The only thing that needs to be changed is the list of MMOs that you play. World of WarCraft needs to be removed from it.
But people were still drawn to the game and bought it?
For the game to hit rocket bottom and be moved outta the public eye, and eventually sold off as it no longer profitable, and goes to the hands of some one that actually just wants to make a fun cool game and is not as concerned about profits.
If you build it, they will come. Warcraft needs the hand of people who want to make a fun RPG game, not looking at the bottom dollar.
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No, that’s not going to happen anytime soon - without some assistance… So if you won’t provide it, then you get to suffer my presence in this community a while longer…
No, I don’t think I will take the perceived ‘culture’ anywhere. Your post has been flagged for standing up for the likes of Afrasiabi! 
Don’t like it? Too bad. Right now Blizzard Entertainment is in damage control mode, and possibly looking at long term options to avoid the stigma its’ former employees has caused. As long as employees’ careers stand to get impacted by their association with Blizzard and the “Blizzard Fraternity”, Blizzard will seek alternatives to lessen the impact.
WoW, is an old game, accept it. Expansion based facelifts can only go so far, whereas the core architecture has its own limitations. A complete overhaul and relaunch of the game could possibly be Blizzard’s best option at this point, as it allows them to apply significant upgrades to mechanics and gameplay as well as infrastructure, rather than the ‘band-aid’ expansion changes we currently have…
actual gameplay. not grindy bullcrap. imo, that’s what it will take.
Standing up for the likes of them? Did you read the entire thing or just the first line?
Maybe read that. But of course, why would you read it? You just want to spout more cancel culture nonsense.
Some of you people are infuriatingly dense.
So? It’s also expensive and not as profitable as investing dev dollars in other things. Learn basic economics. Opportunity costs. If they’re investing company resources, effort, marketing, dev teams into something it means they’re not investing in something else they could be. Just because WoW has a positive balance sheet doesn’t mean it will be from a business and corporate stewardship perspective worth actively developing as opposed to maintenance mode which would slash costs dramatically while still leaving earnings potential. Once they have enough “Classic era” period servers going this becomes a much more attractive prospect. Make it free to play, fire everyone but a minimal bug fixing team and a team to create new store mounts, pets, outfits and you can retask your money into something more compelling that generates $50 for every dev dollar spent to WoW’s $10 or whatever it is.
Look at it from a return perspective. If a property is making less money than it historically did are you going to keep money spent on it the same or slash it to the amount the hopeless addicts sticking around will bear? You’re going to cut content for the next round. Spend less, less dev time, more psychological tricks to extend playtime this then feeds into more players leaving which means less money until it hits maintenance mode.
This can stop at any time. You’re not addressing the death spiral the game is in. Population is continuing to go down. The updates also bring less and less. More grinding, smaller zones, updates and lore and content few people like.
While we don’t know how many players WoW has there is strong evidence that it has fallen to 1-2 million at most. The death spiral can easily continue from here if 10.0 doesn’t make a strong change and we could see it dropping to half a million or less.
Comparing unlike things. Blizzard is only one unit in a larger company but one which still isn’t exactly a behemoth to the point it can just ignore a property not performing because their properties list for investors is small enough to fit on a single sheet. It doesn’t matter if WoW is scrapped to them as it won’t destroy their brand (Blizzard’s brand is already in the trashcan and ACTI has CoD as well as mobile to hang onto), they can just make something else with the IP and may deem it more profitable to do so.
I’m pretty sure EA is so big they’ve forgotten UO exists (and no investors are going to ask them questions on it because of the sheer size of their development and IP portfolio compared to Acti) and it’s maintenance mode so not a good example as no one is saying they’re going to turn off the WoW servers, WoW servers will continue running for another decade at least if it never releases a 10.0. As to Everquest it’s developed by a smaller studio and it’s their only real hit. If you only have one thing putting bread on your table you’re going to keep slinging it as long as you can. If you don’t, you may consider stopping. To EQ’s developer’s EQ is a big fish in their small pond. To Actvision WoW is just a small fish among other small fish in a big pond and one which the performance demanding execs are eying increasingly because it is rather old.
They’re not “hungry” like a young company with only one thing going for it. They’re not going to feel the same way about desperate measures to keep it alive in the same way as they would if it were their only brand. They make a lot of money off of mobile, off of cheaper to develop 1 year turn-around type console/PC games and WoW increasingly looks like a relic. Yes they’ll probably sell expacs as long as it turns a certain profit margin but once the playerbase dips low enough and people no longer buy expacs because most have left then that’s it. The temptation to cannibalize, go to a model of selling people store stuff and not spending much on actual new content becomes attractive.
Not literally everyone but WoW has never been at a lower point. It’s reputation has never been at a lower point. Competition has never been higher and its teams have never been more clueless, more alienating in their choices to their playerbase. The game is noticeably emptier than it’s ever been. Queues are longer, people’s friends are gone, guilds are falling apart, raid teams are imploding. And one faction is all but dead and the devs probably don’t have a realistic solution to fix it in the near term. So yes, it’s in a very, very dire state and selling the developer line that everything is fine isn’t going to stop the fire that’s raging in the background and eating through the supports of the structure.
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Cancel culture?
You really like using that catchphrase without actually elaborating on it. So your current stance is that the game is completely acceptable and that all the negative connotations within the game are all features that should be promoted and taken for what they are. Politically correctness is a fallacy and that it will not change in time, that the stances and actions of 10+ years ago will not impact anything today…
The primary difference is that you are missing the point. I will reiterate: Blizzard is a company. Companies are required to make money for their shareholders. If quality employees are refusing to stay/join your company because you are not doing everything in your power to improve your company’s reputation, for nostalgic reasons, then your company stands to fail.
WoW is old, this provides a necessary excuse to overhaul the game and relaunch a refined, modernized version whilst also promoting the business changes with the intention of future growth.
Well obviously BFA and shadowlands have not been good for the game.
Legion was one of the better expansions. I don’t know how they failed so hard after that but they did.
They definitely should not continue with the current system.
I think they should just stop with shadowlands and focus on classic plus servers maybe wow 2.0 if that’s possible but I doubt it with the current devs that they have.
Not really sure it needs saving
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I played for 10 hours today was great. Just woke back up from my nap, 1,245 Que now getting ready for a long night.
Why would I blast New World forums, their game doesn’t need saving. At peak today they were over 700k concurrent players. Pretty much half of WoW’s subs. By the end of the month probably pass WoW as this game continues to lose players.
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if you really think they would ever sell off the game to someone else and not just put it on their dusty book shelf to re-release it as a cash grab, you’re naïve, activision would just close out the studio, keep the copyrights up, and just keep it out of public eye until people forgot about the game, then re-release it when they need a cash grab
Correct. At last, you get it.
More character slots can’t hurt. 50 is so 15 years ago.
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IF Blizzard was NOT a profit driven business then, yes that would probably work - however, Blizzard is driven by the shareholders and KPI’s, WoW has not transitioned towards a completely F2P model like SCBW, and thus has to turn a profit at all costs… And unfortunately for you (but luckily for me!) the changes are all justifiable… The entertainment of customers is secondary to continued profits…
The changes so far, yes. As for the other changes you’ve listed, pretty much all of them would cost them the bulk of their remaining subscribers. People have been pretty clear that altering in-game areas not named for the implicated devs is a bridge too far.
I for one will be cancelling my accounts after 17 years if any of the following things ever change:
Any of that goes and so do I.
I have chosen World of WarCraft over paying my rent on more than one occasion. If I’m drawing the line, lots of people will have drawn it before me. I imagine Blizzard knows better than to take it that far.
Time will tell, but Blizzard is staffed by smart people who understand that alienating your fan base with digital fascism is the quickest way to lose your product entirely. The shareholders can’t profit if all the whales leave to splash in fairer waters, and people like me who base our entire lives around WoW would not leave unless we felt truly victimized. That feeling doesn’t set in until areas we know and love are edited in the name of transient sensitivities. If you start changing what we’re nostalgic about, you erode our foundation, and we will drift away just like everyone else already has.
The only thing that could be done is to focus on fun and good story, not mythic+ and world first esports. That’s not going to happen, so I don’t see WoW ever bouncing back.
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In the grand scheme of things, you are not Shreds of Wyrmrest Accord, and I am not Macharius of Frostmourne… We are simply statistics: 1 and 1, or 2 out of X… There are some people who will leave if more and more stuff gets cut, maybe even a noticeable percentage, but then there are also quite a few people who have started playing far more recently, than just the long term career players… Decisions will be made, and people will leave from those decisions, but to say that a major portion of the playerbase would leave over such changes is… unlikely…
Let’s quantify things: just a bit of basic maths…
In 2012 Blizzard had 4700 employees, and the most recent average salary for Blizzard employees was $96,829. Now I am fully aware that these numbers are nowhere near what they probably are now.
But bear with me.
So, that comes out as a work expenditure of around $455,900,000 + operating expenses + tax etc… A WoW player contributes (let’s use the monthly subscription) $15 per month. So that’s $180 a year. A total of 2,532,778 subscribers would be needed to make ends meet. But if you take 50% of that number and change it to WoW tokens which were stated to have surpassed the income from subscriptions (despite costing 33% more), you end up with: 1,266,389 subscribers paying $180 a year, and 1,266,389 subscribers paying $240 a year. This in turn drops the number of players required to 2,170,952 subscribers (and WoW coin buyers). This number drops further when additional transactions are added: Mounts, Cosmetic items, New Expansion purchases, Special Bundles… For 2020, the net revenue for Blizzard Entertainment was $1.9 Billion…
So adding additional operating expenses, taxes, and company revenue (before expenses being $8.1 Billion), and you can see where things go… The moment WoW drops below a specific profit margin, that is when things will be shaken up… First and foremost: Blizzard’s primary goal is making money, your entertainment is secondary…
75% of what you posted is pure speculation, mostly by YouTube posters who love to make up statistics and bad news to pad their viewer counts. I agree that populations are down from WOTLK, that’s undeniable. But WoW is still making a healthy profit and that isn’t going to change anytime soon, whether you like it or not.
None of the numbers are made up though, it was put into pretty graphs for you to see then the sources linked. It’s all verified data.
Population is massively down from BFA, no need to mention the peak of WoW with Wrath 
Literally PvP and PvE participation is down huge from BFA. SL has the largest player loss in history. No idea why people are deflecting the obvious.
I don’t want WoW to go somewhere, I hope the Devs can step up and save WoW before it’s too late. It might be too late already. The numbers are really bad and next Quarter will be worse. I am for trying to solve these massive problems the game is facing.
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