I dropped my subscription to wow thanks to MoP. All the "classic" stuff that I think a fantasy mmo is about got ruined by asian-themed expansion that really is the worst ive ever seen. To bad, I played the game for many years, but I just cant do it anymore.
Originally posted by Pipofix I dropped my subscription to wow thanks to MoP. All the "classic" stuff that I think a fantasy mmo is about got ruined by asian-themed expansion that really is the worst ive ever seen. To bad, I played the game for many years, but I just cant do it anymore.
Yes, overall MoP was lousy in many ways.
To me it is not the oriental flavour but rather how they implemented it. It is too kitsch when it should have been more like AD&D's Oriental Adventures. My favourite addition from MoP is the pet battle system, which is not enough to make up the money I paid for this expac. What they did to talents and glyphs was horrendous !
Overall disappointed with it.
I will soon be an ex-subscriber. I had a good run though... 2004 to now off and on with the last run from September 2011 to now. But I will just be one out of a few hundred thousand people to go heh thus I am sure Blizzard won't miss my departure
Even though I hate how the game evolved I can say that the number is a very low number considering that it is a 8 year old game (released November 23, 2004).
I also think that the game will stil have more years to go before it will start to be non-profitable for Blizzard, and even then the option for F2P with perks shop will be an option.
There isn't a soul on this internet that will believe that that picture is from peak time.
Useless post is useless. Borderline trolling even.
I could careless if this game sink or swims it a ok game. Just posting what i found dont be mad. If there are so many people playing 9.6 mil would it matter peak time or not to have so many low server?
To be fair, it is pretty easy to have 18 low pop servers (I'm sure there are actually more than that, but thats what shows up on the screen shot here) when in NA you have 241 servers and in Europe there are 263 servers. So it is very believable that there would be that many low servers.
As to the debate on how many people there are playing in the U.S./E.U. versus China, there's no good breakdown. There are a total of 241 servers in the U.S. and 263 in Europe for a total of 504 (these totals are listed on various sites and I guess you could hand count them if you really wanted to). In China where I couldn't find a total number, but did find a listing of the servers (which means I had to hand count them, so they could be off by a few in either direction) there are 373 servers. So, while it would seem that there is probably a fairly even distribution between the U.S./EU and China, there is no real way to "prove" this, short of Blizz giving the numbers themselves. I suppose it is possible that the servers in China use a different tech that allows more people to play per server, but I haven't heard anything about that.
it's not WOW going from 10m to 9.6m, it's WOW going from 12m to 9.6m, pretty big drop if you ask me. WOW will be around for years to come but has lost it's stand, it's going down not up and will continue to do so. To me it's a good thing because the list of great games keeps getting bigger, and thats good for all of us, WOW fanboy or not.
it's not WOW going from 10m to 9.6m, it's WOW going from 12m to 9.6m, pretty big drop if you ask me. WOW will be around for years to come but has lost it's stand, it's going down not up and will continue to do so. To me it's a good thing because the list of great games keeps getting bigger, and thats good for all of us, WOW fanboy or not.
Peace
Lascer
Actually it is quite the opposite.
The reality is something like this:
2009: WOW had a peak at 12 million subs ... the rest had 3 million subs total.
2013: WOW stands at 9.6 mullion subs ... the rest stands at 700K subs (mostly EVE and some 8 US servers of RIft).
That's it. All the rest is free to play aka as garbage without much support since lacking structured funding.
WOW (9.6 M) and EVE (500K), the rest is on life support of free to play and pay.
it's not WOW going from 10m to 9.6m, it's WOW going from 12m to 9.6m, pretty big drop if you ask me. WOW will be around for years to come but has lost it's stand, it's going down not up and will continue to do so. To me it's a good thing because the list of great games keeps getting bigger, and thats good for all of us, WOW fanboy or not.
Peace
Lascer
Actually it is quite the opposite.
The reality is something like this:
2009: WOW had a peak at 12 million subs ... the rest had 3 million subs total.
2013: WOW stands at 9.6 mullion subs ... the rest stands at 700K subs (mostly EVE and some 8 US servers of RIft).
That's it. All the rest is free to play aka as garbage without much support since lacking structured funding.
WOW (9.6 M) and EVE (500K), the rest is on life support of free to play and pay.
You obviously haven't paid any attention to what happens when games go F2P. Two examples DDO and EQ2. EQ2 has increased cash flow by 3X and DDO was going to close the odors then they went F2P and started making a profit again. F2P brings in revenue & that's why games are going that route. I'm sure there are examples that aren't doing so well(SWTOR maybe? Haven't played it in a while) but if the model wasn't working, companies wouldn't use it.
Well your out of your mind if you really belive wow has 9.6 mil subscribers. Most players are still in china and they have there a pay 2 play per hour system unlike here 15dollar /month.
Blizzard counts those accounts AS FULL SUBSCRIBERS. Now even if 1 played for like 15h and had quitted, he will be counted as subscriber!
Thats how they lie with theyr 9.6mil players. But fools gona believe everything because blizz need to stand with theyr game at the top. I know NOONE of my friends that still play WoW- NOONE. But im anyway in a high educated country- say you play mmos and people start to look down on you, because especially mmos degenerate. But thats another story.
Gold star goes to you. You are the first one to write this in this thread. Guess you missed that part in the OP's original post. We have never heard that before.
Thank you very much for your insight which is extremely helpful. You and your friends are an extremely reperesentable sample of the whole population.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
There isn't a soul on this internet that will believe that that picture is from peak time.
Useless post is useless. Borderline trolling even.
I could careless if this game sink or swims it a ok game. Just posting what i found dont be mad. If there are so many people playing 9.6 mil would it matter peak time or not to have so many low server?
Here we are again i guess, the usual circus of sub figures being released, always forgetting that at least Blizzard do release these figures unlike many others who rely on 'boxes sold' or 'registered players' not actualy showing how many are playing it on a month by month basis.
Then of course we have the eternal devaluation of Chinese players who for some reason shouldn't count as players, of course using the argument that they may only play for an hour or two and get counted as a sub......and? They may also play for a couple of hundred hours and still only get counted as one sub even though by comparison they will have paid 2-3 times the sub cost to someone in the west. There is the other rub, directly comparing two completely different gaming and financial cultures (average monthly salaries being up to 1/10th or less of what they are in the US/EU), it just doesn't work, so for those telling us 'sheep' to use our brains, there may be a little mirror staring to do i think.
Not that it will stay the detractors, but Blizzard lay out a very clear and concise definition of what they count as a subscription yet still draw so much critisism when other companies are happy to maintain an illusion that 3Mill boxes sold means they have 3Mill players?!?
It's been a joy, see you again on the next one
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Exactly shadoed and I bet when the very same chinese player base plays one of the b2p or other new fangled version of pay system suddenly the chinese player is as much worth as a sub player. It is all very much a point of view depending which side you are on. Whether a chinese player pays hourly or not they are still playing and therefore should be considered as we will all see soon enough once GW 2 gets released in China and a whole new tune is sung.
Here we are again i guess, the usual circus of sub figures being released, always forgetting that at least Blizzard do release these figures unlike many others who rely on 'boxes sold' or 'registered players' not actualy showing how many are playing it on a month by month basis.
Then of course we have the eternal devaluation of Chinese players who for some reason shouldn't count as players, of course using the argument that they may only play for an hour or two and get counted as a sub......and? They may also play for a couple of hundred hours and still only get counted as one sub even though by comparison they will have paid 2-3 times the sub cost to someone in the west. There is the other rub, directly comparing two completely different gaming and financial cultures (average monthly salaries being up to 1/10th or less of what they are in the US/EU), it just doesn't work, so for those telling us 'sheep' to use our brains, there may be a little mirror staring to do i think.
Not that it will stay the detractors, but Blizzard lay out a very clear and concise definition of what they count as a subscription yet still draw so much critisism when other companies are happy to maintain an illusion that 3Mill boxes sold means they have 3Mill players?!?
It's been a joy, see you again on the next one
I'd save that post for future use. And used it will be....
Here we are again i guess, the usual circus of sub figures being released, always forgetting that at least Blizzard do release these figures unlike many others who rely on 'boxes sold' or 'registered players' not actualy showing how many are playing it on a month by month basis.
Then of course we have the eternal devaluation of Chinese players who for some reason shouldn't count as players, of course using the argument that they may only play for an hour or two and get counted as a sub......and? They may also play for a couple of hundred hours and still only get counted as one sub even though by comparison they will have paid 2-3 times the sub cost to someone in the west. There is the other rub, directly comparing two completely different gaming and financial cultures (average monthly salaries being up to 1/10th or less of what they are in the US/EU), it just doesn't work, so for those telling us 'sheep' to use our brains, there may be a little mirror staring to do i think.
Not that it will stay the detractors, but Blizzard lay out a very clear and concise definition of what they count as a subscription yet still draw so much critisism when other companies are happy to maintain an illusion that 3Mill boxes sold means they have 3Mill players?!?
It's been a joy, see you again on the next one
I'd save that post for future use. And used it will be....
This is by far the best post I have ever read on this site....
Not sure about MoP figures, but cata sold over 4.7million in the first month and thats without china (which is about half of wows player base) who didn't get the expansion until July the following year
So, they always post China subscribers, but never post China expac sales?
As a WoW player, that makes perfect sense to me for some reason.
It really does make perfect sense. In China, nobody but the Internet Cafe has to buy the expansion.
Imagine a cafe with 12 computers. that cafe has to buy 12 copies of MoP. During the month, 300 different accounts use those 12 computers to play the game, they all can play MoP. 12 expansions sold, 300 subscribers.
Just to point out a few things that that haters fail to realize
1. China pays by the hour - YES. But their servers have the same raid progress and AH activity as western servers. In fact, most chinesse servers have much deeper raid progression per server. Hypothetically, you could say that 5M chinesse all paid 5 cents last month and thus are ´subscribers´... but guild, AH and raid progression on those servers ALL indicate that chinesse players play even more hours than we do.
2. Last year at this time, WOW was down to 9.1M subscribers. So yes, they dropped 400-500k subscribers since MoP launched, but they currently have more than they had last year.
3. Competition - AOC, Warhammer, SWTOR and now GW2... all big budget games with a lot of hype.. none of them have made a dent. Elder Scrolls is coming probably in 2014, and like those above, could get a lot of hype.. but for at least 2013, WOW has nothing launching to worry about.
The devs made a lot of mistakes in Cata, mainly they spent way too much effort revamping 1-60 which meant there was very little content for endgame. The tuning was off on heroic dungeons (for pugs) and a few other minor things that have all been fixed. In MoP, CRZ isn´t liked by some, but it was added to help new players. Dailies are not liked by people who are stupid and math impaired and couldn´t figure out that they only had to do a few a day if that. Most of them now say they ´hate dailies´ but have realized and moved on and know they don´t even have to do them if they don´t like them.
in any event, WOW is going to bounce between 9M and 10M for another year. It will probably trickle down for the next 6 months only to pick up when the next expansion is announced.
And people who say WOW is lying about subscribers. Check out their financials.. they list Revenues which was up. The stock price of ATVI is much more closely tied to COD and their other projects than WOW. in all of the financial recaps I have seen, never was WOW subscribers mentioned ( it just isn´t that big of a deal to investors).. instead they focus on COD sales and their other new game. There is no upside to ATVI lying about subscribers, but if they did lie and got caught, a bunch of them would go to to jail. Again, read the financial recaps on Yahoo or Seeking Alpha.. no mention of WOW, let alone WOW subscribers.
Originally posted by Celcius I expect to see continued and bigger losses in the quarters to follow. It will be especially interesting when all the 2013 MMOs start to hit and there is no expansion in sight until late 2014.
What MMO is hitting in 2013? I think Elder Scrolls has an outside shot, but I think it will be 2014.
And really, do you know how silly you sound even saying that. AOC, Warhammer, SWTOR, TSW, Darkfall, and now GW2... none of which even dented WOW.
Don´t get me wrong. Elder Srolls is a great franchise, but the game is going to be click-click attack style. While some like that diablo-style, it is vastly different than WOW. I am certainly going to play it just because I think the world will be amazing.. but I am not sure click-click attack style will transition well to endgame progression type gameplay.
Originally posted by Kyleran I don't know how they do it, but somehow WOW keeps drawing in the players. Over the years I have known at least 50 people who played WOW, and today to the best of my knowledge not one of them still does. Yet somehow Blizzard keeps finding players to replace them, have to applaud their efforts.
I would love it if they released the total number of players they ever had. Just today I had a player join my guild (lvl 4 and not a trial account since he joined my guild LOL). In any event, he was in Ogrimmar and said that he ran up there before questing because he wanted to see the changes to the city since CATA. I never asked him when he played last.
But I think that is indicative of why WOW can maintain subscribers. They simply always have a huge amount of former players coming back for short amounts of time.
Before LFD was introduced, I had a huge friends list full of nothing but tanks, because before LFD, if you wanted to run heroics, you basically had to know a good tank. That friends lists from 3 years ago lite up like crazy when MoP was launched.
WOW probably had 40 or 50M people in the USA and EU with accounts. There aer always things that are going to tempt a bunch of them back, whether it is monks, or killing the Lich King (big lore thing for WC3 players) or just a promotion.
Comments
Yes, overall MoP was lousy in many ways.
To me it is not the oriental flavour but rather how they implemented it. It is too kitsch when it should have been more like AD&D's Oriental Adventures. My favourite addition from MoP is the pet battle system, which is not enough to make up the money I paid for this expac. What they did to talents and glyphs was horrendous !
Overall disappointed with it.
I will soon be an ex-subscriber. I had a good run though... 2004 to now off and on with the last run from September 2011 to now. But I will just be one out of a few hundred thousand people to go heh thus I am sure Blizzard won't miss my departure
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
Even though I hate how the game evolved I can say that the number is a very low number considering that it is a 8 year old game (released November 23, 2004).
I also think that the game will stil have more years to go before it will start to be non-profitable for Blizzard, and even then the option for F2P with perks shop will be an option.
V.
i agree
regardless, WOW is doing fine
EQ2 fan sites
Wow could have 3 million subs and no one would notice...
Almost everything is either done through cross server or its Guild based.
When a game doesn't rely on a massive community in a particular area of a game world As long as numbers arent too low it wont matter.
Games like Guild Wars 2 are hurt by low numbers, Rift is hurt by low Numbers... because their mechanics require massive zone population. Wow Does not.
Playing: Nothing
Looking forward to: Nothing
To be fair, it is pretty easy to have 18 low pop servers (I'm sure there are actually more than that, but thats what shows up on the screen shot here) when in NA you have 241 servers and in Europe there are 263 servers. So it is very believable that there would be that many low servers.
Didn't MoP shift like 9-10 million copies though?
I bet other games out there wish they were this 'dead'...
Look, subs drop inbetween expacks, we know this.
Humans naturally take the path of least resistance. WoW is so easy a half retaded monkey could play it and play it well.
it's not WOW going from 10m to 9.6m, it's WOW going from 12m to 9.6m, pretty big drop if you ask me. WOW will be around for years to come but has lost it's stand, it's going down not up and will continue to do so. To me it's a good thing because the list of great games keeps getting bigger, and thats good for all of us, WOW fanboy or not.
Peace
Lascer
Actually it is quite the opposite.
The reality is something like this:
2009: WOW had a peak at 12 million subs ... the rest had 3 million subs total.
2013: WOW stands at 9.6 mullion subs ... the rest stands at 700K subs (mostly EVE and some 8 US servers of RIft).
That's it. All the rest is free to play aka as garbage without much support since lacking structured funding.
WOW (9.6 M) and EVE (500K), the rest is on life support of free to play and pay.
You obviously haven't paid any attention to what happens when games go F2P. Two examples DDO and EQ2. EQ2 has increased cash flow by 3X and DDO was going to close the odors then they went F2P and started making a profit again. F2P brings in revenue & that's why games are going that route. I'm sure there are examples that aren't doing so well(SWTOR maybe? Haven't played it in a while) but if the model wasn't working, companies wouldn't use it.
Gold star goes to you. You are the first one to write this in this thread. Guess you missed that part in the OP's original post. We have never heard that before.
Thank you very much for your insight which is extremely helpful. You and your friends are an extremely reperesentable sample of the whole population.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Better to look at live stats;
EU http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/status majority High/Med at 10am GMT
US http://us.battle.net/wow/en/status majority Hugh/Med at 2am PST
Wayyy more medium to high population servers on EU and US then low ones.
If each server on that list had a average of 5k player it would be around 3million subs which is about right for the west.
Here we are again i guess, the usual circus of sub figures being released, always forgetting that at least Blizzard do release these figures unlike many others who rely on 'boxes sold' or 'registered players' not actualy showing how many are playing it on a month by month basis.
Then of course we have the eternal devaluation of Chinese players who for some reason shouldn't count as players, of course using the argument that they may only play for an hour or two and get counted as a sub......and? They may also play for a couple of hundred hours and still only get counted as one sub even though by comparison they will have paid 2-3 times the sub cost to someone in the west. There is the other rub, directly comparing two completely different gaming and financial cultures (average monthly salaries being up to 1/10th or less of what they are in the US/EU), it just doesn't work, so for those telling us 'sheep' to use our brains, there may be a little mirror staring to do i think.
Not that it will stay the detractors, but Blizzard lay out a very clear and concise definition of what they count as a subscription yet still draw so much critisism when other companies are happy to maintain an illusion that 3Mill boxes sold means they have 3Mill players?!?
It's been a joy, see you again on the next one
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I'd save that post for future use. And used it will be....
This is by far the best post I have ever read on this site....
You sir...i think....just won the internet...
It really does make perfect sense. In China, nobody but the Internet Cafe has to buy the expansion.
Imagine a cafe with 12 computers. that cafe has to buy 12 copies of MoP. During the month, 300 different accounts use those 12 computers to play the game, they all can play MoP. 12 expansions sold, 300 subscribers.
Just to point out a few things that that haters fail to realize
1. China pays by the hour - YES. But their servers have the same raid progress and AH activity as western servers. In fact, most chinesse servers have much deeper raid progression per server. Hypothetically, you could say that 5M chinesse all paid 5 cents last month and thus are ´subscribers´... but guild, AH and raid progression on those servers ALL indicate that chinesse players play even more hours than we do.
2. Last year at this time, WOW was down to 9.1M subscribers. So yes, they dropped 400-500k subscribers since MoP launched, but they currently have more than they had last year.
3. Competition - AOC, Warhammer, SWTOR and now GW2... all big budget games with a lot of hype.. none of them have made a dent. Elder Scrolls is coming probably in 2014, and like those above, could get a lot of hype.. but for at least 2013, WOW has nothing launching to worry about.
The devs made a lot of mistakes in Cata, mainly they spent way too much effort revamping 1-60 which meant there was very little content for endgame. The tuning was off on heroic dungeons (for pugs) and a few other minor things that have all been fixed. In MoP, CRZ isn´t liked by some, but it was added to help new players. Dailies are not liked by people who are stupid and math impaired and couldn´t figure out that they only had to do a few a day if that. Most of them now say they ´hate dailies´ but have realized and moved on and know they don´t even have to do them if they don´t like them.
in any event, WOW is going to bounce between 9M and 10M for another year. It will probably trickle down for the next 6 months only to pick up when the next expansion is announced.
And people who say WOW is lying about subscribers. Check out their financials.. they list Revenues which was up. The stock price of ATVI is much more closely tied to COD and their other projects than WOW. in all of the financial recaps I have seen, never was WOW subscribers mentioned ( it just isn´t that big of a deal to investors).. instead they focus on COD sales and their other new game. There is no upside to ATVI lying about subscribers, but if they did lie and got caught, a bunch of them would go to to jail. Again, read the financial recaps on Yahoo or Seeking Alpha.. no mention of WOW, let alone WOW subscribers.
What MMO is hitting in 2013? I think Elder Scrolls has an outside shot, but I think it will be 2014.
And really, do you know how silly you sound even saying that. AOC, Warhammer, SWTOR, TSW, Darkfall, and now GW2... none of which even dented WOW.
Don´t get me wrong. Elder Srolls is a great franchise, but the game is going to be click-click attack style. While some like that diablo-style, it is vastly different than WOW. I am certainly going to play it just because I think the world will be amazing.. but I am not sure click-click attack style will transition well to endgame progression type gameplay.
I would love it if they released the total number of players they ever had. Just today I had a player join my guild (lvl 4 and not a trial account since he joined my guild LOL). In any event, he was in Ogrimmar and said that he ran up there before questing because he wanted to see the changes to the city since CATA. I never asked him when he played last.
But I think that is indicative of why WOW can maintain subscribers. They simply always have a huge amount of former players coming back for short amounts of time.
Before LFD was introduced, I had a huge friends list full of nothing but tanks, because before LFD, if you wanted to run heroics, you basically had to know a good tank. That friends lists from 3 years ago lite up like crazy when MoP was launched.
WOW probably had 40 or 50M people in the USA and EU with accounts. There aer always things that are going to tempt a bunch of them back, whether it is monks, or killing the Lich King (big lore thing for WC3 players) or just a promotion.