How to get 12 million subs back. Step by step guide

Community General Discussion
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There will never be a return to 2008ish numbers because we have a different gaming climate. At it’s peak, WoW was also the peak. It was the online game everyone knew about, talked about, played, or at least had sort of heard of. It was a gaming sensation.

Today, even if it was better than it had ever been in every way imaginable, it is competing against games like Fortnite, Apex, PUBG, Overwatch, a myriad of FPS bro shooters, LoL, and a million other games that simply didn’t exist back then. People’s focus has also shifted away from the open world, go-exploring and quest for epic loot pace to the E sports speed and competition of instant gratification lobby games.

That isn’t a bad thing, the gaming world will continue to move on and adopt fads and explore the new hotness, but WoW needs to focus on being the best it can be, not trying to be what it was.

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That’s probably why they are putting out Classic, and TBC/WOTLK if Classic succeeds.

Retail and Classic/TBC/WOTLK/etc. servers will be Blizzard’s efforts to relive progression on different fronts to possibly be the best they can be.

Whether or not they actually are depends on the communities formed and Blizzard’s response to them, as well as lessons learned from at the very least Classic.

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Perhaps an academic thought experiment, but here’s how I look at it:

Imagine 0 subs in WoW. Yes 0.

How do you get 1 million? What would get anyone to play WoW?

Most would probably say “because I’ve been playing it,” most that were already playing it when I arbitrarily kicked ‘em out.

I say this is the group that like Warcraft products and would be those that started WoW when it was fresh - off the success of Warcraft RTS.

Then how do you get more?

Marketing and cross-genre exposure. Marketing may be straight forward, but cross-genre is harder. RTS’ was still fresh and could bring folks into WoW that never liked Warcraft, but enjoyed RTS.

So now we have more in the fold.

Similar games. EQ, was a big MMO. Conan, Camelot, etc. the market had decent saturation so WoW just needed to entice folks from other mmorpgs to try WoW - it didn’t have to entice folks from another genre to then try THIS genre and then THIS game (WoW).

Current WoW doesn’t have, really I argue, any of these. We’ve been removed from the initial launch vehicle of WoW; the RTS roots, the market saturation, the familiarity of the franchise.

I think to grow WoW you’d want to grow the tertiary things: cross-genre (another Warcraft RTS), stimulate mmorpgs (diablo mmorpg? May bring in folks to WoW who wouldn’t like mmorpgs but do like Diablo, and thus try World of Diablo/Sanctuary, and then migrate to WoW.).

That’s my hot take.

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As to the cries about kids not being “into” MMO’s, before WoW was popular Halo was popular and it was more akin to the modern pubg than WoW. Point being popularity among teenagers fluctuates and there is no telling what will be popular next. Most teenagers aren’t even your major spenders as they spend far less money than 20-30 year olds who have their first “real” job and are not used to saving.

One thing is for sure, WoW is kind of an old game at this point. Yes, its not the same game as 15 years ago but it is still a bit old. WoW is still fairly unfriendly to new players and as much as people hate skill trimming that helps with players who are overwhelmed with button bloat. Low level wow is garbage that virtually no one wants to stick with for long.

It’s very difficult for Blizzard to put out an expansion that appeals to the long term hardcore crowd as well as the game of the month jumpers. Blizzard needs to bring in/bring back more players but they won’t be able to put out a product that makes everyone happy. I think Wow Classic is a great example of Blizzard trying to find a solution to make a small(but significant) subset of their previous playerbase happy and bring them back.

I think titanforging is great for giving players the excitement that anything in the world might give them a good piece of gear. HOWEVER, it does cause problems with raid scaling and kills the drive to do dungeons or raids. Providing you have a small group of good players to play with you can quite easily out gear raids. Perhaps they should just scale back the proc rate significantly to make them more rare.

As to overall gearing I think M+ as a source of gear is great, especially for those who cannot find a good guild with a large enough player base to raid. HOWEVER, it should absolutely have weekly loot locks just like raids. If it drops the same gear as raids it should lock loot just like raids.

Valor and Justice are good, but mainly as a source of filler when you have that one piece that you just cannot get a drop for. I’m not opposed to bringing them back.

Nothing wrong with WQ, but there should be alternatives. Just as you can choose the resource to buy the roll tokens, or chose the follower in naz, you should be able to chose the type of activity you want to do to collect rep. Not specific activity say, but at least a general, ie pvp, dungeons, quests.

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Although I have to regrettably agree with everyone saying it’s not going to happen I really can’t say I dislike any of those ideas. :+1:

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Agreed 100% :100:

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It’s too late now, the TRUST has been broken by Blizzard.

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Not to mention 12 million, added to 35 million mau’s = 47 million mau’s. That isn’t very much when your game is in every country on earth.

There are billions of people on this planet. There are hundreds of millions playing fortnite.

…

There are youtube videos with over a billion views…

I mean…

It is time for them to start getting creative.

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Those subs are GONE. They aren’t coming back. Players want a more action oriented game now, they don’t want to stand there playing the keyboard.
I mean what does WoW offer as an experience that would be better than what its competitors are offering? Outdated gameplay? Outdated graphics? A static nonimmersive noninteractive world?

Not one single suggestion made by the OPer was an intelligent or useful suggestion. The OPer failed to identity actual major problems and simply listed some of their petpeeves, pet peeves which were minor personal grievances that I do not want.

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465

There’s only one way and it’ll never happen
Especially now. WoW “classic” should have been released with an ENTIRELY new game engine and a complete zone revamp while being familiar yet different.

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mythic raiding being 15-25 man scale would make alot of people happen.

‘’ but its hard to balance wahhh’’ shouldn’t be an issue stop being lazy or keep losing subs

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The 12m sub dream is dead. It’s not coming back. Genres like team/arena/BR shooters and MOBAs ate a massive part of WoW’s potential audience, and for good reason. They are, by and large, tighter experiences that don’t rely anywhere near as much on their own legacies to preserve interest.

If Blizzard wants a smash hit, they need a new game. There’s no amount of changes to the current game that’ll make it feel as nice on a moment-to-moment basis as the non-MMO competition.

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468

exactly the game is tooo time consuming for little reward that why the whole classic will fix it idea is stupid

we are older now noone wants to spend 2 weeks doing the same thing over and over just to have a ‘‘new’’ way of doing the same thing over and over ( pathfinding for example)

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469

you will end up bringing back a lot of the old players that left though. Due to the bad direction the game has taken.

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470

Saw that coming.

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a few options
Option one:
step 1, add classic servers with an active sub.
step 2, profit

Option Two:
Step 1, Balance RNG loot with a Fixed method of obtaining guaranteed loot
Step 2, bring back reforging.
Step 3, continue adding more playable races.
step 4, Make certain grinds account wide for the initial unlocks.
step 5, Have flying unlocked with just pathfinder 1.
step 5.2, if pathfinder 2 is still needed have it only lock flying in the new zones that are added with it.
step 6, add an option in game to get store mounts with some sort of achievement.
step 7, add the talent tree back into the classes for leveling but also keep the select a perk talents.
step 8, add bigger bags.

oh wait, that last one might just be an item on the wish list…

Step 9, temper RNG with Smart RNG, so it stops giving lower ilvl items for slots that have the highest ilvl already equipped. (more likely to give ilvl upgrades for the lowest ilvl slot.)

step 10, learn from what works in classic and adapt a version of it for live that takes into consideration what type of game live has become, such that a balance can be found in the force.

Edit: Option 3
Step 1, add pristine servers for every past expansion
step 2, profit

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Pathfinder part 1 is ok - what’s not ok is Pathfinder part 2.

I completely agree with the rest. The longer the grind, the bigger/cooler the reward should be.

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I agree with everything except this one here.

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No. Keep it at least time locked until the first raid is done. Also no high elves we have enough elves already.

Also those numbers are highly unlikely to ever be sustained in this game again. The genre is in decline and it would take something fresh to get anything near that, if it ever happened again. Wow’s early success was that it brought in a ton of non-mmo players because it was new and fresh (at least to them).

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I still fail to see how titanforging is such an issue for people. It doesn’t happen often enough to skew anything in terms of game balance. So some mythic raider gets his panties in a bunch because some casual has a piece of gear with a higher ilvl than him. Big deal. That casual player is thrilled to have it, and there are far more casuals than hard core raiders.

The argument has been made that people will have to grind endlessly to get titanforged gear with sockets. While I can certainly see this happening, it’s a personal choice of the player, and they’re going to need some amazing RNG luck and a whole lot of time. I doubt it could be done before the next tier forces that gear into obsolescence.

Speaking of tiers, I notice you left out bringing back tiers, as well as the elimination of sharding, CRZ, the loot pinata mentality, and a host of other items that I would have added to your list.

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