its MONEY! fly more longer spend more time meaning you spend more time in game right? and spend more time in game flying around to whatever place you going to will cost you sub time which you need to buy $$$. its all about money get it. nothing new lol
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Post #4587 about this exact conspiracyâŚ
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The monthly subscription price is the same whether I spend 40 minutes a month flying or 5 minutes a month using portals.
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I am so sorry. I was too busy realizing it is Sunday the 17th of March at 2:02am. I shouldâve just not come onto the forums!
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Blizz does not give a damn about minutes /played.
Blizz cares about how many people log in per month. As you might expect from a game with a month sub model.
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Cool conspiracy theory bro
It does demonstrate one thing.
People like to say that only upset people post on the forums, and the people who arent posting are emjoying the game abd find with the changes.
In my experience over the expansions, itâs more that forums posters are most dedicated and informed. The other people are often ignorant of the changes till they happen in game, followed with them posting here as if they are the first to mention it or saying something novel
Yes they do. They also point out on quarterly reports when games have an increase in play time. Its one way that they use to measure success.
Actually they donât. They report Monthly Active Users (MAU) numbers. The quarterly reports are available on the Activision Blizzard website if you want to go read them.
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I think it is more about the creation of tinfoil hats.
Less portals, less cows, less cowbells, THUSâŚ
More farming needed to create tin foil hats.
It is the only thing that makes sense!
![:crazy_face:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/crazy_face.png?v=6" ":crazy_face:")
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So thats why they highlighted on black ops 4 specifically sayingâŚ
Black Ops 4 sold-through more units
than Black Ops III in its launch
quarter, with PC units >3x, and
average hours per player increased
So yes. They do watch how much time players are spending in their games. They do care about time spent.
Did they highlight that in WoW? AFAIK, BO4 doesnât have a sub fee.
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The quarterly reports do not break play time down by game. This might come from the quarterly investor call but that isnât the same thing as a quarterly report. Reports are what people ultimately rely on.
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I see this fallacy so many times on the forums, and parroted by CMs. It makes my blood boil every time.
The whole âsilent majorityâ fallacy.
âThereâs this sect of people you donât know about who agree with our decisions. Iâm not going to prove it or anything. Iâm just going to pull that out of my rear like itâs true.â
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Objectively speaking, the travel time isnât huge relative to the spent spent at the destination. It might add a slight inefficiency, but that doesnât increase my total time played, just slightly reduces the number of things I accomplish in the time I do play (and even then, its not much unless Iâm doing something extremely degenerate with an army of alts that probably should be nerfed).
What it does do is focus my attention on the time passing. Even us old folk can get a touch of âare we there yet?â
They donât use subscription numbers as a metric for success anymore, at least not publicly. No doubt they do internally, but thatâs not what this change is about.
The numbers they report to investors involve people playing more time, which is not subscription-dependent. Also they use numbers of how much new content is being played to demonstrate how successful that new content is.
So if people play longer because of this change to get the same amount done, the change has improved their metrics of success. Also if people play less old content and more new content because old content is harder to get to, their new content will appear more successful.
And if people who are not going to do new content now find it too tedious to do old content and stop playing, it doesnât affect those metrics for success in any way.
And we know (because we read in in an interview article online) that their metric for whether people are having fun is if they play 52 minutes per session.
Itâs not a conspiracy theory.
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I didnât say anything about subscription numbers. I said monthly active users. In the last quarter Blizzard has 35 million monthly active users across all of its games. They donât break it down by game in the reports.
that makes 0 sense
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I stopped reading after that travesty.
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No, they donât. They could lose a million more subscribers in this game, yet the numbers they report would not indicate there was an issue.
But they do keep numbers on lots of things they donât actually report. I read an interesting blue post in a thread on âIs BfA successful?â at the beginning of the expansion where Lore attempted to explain to us how their metrics work. Suffice it to say, making fun content to appeal to customers was not part of the equation.
There are people who play just enough to achieve todayâs goal and then log off. These are the people who whose behavior this change is trying to affect.
But my feeling is that more people play the same amount of time every day, and will get less done. Some will get bored of flying to some of these outlying zones and quit.
A recent thread had a great many posts by a poster who claimed to run âevery raidâ on 12 characters every week, and felt no one would be impacted by the change. That same poster had no idea where Heart of Fear or Throne of Thunder are or how long it takes to get there.
You be the judge.