Why does everything in wow seems

Community General Discussion
21

Defeating that compulsion feels really good.

Then you get to browse the forums and tease the devs.

(A brand new compulsion!)

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22

WoW = World of Waiting

It’s an amusement park that you get a full-access pass to with your monthly sub but you still have to wait in line for every attraction.

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23

/sits down on a bench in Orgrimmar

Ahhhh!

This looks fun.

24

From a business perspective, it actually is. Just saying.

25

Not IMHO. Id rather the goal of game design be 8 million paying subs than 2 million active subs. There is a huge economic advantage to creating a game that keeps and generates subs. Designing a game around rep grinds and other time gated stuff has proven to cost subs.

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26

Again, time played isn’t their primary investor metric. In fact, it’s such a minuscule metric on the investor reports they don’t even separate out Activision, Blizzard, or King’s playtime and just average it all together. It’s lucky to get a single sentence. (Fun fact: average playtime is 50 minutes, but again, that’s an average of all of Blizzard’s IPs, Activision’s IPs, and King Mobile IPs such as Candy Crush.)

Their metric is Monthly Active Users. Content that encourages you to log in at least once a month or once a week is the content that impacts investor relations the most.

Less fun fact, Blizzard Entertainment MAU’s are down 25% from their peak of Q3 2016. They’ve fallen from 42 million to 32 million. 1/3 of that drop came from a single quarter, IIRC Q1 2019.

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27

That looks bad to the shareholders, though. Shareholders like to see “player engagement” because - the theory is - higher player engagement leads to higher spending on microtransactions.

Sort of how grocery stores re-arrange things every few months, because studies show the longer you’re in the store, the more you spend.

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28

Used to take WAY more time. This is peanuts. You just don’t enjoy the content. That’s understandable.

29

I noticed that there was no citation about t current number of subscriptions, and if you refuse to link any, then you post is merely based upon conjecture. The game world is the large in this industry, so players will be spread out more then any other game. Also, I’ve seen the WoWhead speculations of the current population, and it’s only speculation, so don’t loin

30

Yeah. For me it feels like a job, which is a shame, because I love Azeroth, but damn I hate this system they have going on of artificially time-gating everything to increase time played metrics.

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31

The fact that this is how you react is quite interesting

You know that this is just a game right😂

32

Because the current design philosophy is to drag out sub time as long as possible. Also the new big thing is a term called “player engagement”

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33

If you aren’t having fun with the time allotted to you per session, then invest in another game.

I have fun with the time I play.

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34

I’m impressed that so many people general are not just a game design experts, but also have such great insight into both the way publicly traded companies work, and the specifics of how Blizzard runs their operation.

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35

And There’s some circumstantial evidence to be found in the language of the investor reports, but it’s not too much to go on.

In every quarterly report during Legion’s tenure, they were explicit in saying that Legion was out performing WoD at this point in the expansion’s life cycle by X%.

We also know that Legion’s launch increased the player base by 30% initially, but retained a general increase of around 10%. After the first real update to Legion, it began growing at a generally unspecified although fairly small in the grand scale rate across the expansion’s life cycle.

We can generally put this at around 6 million subscribers (maybe 7 million - just in general WoW grew about 1 million players over WoD’s historic low. Can’t remember if that low was ~5 mil or ~6 mil). I can probably use…shudder…math to get a better approximation using the numbers of the reports, but I’m not really feeling it on mobile.

BFA hasn’t received any fanfare in investor reports at all, after the initial launch in Q3. In fact, it was mentioned once in the Q4 2019 and they only said it was facing expected post release decline.

A far cry from how every Legion report showed performance numbers. Couple that with the massive player base drop (Blizz lost 10 million players across all IPs) that’s been ramping up, it’s a very safe bet to assume BFA’s subs are at or below WoD levels.

My source is the Activision Investor Relation website which contains free access to its investor reports and other useful businesses data.

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36

Because time is money, friend.

Crap, now they have me sounding like a Goblin.

shakes a fist DAMN YOU BLIZZ!

37

Did you forget how General Discussion works?

38

Sorta like WoW since inception?

Are we pretending these “take longer time” activities didn’t happen before Acti-Bliz merged?

I can point to a bunch of mechanics from the “old team” that pursued “making things take longer” over fun.

People act like WoW stretching out content is a new concept, and hasn’t been around since Vanilla.

I can completely understand if you dont like a particular activity. But to pretend the “old team” didn’t use “lets stretch out how long it takes to do basic things” to an extreme also…is just having selective memory to push an anti-current dev team agenda.

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39

Can you give 10 examples of the same time gating that is being employed now in the game that was used in the past?

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40

Because there is a category of players that enjoy step-by-step repetition, and the gradual pace of accomplishment. The current crop of gamers (generally speaking, naturally) do not seem to be into that.

Someone the other day mentioned to me how, after I had listed everything I considered “needed to be done” in order to push my HoA, “how is that fun”. I didn’t know what to say, because while not every single moment of it is “fun”, overall it’s nice to see BC levels of things to do for a change. Tasks that are concrete and lead to concrete benefits. I find it very relaxing, personally.

How much of a load it is, that is entirely up to me and the time I have in my schedule. So if I find I’m not “having fun”, I just reduce what’s on my plate and spread it out. I will probably start coasting once my heart is 60.