What happens if pre patch doesn’t come out in May?

They don’t have tens of millions of subscribers. Anymore.

Hint: there’s a reason they stopped publishing sub numbers.

Please note that I’m not criticizing the game… hell, I’m still playing. I’m just pointing out that they’ve tanked their customer base over the last 10 years.

And the SL pre-patch, as well as SL, itself.

I think they probably do. Shadowlands sold 3.7 million copies on day one. Then there’s Classic.

I work in education. There are all kinds of metrics out there to try to describe a population. Each one has its flaws. Not a single one tells the whole story.

Looking at monthly active users has some advantages over a raw subscription count. How many folks pay for 6 months at a time and quit playing a couple months after they paid for 6 months? I know I have. Hell, once time I thought I canceled and ended up paying for a whole year before I caught the charge (I didn’t like cataclysm, and I was busy with grad school at the time.)

I didn’t take it that way, and I apologize if it seems like I did.

That seems to be a common theme here on the forums. The picture I see is different. I had several long breaks from WoW due to not liking particular things. Cataclysm wasn’t my cup of tea. I came back half way through MoP and quit toward the end of WoD due to life. I came back when Classic was announced. I leveled through Legion and tried BFA. Retail isn’t my thing… but I get why others like it. I also see that retail exists due to Blizzard responding to player demands. Yeah, some of their changes end up going over like farts in a space suit… but they seem to pay attention to those and they do keep trying.

Okay. You got the data. Do with it as you will.

Tbh I’d love to see someone create a game that achieves 12 million active players and then just try to maintain that many players for over a decade

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I think it will be may. They are suspending transfers on april 30, and they said it will be down for a couple of weeks, at which point they will do the snapshot.

Logically, the snapshot comes directly before prepatch.

That said, if it’s later? Nothing really terrible happens, people will just come back when it does happen.

They grabbed a large audience back in 2004-2010. It has since been hemorrhaging players. What you see are blind brand loyalists that refuse to believe blizzard is a bad company now. Maybe the other game teams are doing okay but WoW is not.

They are snapshotting at the beginning of may, it absolutely has to come out in may or at the very latest early June. Can you imagine the rage if they snapshot you and you continue to play for a month and then bring over nothing you earned?

I hace no idea where you’re coming up with this, but okay.

Reality doesn’t care what people imagine will happen in the future.
Blizzard doesn’t care what players say will happen in the future.
Especially when it contradicts what Blizzard has announced.

Blizzard is “out of touch” with players’ imagined fantasies? I sure hope so!

As a retired software engineer, I KNOW that non-software people drastically under-estimate how long software projects take to complete. But I sure hope that Blizzard doesn’t under-estimate like that. Not after 30 years.

The fact that they had to stop posting sub numbers because it was bleeding players so badly it looked bad for their investors so instead they started only posting money earned which is mostly just shop purchases.

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They are catering to retail whiners on a classic version designed and brought about by vanilla/tbc players. That’s being out of touch.

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Didn’t they switch to Monthly Active Users? If you ask me, that’s a better metric to go by.

They did for their entire video game categories not just wow. This was specifically because wow was losing so many players. Not even a fifth of what it once was.

PSO2 NG comes out in June and New World comes out in August. They can’t just sit around waiting to drop Pre-Patch and then wait for the TBC launch. Not saying everyone is the same but I’ll play one of the newer games over TBC when they come out if I have to just keep waiting.

Looking at the past year’s stocks, I’m nit sure how that could be, but okay.

Cauchy, you might want to try reading an annual report. Go to the SEC website and search for Activision-Blizzard’s most recent 10k.

Edited to elaborate: Activision-Blizzard is a much bigger company than just WoW. The stock price is in no way indicative of the state of WoW. Also, the Blizzard division results include Call of Duty so those numbers don’t reflect WoW’s status either.

Most companies intentionally obfuscate exactly how well any particular product line is doing so this isn’t anything odd on A-B’s part.

I got this feeling pre patch won’t be in May they need to give advanced notice for release dates, we could even be looking at mid year who knows.

I looked at a graph that showed all the year’s activity. It had about 40% growth over the past 365 days. There were a few dips (including a small one recently, probably due to that guy leaving.) I forget which website. Just for the hell of it, I took a look at last year’s 10-k (12/31/19 - 12/31/20) and it looked fine. Everything’s in the black, and it looks like folks are still making money. It did look like things dipped toward the end, but I’d expect that considering how last year went with COVID.

I’m aware it’s a big company. People seem to think WoW is in trouble, and it’s because of the company making bad decisions, but I don’t see things that way. WoW is probably Blizzard’s most expensive game to develop and maintain. I don’t see why they’d keep it around if it’s struggling.

They put that message on the login screen. I’d guess may is a really good pin for pre-patch.