And social media.
A big part of WoW’s draw in the early years was as an online chat room. Which was still a novelty for many people.
Remember, WoW came out just a year after myspace, and a couple years before even facebook was available to the general public. Not to mention all the newer sites and apps.
Mobile MTX stays on mobile, it doesn’t move to the PC or console marketplace, because it can’t survive there.
If it could, we’d have seen that happen years ago. No major publisher would have ignored those profits if they could have made it work outside of mobile games.
Conduits were such a head-scratcher. They weren’t even implemented until late in the beta, and the universal feedback from beta testers was… “why do this? just take it out”
They could have removed conduits completely and nobody would have missed them.
Lol!!! I was thinking the same thing. Not sure why they add that to every post. Annoying to read or imagine.
The time played mechanic was installed to pad subs out. If the game is fun, the people will stay. People don’t like being manipulated with drip fed content.
wiggles toes
Conduits didn’t add to time played, though. You just… sort of got them as you went along.
And the disparity between specs was huge. Some people get a conduit upgrade and it’s 13% extra damage for their strongest ability. I get a conduit upgrade and it’s 0.1% Mastery - but only with a 1/3 uptime.
Even by modern Blizzard standards, conduits were an especially stinky pile of trash.
You’re not wrong about the conduits.
I appreciate that a post just… full of positivity and hope is alive and well. The fact that most of the replies are just “well in the past it’s been terrible so therefore it will probably be terrible again!” is just… why?
Why not let people be excited and hopeful? There’s no need for so much negativity. Y’all love the game right? Then why are you so dead set on the fact that it will fail, seeming to hope it will so that you can feel morally superior? For what? The game is in a worse state, is that really worth it? I think it’d be much more useful to point out the good news, the things we like, that are excited or hopeful for, that would be good for everyone.
I prefer to stay cautiously optimistic.
wiggles toes
I love the optimism, really do. But that being said I don’t see it breaking much more than 10 mill.
I can see 10mill maybe in the expansion that proceeds Dragonflight. But only if Dragonflight does an amazing job and lands great scores all around while the next expansion looks promising while also holding true to Warcraft lore and feel.
But there are some problems. Which is why I can say 10mill for like an expansion opening like what we saw with WoD. But beating WoW’s old record? No. I can’t see that, and these are the reasons.
There are so many ways for this company to shoot itself in the foot that I just cannot see it breaking its old records. Much less the way they have worked for profit too using in-game store items and valuing the wealth of some customers willing to buy over the health of the game. Dragonflight is in my opinion a reaction to fix some of what has become many of the problems with this game which is why it seems so good. But give it another expansion or two and I won’t be surprised if we see another Shadowlands.
We’re simply pointing out that this is exactly what people said at the start of every expansion.
Remember all the praise that Torghast got, before Shadowlands came out?
The individual parts of every expansion look terrific. In isolation. It’s when they all get put together that the puzzle pieces don’t fit and the whole thing falls apart.
This is honestly the best position in my opinion.
To much negativity makes anyone sound like an ex in the relationship using Facebook to express the scorn.
wiggles toes
LOL That’s definitely a good way to put it. And I agree.
I’ll take ‘spicy responses to others’ for the daily double. 
There was a lot of hype for the titanic ( the unsinkable ship ) that worked out well.
Yeah but if DF sucks, you won’t die from it. People seem to forget that games are a fun luxury, and if the game sucks, you find something else to play and get excited for.
I don’t experience this mass “disappointment” some players go through when an expansion doesn’t meet their expectations. It’s just a game, after all. I’d rather find something else to get excited about.
If you play the game solo, sure. The problem comes when groups of people come together and spend many years playing together… and then a bad expansion breaks it all up.
And those kinds of social groups… well, they tend to just never reform. So the draw for all those players is just gone, now.
But my point was don’t dismiss opinion even ones that don’t agree. It was brought up to the people that made the titanic that there were not enough life boats for a ship that size but they said it was unsinkable and it was a waste of space and materials to put more on.
Telling a linear story via campaign quests and raids just isn’t compelling anymore. The way they’ve implemented sharding and the dated engine prevents them from making players feel like they’re actually having an impact on the world.
In Slands they made the campaign quest mandatory which is a horrible idea, like if people want to ignore your story and just dungeon que, bg grind, or just kill mobs to level up they should be able to do that without slogging through some dated story telling method.
They’re put an insane amount of resources into raids zones and campain quests every time because they tie into the story. This means you have a lack of PvP content and a lack of M+ content. This has been the case for multiple expansions. Until they put just as much effort into PvP and M+ as they do the story related content I think the quality of the game is going to continue to bleed out.
I do not care about dragon riding it’s just a means to end. Like wow I got where I was going faster now I’m doing the thing I’ve done thousands and thousands of times before…
Putting in old dungeons on a rotation for M+ isn’t going to make the expansion more exciting, and adding a solo queue 3v3 bracket really brings 0 new pvp content. We’ve had 3s for a long time. A good chunk of the player base always pugs their arena teams so really all you’re doing is offering premade protection which IS NOT a novel concept.
They don’t even have to be original just common pvp game modes that are even in their other titles would be welcome, but we want to die on the hill of creepy guilds and communities and watching npcs do idle animations at each other while people pat themselves on the back and say, “ain’t that just the most amazing thing you ever done seen?”
Every expansion they find a way to make meaningless busywork to eat up office hours for themselves too in BFA it was scaling, in shadowlands it was covenants and this time around its the talent rework.