It might have had the highest sub numbers, the by enlarge it hit a plateau. Wrath baby back lash was real. The people who quit equaled the new people playing the game for the first time. Wrath rode the coat tails of TBC’s popularity.
Really this. The people that are anti LFD probably would have played anyway. Where as lack of LFD will push away more casual players. It doesn’t make sense.
That being said, there has to be a cost associated with LFD that makes the loss of subs not worth it. Or, those same “casuals” are projected to keep on playing Retail anyway.
If you look at Retail, Blizz clearly doesn’t have a problem driving away the masses to appeal to a much smaller playerbase of whales.
But it’s harder to justify that perspective in Classic since they’re cutting out a lot of micro-transactions that could be in Wrath (race change, faction change, etc…). So why do this? I think they’re just completely detached from what the majority of players want. The ‘silent masses’. The casual players. The people who want an authentic experience. I’m honestly at a loss who they’re trying to appeal to, because it seems to be bots and boosters and the gdkp lovers. That’s really only who removing dungeon finder benefits.
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Just a guess, but I think they’re aware of what the majority of the players want. However, it’s really cost analysis on their end. A sub is really only 15 dollars a month. Now if there is a feature that might cost … i dunno 5 million. They’re aren’t doing it.
No one knows, but my guess is that LFD won’t be a walk in the park to develop and by their estimation, it won’t be worth it.
I don’t know much about Retail, etc. I’m just playing Devil’s advocate here tbh. I do know this whole world first race is a thing and people follow it. It’s possible that they make more money from sponsors etc, all that jazz than just your casual player.
/shrug
And yet private servers use lfd without issue.
Surely, you can’t compare a bunch of hacks to a world class (and yes 95% of the software engineers probably couldn’t pass their interview) software company.
I think the blizzard UI devs could take a lesson or 2 from the ascension projects UI people.
the window to add abilities in their classless based system was impressive. Looked organic to the wow way…but its not the cut and dry wow way.
as was the noob tutorial they have in it.
Blizzard hardly gets the best. They pay garbage, to begin with. Then look at the toxic culture of the company. Who would want to work there?
What I’ve learned the past few months after finally experiencing private servers is…Blizzard is quite incompetent. Things that just felt wrong in Classic now I know were wrong. Quick example: the other day I had a client of both Classic and a private server open. It was raining in both games. On the private server it was blustery and foggy and way more intense and loud. Which is precisely how I remembered it from back in Vanilla. It’s really sad that a private server is more authentic than what Blizzard can provide.
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They got by on their name for years, but that’s simply not enough anymore.
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I remember the n classic I was farting around in Hillsbrad doing whatever and it was foggy. I couldn’t remember seeing fog in retail for years. The atmosphere was so cool. That doesn’t happen on retail at all any more and I have no idea why.
We get the foggy blizzard arathi as a once in a while brawl.
I liked that one when up. He who controls BS can’t make callouts for GM or LM…from BS. You can’t see like 6 feet out from your nose. So its nice that.
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There’s plenty of awesome weather effects in Modern WoW, they’re just rare and sometimes limited to certain zones, unfortunately.
Here’s a screenshot I took in the remastered Arathi Basin:
Fog, can’t remember which zone but it was in BfA:
A little fog and rain in Elwynn Forest:
BfA truly had the best zone design and aesthetics that WoW has ever had. The geography is great. Climbing up mountains and seeing all the little details they put into the terrain. I enjoyed flying around taking screenshots of the zones more than I did actually playing the game.
They even had little snow flurries sometimes when flying around:
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Found the guy on drugs.
WotLK was the absolute peak of WoW and subscriber numbers are proof. Subscriber numbers didn’t fall from their 12 million peak until 2010, which was the same time dungeon finder was released (June 2010) and shortly thereafter Cataclysm launched (December 2010). I think you need to go do some research.
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You’re just arguing semantics. Whether you call leveling “playing the game” or look at it as something that should be skipped entirely, the fact still stands that people like you aren’t going to stop paying for dungeon carries because it takes less effort to get into a dungeon. You’ll keep doing anything in your power to avoid leveling because you don’t like it.
The only way to stop dungeon carries from happening is either the creation of an even easier way to level, or simply breaking dungeon carries. Dungeon finder is neither of those things.
The game was never intended to have a cancerous economy fueled by botter gold that allowed players to entirely skip a significant portion of their character’s progression. I’m not playing the game “my way”, I’m just playing the game. Leveling is an intended part of that game whether it’s one’s preferred content or not.
I don’t care if you try to speed up the leveling process as fast as you possibly can, to each their own. Whatever part of the game you like the most isn’t a concern of mine. But to try and say that spending dirty gold on skipping the intended design of the game is somehow just “another perfectly good option” is nothing short of laughable. That’s circumventing the intended design of the game and I’m absolutely amazed that they didn’t remove it from the game the instant it was an obvious problem.
Yep. I was a subscriber. Like many that were not happy at all with wotlk. So i guess tbat blows your sub count equals happy argument. I am proof.
Then they added lfd tool. A lot of us were going to quit but lfd was so good that we stayed. Thinking things would continue to get better. So lfd caused me to stay. Not quit. So i also proof tbat lfd didnt cause ppl to quit.
You have some deep logoc tbere. How do you do it? Just take one of any million changes that took place at a given time and bingo, you have the root cause of any other change that took place at the same time. Wow why didnt anyone else ever think yo do that We should go back and see what the weather was like at that time. Who was president. What team won the wold series. What the top song was. Then randomly chose which ones caused which wow changes. Genius.
“Leveling is an intended part of that game whether it’s one’s preferred content or not.”
It is right up until the game developer offers you a way to skip leveling. Like a boost.
Also, leveling with a mage is still leveling. Leveling is going from one level to another level higher.
Some ppl dont like doing the same time consuming questing they have done a thousamd times over and over. They want to get to max level. Where they can play the real game. Where they csn actually play with other players. Thats what it is about. They would gladly play with other players if they had a tool that helped them group up at lower levels. Like lfd tool would. Imagine being against a tool that helped people join and play together. That would be nuts in a game designed for players to play together.
It’s crazy that subscriber numbers went UP throughout the course of the WotLK expansion, only to drop after the dungeon finder patch and Cataclysm expansion.
Until now I have never heard of something being so bad that it caused more people to buy/subscribe to it.
Weird…
It is also weird that after that “OH SO AMAZING” 3.3.5 update which included the dungeon finder that those subscriber numbers would fall so hard.
Hmm…
The only drop in Wrath was Q2 not in the Dungeon finder patch? it was stable and up after RDF?
RDF dropped in Q4 2009 December 8, 2009
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https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2016/world-of-warcrafts-declining-subscription-numbers/
Peaked at 12m in 2010.
Dungeon finder released June 2010.
Cataclysm released December 2010.
Rapid decline from 2010-2013.
Obviously dungeon finder did nothing to keep people subscribed back then, so why should they rely on it now? Time for a new strategy - server communities and the bond between players, the Classic way.
umm ya that was after Cata launched and everyone there at the time said it had to do with the dungeon designs (guessing you were not there, my mistake.) it never went down in LK after it was put in…
the link you put in blames PVP…
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