Personally speaking, the main reasons I dislike modern wow is the changes made to it.
Since this isn’t the General Discussion forums, though, I’d rather refrain from just trashing things I don’t like about retail and focus on Classic Discussion.
“Pristine” servers do not offer, in any way, what Classic would offer.
But Google Trends, something that many stocks live or die on these days, is ignorable?
Regardless, claiming that:
Is easily refutable by looking at the trends and the community response. People enjoyed Legion, and decried BfA for ditching all the things that made Legion playable again.
God no, by 3.3 that community was already mostly gone.
I remember dalaran was nothing but afking, mammoth trains and people talking how classic and tbc were better.
Besides that, retail is a mess in a lot of ways, it’s not just “quality of life”, it’s core philosophy changes, from flying to class design to pvp to world and questing, etc.
Classic is renowned for it’s design and philosophy, not dumb nostalgia for chipmunks with 3 total polygons, it was simply a better game.
show that the game was as popular as WoD at start, and then plummeted. It was also NOT as high as wrath or cata. You should review your data.
According to twitter com/WeakAuras/status/1051812677578838016, BfA sub numbers were accidentally leaked at that time and had dropped from 3.2m to 1.7m. It’s not 100% certain those numbers are accurate, but that’s probably the closest you’ll get to a recent sub number.
edit: and for people who don’t go to the tweet to read it, it’s also not clear if that’s only certain regions. A WoWhead employee also comments and says they had 11m unique users on their site in August 2018.
Despite having no concrete evidence, I’m confident Legion was much more popular than BfA or WoD. WoD had 5m subs before they stopped reporting the numbers (mmo-champion com/content/5063-WoW-Down-to-5-6-Million-Subscribers). The WoD link with official sub numbers also has a chart showing the changes over all the expansions during the time they released numbers.
edit: having played a lot of Legion and criticized it a lot on the forums, I did hate things like Legendary RNG and titanforging and what not, but overall it was a much better game than WoD. I hated some of the class design like Legion MW vs. MoP MW, but overall it was a hell of a lot better than BfA.
More like people tolerated/somewhat liked legion.
It introduced some decent systems but they had some issues in them, also did some horrible things at the same time, but it was better than wod at least so it doesn’t feels all that bad.
Legion launch was the same as any expansion, high increase of interest, drops down after launch and the problems are apparent, same happened with bfa.
I remember bfa being called amazing and the savior of wow on launch days.
Instead of fixing the horrible things and issues in these systems, they doubled down on them and you got the mess that is bfa.
The game and the community are just too far gone, they can’t fix or change these designs because the community that got used to free stuff for minimum work (or not at all) would complain and they can’t make it easier because it kills the game for everyone else.
In their attempt to make a game for everyone they made a game for no one, retail will just get worse and worse with time, legion a partial outlier in a downward spiral.
how to make this work.
gate stuff.
1-60 for 2 or 3 months that way those raids and dungeons would be valid (even though with all the new stats and crap it just might not be. Could possibly fix with limiting the amount of peeps in the raid)
60-70 gate
70-80 gate
etc etc etc
no purpose blowing through all the old dungeons. and not skill up your professions cause they made every content have its own level system ![:confused:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/confused.png?v=6" ":confused:")
pristine server, redo achievements, no mounts, nothing carries over. Fresh start.
lots of other stuff too, but dont have the time at the moment
Uhh… no a company that doesn’t make money or have plans to make money by a certain point, is not going to be business very long. That isn’t to say profitability is the only metric for success and somehow exists in a vacuum, other considerations are usually to ensure profitability though (either longer or shorter term).
Call me a cynic if you like but wow’s overall direction certainly feels more about the money than the passion these days. That is not to discredit the talented and passionate individuals who work at blizzard and do amazing work but the heart and soul of the game doesn’t really reach me anymore (like it did in Metzen days). There is no love or perspective for the horde anymore which is the backbone of the franchise to me (its generic good vs evil fantasy tropes so that it can be better consumed).
Its the movie equivalent of going for a PG over R rating.
Link? Source? Anything?
Their latest financial disclosure had 38 million MAUs or “Monthly active users”, but that’s across every product.
It also specifically highlighted they were overwatch and hearthstone and that wow “as expected post xpac release significantly declined” I think was the term.
Mobile gaming is the new focus blizzcon was proof of that. I wouldnt be surprised to see various mobile phone tie ins next xpac… level your warcraft battle pets on your mobile phone.
edit: revamped Battle pet system - Max level increased to 100, purchasable battlepet xp boosts, pet family ability, rarity stones, stat sheets etc
Cite them please.
First off, those two are not mutually exclusive. You can be popular and make money. In fact, it’s how most companies prefer it. Second, you can suck out loud and make money too…just not for overly long.
But, the topic was profits vs popularity, and unpopular companies will either die or change. Look at EA right now. They are making more money then they did, but do you think it will last if they keep doing what they’re doing?
Theu don’t release sub numbers and subs have made up such a small portion of tgeir income for ages. The real money is character services.
And what came out in legion? Allied races.
No, thank you.
I stopped mid Cata, and I didn’t even really want to play Cata, but I thought maybe Bliz would turn it around. They didn’t. I started back up for a bit when they announced Classic, because I wanted to see if it was better. It wasn’t. It wasn’t just community that was lost. It felt spoon fed and dumbed down.
When they first floated out that idea of Pristine servers I thought there was some merit to it. Not in such a way that they would remove the desire for Classic, but I did think that attempting to recreate community in the live game would’ve been good for the people that wanted it in live. I was of the opinion that they should do Classic as well as throw up some Pristine servers just to see what would happen.
Would I personally play modern again if they did put Pristine? Probably not, the gameplay just isn’t interesting to me anymore, but I DO think the idea of Pristine was a good one. Not good enough to justify not making Classic though.
The problem is profits are quantifiable popularity is a subjective assessment.
Blizzard could make wow the most popular game for 5% of the playerbase, they would praise it and consider it the best video game of all time (re: classic), or they can make a video game that 50% of the potential player base sorta kinda likes and logs in for new content maybe buys a cosmetic here or there (BFA).
To me I get the feeling the company aim and vision doesn’t seem to be to please that niche audience anymore, its about mass market appeal. The analogy I used was a movie censoring for a PG rating so more people enjoyed it, rather than making an R-rated movie that a smaller group of people would like better.
That’s also false. You can quantify popularity…
And now your simply dreaming up imaginary scenarios that justify your incorrect position. Blizz was demonstrably more popular when it, to your mind, was only for 5% of the players. However, I would argue that it appealed to more people than the fetid chunk of refuse we have now does. Not to mention, that to make it “appeal” to more people, they have to willfully gimp and even gut the game itself.
Which is why you’ve seen nothing but an ever increasing departure of players since the mass appeal (pandering) started, and as that mass appeal (pandering) has accelerated. It’s also why the demand for classic got as loud as it did.
I am fine with keeping the leveling experience very long… but actually make it fun and relevant.
NOPE, that has never been my problem with the game. I am not a big fan of cliques. Modern is a lost cause, they have ruined the story and the game and THEY just don’t “get it”. What has been broken can’t be found by looking at spreadsheet.