Stop rewarding the 1%

Community General Discussion
1777

/sigh

Let’s unpack even though I know it’s pointless.

It is the opinion of people who play MMOs on a game by game basis.

More people play WoW than any other MMO despite it being 18 years old.
, in spite of those other MMO’s having access to the console market.

This happened one time. Summer 2021. It leveled off when people realized how awful FF14 is.

This game is not competition for any MMO. It averages 800 players, and has been dropping for months.

I’ve played other MMO’s over the years. There’s a reason I don’t play them any longer. they aren’t as good.

I’m not “poo pooing” WoW’s “competition” (LOTRO LOL)-I’m tired of the myth that is propagated on this forum that these games are gaining WoW players because WoW isn’t giving “casuals” whatever it is that they want. These games being used as a threat if “casuals” don’t get what they want.

People come from those games to WoW too, you know.

You’re right. This game is absolutely designed with MMO players in mind. Just like it always has been.

There are two types of players in WoW, boiled down.

People who play an MMO, and people who play a character inside an MMO without or rarely engaging in the MMO side of it. That second group is playing the wrong game.

This is the WoW we’ve had for 18 years. Most of the rewards in an MMO make sense to come from competitive instanced play.

I will concede that the world itself is rather dull, and I have settled into spending almost all of my in game time in some instanced content or another. Do I miss the old days of world exploration and stuff sometimes? Of course.

Do I think that this game will ever go back to that primitive (albeit quite fun) playstyle? No. Classic is a good example. They have it, but most of them are raid loggers.

Read the above. This game in 2022 is much, much better than vanilla would be in 2022. It was a great game for it’s time. I played more of it than any other time in WoW-but that iteration really was the epitome of brutality toward people who refused to engage in endgame content.

So I think you might be coming to a realization here and not knowing it. This game has a very clearly defined endgame. Once you make it there and do what it has to do…I mean…you’re done as far as the vertical progression hamster wheel is concerned.

Anyway.

Ff14 sucks. ESO sucks. LOTRO has less people playing it right now than there are people playing battle chess on steam.

1778

The specific achievements in the set matter more than the size of that set.

1 Like
1779

I would say the constant decrease in subscriptions, the very obvious departure from previous expansion design with Dragonflight, the scrapping of 9.3, the many content creators and influencers leaving the game in droves, and Blizzard having to reverse course on their garbage systems because everyone hated them would be indicative that plenty of folks, in fact, do not find it fun.

1780

I think you have a hard time reading or something.

If relevance is measured by sales and subs…then every other MMO on the market is more irrelevant than WoW.

1781

Relevance for any live-service game is not measured by sales because what matters is the retainment, and we don’t know the subscription count for any game, including WoW. The only thing we know for certain is that WoW has lost most of its subscription base from when it was at peak, which is never a good sign for a “thriving” or “relevant” game.

Like WoW is in such a terrible state that it forced some of the most prolific streamers like Asmongold (like him or hate him, he has major pull and is a significant part of this community) to go play other games, and you want to act like it’s still relevant? Man, you can like the game but you don’t need to shill for it. Accept the writing on the wall as it is.

1782

Making things up doesn’t make it right.

ALSO

There are a plethora of websites that estimates monthly users and WoW sits between 3.5-4 million per month on every single one of them.

I feel like those are pretty good numbers tbh. /shrug

They left WoW summer 2021 because it was a trendy meme for views.

Guess who all is back?

=p

1783

LOL what? Any person will tell you right now that sales have no significance to the overall success of a game. WoW could sell 10 million copies of Dragonflight and it will mean nothing if they only keep a tenth of that in player numbers. There is a reason why we focus less on the sales and initial expansion and more on the content updates that come after. In fact, if this were any other game, the inability to keep a significant portion of those sales as subscribers would indicate that there is something wrong with the game. But again, this is the WoW community we’re talking about, and facing reality doesn’t really exist here.

Only a person who doesn’t understand basic economics would think sales actually matter for the health of the game.

Actually, Asmongold has been very vocal about his concerns with WoW’s state for years prior to finally playing other games, and the only reason why they’re back right now is because there’s an alpha going on.

1784

Oh boy.

So the fact that endwalker sold less than half of SL copies has no significance, eh? Somehow, FF14 is maintaining a sub base roughly the same size or better than WoW…without selling half as many copies of it’s latest expansion?

Yikes lol.

Great! Then the good news for WoW players then (I guess) is that logically, WoW still maintains more players than any other MMO on the market after initial sales.

You’re a bad forum troll. Reality doesn’t matter to you. You want to doomsay WoW like so many have done before you on this very forum for the last 18 years. It’s still the most popular, played; and successful MMO in history and currently on the market.

Lol, okay. Let’s do this then.

  1. He’s ruined the game for himself by practically enabling the MMO version of cheat codes. Anything he wants to do, he is carried through it (assuming he’s not just farming mounts and transmogs.)

  2. He left for the same reason the other streamers did summer 2021. It was a trendy meme for relevance.

  3. It doesn’t matter what you think the only reason is. The fact is-All the streamers are back. They’ve been back. You’re silly for thinking otherwise lol. They were all over SoM when it dropped and that’s dead as a doornail. I know you think you’re on to something here, but the streamer crowd is as FOMO as it gets. Their favorite streamer plays a game-they play. Their favorite streamer plays another game-they play.

  4. They brought their crew right back with them.

  5. Simp

1785

Hurry up and respond, I wanna read what you’re posting but I have things I need to go do.

1786

It doesn’t because FFXIV could have a higher retention rate than WoW. WoW could still sell more copies but if they drop down to 1 million in subscription numbers then it’s entirely possible for FFXIV to have a larger sub base at that point.

Of course, we don’t know the actual statistics which is my entire point, so you simply cannot claim that WoW has a larger subscriber base without them actually publishing their numbers.

Doomsayers didn’t have much leverage when WoW had 12 million subscribers. I would say that they have way more validation right now than they did 12 years ago.

At least I understand basic economics.

1787

You took this long to type this?

Both games are cyclical, patch driven games. It would make sense that people leave and come back, leave and come back.

If one game starts at 5 million copies sold, and another game starts at 1.8 million copies sold- You’re really gonna have a hard time convincing anyone (especially when there are aggregate websites out there that have estimates of players playing any given MMO) that one game is going to retain 10% of it’s sales, whereas the other game is going to maintain 100% of it’s sales in subs.

Sure I can.

WoW has more subs than any other MMO on the market. Full stop. Even if all I had was sales numbers to go by, that is still an extremely logical conclusion to come to based simply by that.

Well duh. WoW is 18 years old now, wrath is wrapped up-and everyone is old and has moved on. The MMO genre in particular has seen a sharp decline in players over the last 12 years.

No, you fantasize about numbers and call them economics. Read the first response in this response.

1788

Here, just look at these things.

<How Many People Still Play World Of Warcraft? (svgcom)>

<How Many People Play World of Warcraft? (User & Growth Stats 2022) (fictionhorizoncom)>

< 15 Facts About The WoW Player Count in 2022 (webtribunal.net)>

A super quick google search shows exactly what I said. The estimates range from 4-5 million players month.

Yep, them are estimates.

Estimates for FF14 show about 80k players per day. WoW at more than a million per day.

I don’t know what else to tell you. If you want to believe a particular thing, I guess that’s your deal. I can’t provide you with numbers directly from blizzard and sqe-but I can provide you with the closest I can get to it.

And

It shows that WoW is (according to your definition) more relevant than any MMO on the market full stop.

Another edit

I just looked at FF14 community hub on steam. 21k players active. Obviously not everyone is using the steam version, and 21k players at this time of day is pretty impressive.

Compare it to something as no name as Naraka bladepoint with it’s 79k current players in steam though.

MMO’s in general, are fairly underplayed.

1789

This is subjective. There’s tons of great looking transmogs out there that you don’t need world first for.

1790

hell even new world has 19k online currently and if you asked anyone they’d tell you that’s a dead game.

compared to FF14’s 21k players currently active.

Anyway, I waited for your response for a while. Stuff to do. Enjoy your day doomsayer. I wouldn’t be putting my eggs in the FF14 basket if I were you however.

lol

1791

Not at all, because we already know that a significant chunk of the playerbase that comes back to WoW does not stick around. Ion himself has even acknowledged this. If the game is in an even worse state than normal, then naturally those subscriptions will decrease even further.

In fact, I’m pretty sure there was a data aggregate from an aggregate website that was published not even 2-3 months after Shadowlands came out that the game had lost somewhere between 40-50% of its subscriber base? I would have to go find this but it was pretty big news at the time because the source was notorious within the industry for being reputable and on point with player engagement. It is, of course, not from Blizzard so it should be taken with a grain of salt, but most assuredly it’s the most trustworthy source we have.

This is an article from 2019.

What’s actually funny about this source is that it uses MMO Population as a reference, yet if I go to MMO Population right now:

You can very much see that FFXIV is actually at the top. It also lists OSRS at #2, which can be easily discredited by going to OSRS’s homepage and seeing its actual active player count, so clearly there are discrepancies in these statistics that don’t line up.

Can’t really speak to this one, though. Statista tends to be somewhat reliable but again, if the other sources are anything to go by, we don’t really know how legitimate it actually is.

1792

I didn’t claim they’re super credible.

I’m telling you that any article you look at from any point in time is going to show you that WoW has a much larger player base than any other MMO

At

Any given time.

:person_shrugging:

1793

World of Warcraft 5 Year Subscriber Stats Server Population & Player Count - MMO Populations (mmo-population.com)

Yikes, that big dip in March.

1 Like
1794

If they aren’t credible then why in the world would you use them to support your argument lol

And I’m telling you that these articles are nothing more than guesstimations. Even the one I referenced is just an estimation. None of us have anything to go off in terms of hard statistics. What we can deduce, however, is that Blizzard suddenly decided to stop publishing their subscription numbers after doing it for 12 years, likely because they saw the decreasing trend in retention and didn’t want to publish statistics that implicated their game was failing.

And considering the amount of people who have been upset with the game’s state, I highly doubt this trend has changed any.

1795

This game has seen doomsayers on the forums since I started way back in 2005. Youtube wasn’t nearly as big of a deal as it is now, but that trend also exists on WoW by the very same people making a living playing it and streaming it.

I didn’t say they were super credible. I do believe there is enough credibility there given the amounts of copies of expansions that sell every cycle to say that WoW is the most played MMO still.

After 18 years.

WoW isn’t failing anymore than FF14, ESO, or whatever other MMO’s you want to post about are given that more people are playing it than any other MMO on the market.

I’m just going in circles with you.

Watch streamers and youtubers tell you WoW is falling apart if you want. They did that summer 2021 and they all came back. /shrug

1796

There actually isn’t because you don’t know what their retention rate is, which is the problem with your argument. You cannot base a game’s retention rate on sales, especially if that game is in a poor state. Poor state = More people leaving. Again, Dragonflight could sell 10 million copies and it would still mean nothing if they keep a tenth of that. FFXIV selling less doesn’t mean it has less subscribers. For all you know it could have the same amount because of how badly Shadowlands failed, how quick TBC dropped off, and how much FFXIV is succeeding.

Square Enix’s profits are up 90% with FFXIV contributing to a significant chunk of that. It doesn’t elucidate anything about its subscriber count, but Square Enix has said that FFXIV has only continued to grow in subscription numbers, so it does confirm that FFXIV is most assuredly in a great spot.

Meanwhile, World of Warcraft was the primary driver in Blizzard’s decrease in net bookings last year. Between December 2020 and December 2021, Blizzard also saw a decrease in revenue with World of Warcraft also as the primary driver for this loss. This is information you can find from their annual earnings statement.

Bro, nobody cares how long WoW has been around. Pointing out how long its been around doesn’t detract from how badly it’s failing right now.