put. Blizzard MADE it a problem. It wasn’t a problem when they put it in the game but Ion and his henchmen turned it into one.
9 Likes
Ions a lawyer. By law, he has to hate fun.
3 Likes
Took them long enough to add flying,so I’ll try another month which should have been implemented long ago because now I don’t know if I can catch up after a year and some odd months unsubbed.
1 Like
And lie with intellectual vocabulary.
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After watching the requirements for flying in patch 9.2 on flying they can eat a bag of d***s, this game just might be dead to me.
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Definitely is to me. If I wanted to play a mobile game I’d download one on my phone for free and not pay $15 a month for it.
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It was ALWAYS an end of journey reward. ALWAYS. And it still IS.
I always felt getting max level was the start of the journey in all the expansions.