Those of you saying that Blizz is lying or the numbers they report are wrong, are absolute morons and know nothing about how business works. If you did, you would know that Blizzard can't lie when they report there numbers cause it's against the law.
who says they can't? The law? How many companies have broken the law that got caught and I wonder how many continue to break the law and haven't got caught? So saying they can't is wrong since they can, but are they willing to take the chance on getting caught?
Despite the hate lavished on this game from posters here, I expect there are enough supporters to put this game in the millions. This is coming from someone who is not a fan, but what does it matter to me what someone else plays. WoW remains popular with lots of people. Deal with it.
(although we do know that it is a pay per time model in Asia so subscriber is a loose term).
This is the bit i will never understand, what is it that is so objectionable about the pay per hour model that alienates the asian players as 'subscribers'?
For the first part, people will throw in that even if a person plays for 5 minutes in the pay per hour model they are counted as a subscriber? OK, that's as maybe, but in reality how many people do you think trek to a cafe to just log in for five minutes and then nothing until the next month?
Anyway, that is also besides the point because if i log in for just five minutes in a month i am still a subscriber because i paid my monthly fee, so is it just the amount of money they pay to play that people are using as an excuse to write them off as subscribers?
Hard earned cash is hard earned cash, remembering that there can be a huge difference in those amounts from country to country and if you choose to spend it to play a game then you are by definition subscribing to a service that is being provided to you.
The wierd thing is that most that drive that notion of the asian players being the majority of the population seem to want it both ways in that they then say "well they only pay pennies to play" but Blizz still managed to pull in $275,000,000 in subscriptions and sales in a single quarter, so if they are the majority they are still spending a pretty penny to play, in most cases comparatively as much as a western player would pay in a monthly sub or more to make up those kinds of numbers. Either that, or we can throw in another subscriber disaster excuse and say that Blizzard is still shifting 10's of thousands of boxes and expansions in the west and is just keeping up with the loss of long term subscribers whilst doing so?!?
That is the most accurate, logical, dead-on, unbiased summary of the "subscriber" situation in WoW that I've seen in quite a while if not ever.
You would be surprised at how many people have year long or 6 month subs that are not always actively playing the game..
Contrary to popular belief subscriptions are not always a valid indication of how healthy a game's population is.. And I think it's becoming a less useful metric to boast about..
even 8.3mil seems like a exagerated number , every where is dead and almost all servers are low pop
You should pay them $25 for a server transfer and transfer to one of the higher population servers.
Not really nice suggestion right after Blizzard announced upcoming server merges for Western WoW server which would save him a lot of money.
Well ninja announced hidden somewhere between 5.4 patch notes disguised as a "game feature" under cover of a fancy new name, when its still just merges.
Well the usual back paddling and derailing, from the "inarguable facts" to the ever same conjecture, misleading half truths and strong personal beliefs of the white knights already kicked in. What would a "WoW subscription" topic be without them.
No one even bothers any more about the fact to OPs problem is that his personal experience does not correlate with the impression the alleged facts give of the game. Successfully derailed another sprout of doubt.
Its more like Server-Mergers-PLUS™, what blizzard are doing is so much more than server mergers (i,e closing a bunch down and forcing players to transfer - that's easy). Blizzard have spent time,money and manpower developing this new technology - They're keeping their infrastructure (servers) in place should they have a sudden influx of players to their low pop servers yet making it so all servers should show a marked increased in player activity. If you've ever tried to log into WoW with a few days of new expac you'll know why keep all their servers alive is a good idea.
It's server mergers without the merge.
Looks like this could be the first steps towards having a hand-full of MEGA servers™ rather than 400+ regular severs that they currently have. All why avoiding the stigma of server mergers, this is win win all round.
Originally posted by rush1984 there is no way wow has 9.6 mil subs still, id be surprised if they had even 4 million..almost every server is dead and the remaining bulk have all piled up onto a couple servers, that is atleast how it is on eu servers. so where does this number come from because its a lie....or maybe they have lost even more since the last check?
Like someone else said, have you considered the Asian population? From what I understand that is where the large majority of players are located. I personally feel like the MOP expansion was catered to them. I could be wrong but it doesn't seem that hard to imagine.
Its more like Server-Mergers-PLUS™, what blizzard are doing is so much more than server mergers (i,e closing a bunch down and forcing players to transfer - that's easy). Blizzard have spent time,money and manpower developing this new technology - They're keeping their infrastructure (servers) in place should they have a sudden influx of players to their low pop servers yet making it so all servers should show a marked increased in player activity. If you've ever tried to log into WoW with a few days of new expac you'll know why keep all their servers alive is a good idea.
It's server mergers without the merge.
Looks like this could be the first steps towards having a hand-full of MEGA servers™ rather than 400+ regular severs that they currently have. All why avoiding the stigma of server mergers, this is win win all round.
No mega servers. That's a myth fans on damage control try to spread or few player would love to see. But nothing Blizzard ever said even indicated such a change. In fact multiple post by blues like server queues are continuing to exist due to game server limitations (old structures are not kept, player share fewer server) completely contradict the mega server myth.
Until now or until they actually promise it its just consolidation of separate user groups (past realms) in the database into so called "virtual realms". Effectively just merges. Whether its manually done or on the fly doesn't make the server infrastructure magically different from a common merges or overflow/channel systems. That is not the point of anything they explained until now about the merges.
Clustering player group based on past realm ids permitting even name duplicates, yes. Server cluster, no, that's just wishful thinking until now. Realms are kept as a facade to avoid admitting that the server have been merged and avoid the impression sth. was "removed" and still group the player together even when not technical necessary any more. But realm identification of characters has nothing to do with the unchanged physical server and game server structure.
They are not likely going to keep the infrastructure in place, when most will be completely empty because the player are accessing another server that became their new designated "virtual realm". Just like cross realm worked. They didn't work as server cluster somehow communicating with each other either, but player where just designated to another realms physical server instead of theirs and that way grouped together. That is why the IPs simply changed to those of the other server for one side. Like throwing blue fish and yellow fish into the blue bucket instead of keeping two half empty buckets. And only reverse it when its to many blue or yellow fish for the same one bucket The blue bucket never became a mega bucket cluster. It just had enough empty space left to accept the yellow buckets fill either.
And everyone knows they don't need expand them at this point since more than half of the space already is empty and population is in decline. Even if they could implement the equivalent to overflow server as they once proposed. That's something entirely different than mega server again and more like generic overflow/channels, instances on separate server restricting player to interact with those of the other channels/overflow server (due to set zone limitations, of course they continue to exist otherwise they wouldn't even need to launch new instances. Those zones are limited by entire different untouchable factors like exponential increasing traffic and load when playerr start to overlap)
Yes if you boil it all down its a server merge, but it's so much more than that from a players perspective (which is what matters), no forced transfers, no forced name change, no risk having your guild break up, more players out in the world (great for PvP), vastly more players avaliable to form and join guilds. Aside from meeting some with an * after their name it's completely transparent that it even happened. Sadly I'll still encounter queues of 20k around the launch of an expansion but I'm ok with that.
Blizzards figures include the Asian market where wow is still huge and doing better than it ever has in the West.
My Colour Is Vomit green, I puke on the tards with stupid colour sigs. My symbol is ,,!, O ,!,, My enemies are any prat with a colour sig, a meaningless personality test, or a pointless list of games and classes.
The whole issue of the number of WoW subs is becoming rather pointless. Since more and more online games are transitioning to F2P, WoW is the "leader" in a rapidly dwindling market.
The last official number I heard was 8.4 million subs, with Activision execs stating they expect that number to continue to decline. The last 2 expansions were rather lackluster, combined with the growing number of F2P games most likely led to the (continuing) decline.
WoW has the illusion of being bigger since Blizzard, for some reason, refuses to merge servers. Merging servers would only benefit both the community of players and Blizzard itself. For Blizzard, less bandwidth costs and less hardware to maintain. For players, larger communities. Blizzard tried to say they "couldn't" merge servers since that would "congest" Stormwind and Orgrimmar. This is an absurd statement. The only reason said cities are "congested" is because of Blizzard's design philosophy. You put all the Cata and MoP portals in only those 2 cities, so of course players are going to congregate there. This was the same problem in early vanilla with the Auction House. The easy solution: put portals in all major cities. Behold! Congestion solved.
They aren't allowed to lie about those numbers. They can use players from other countries and count anybody playing within a certain period of time as a subscriber but they can't straight out lie. Why? You know how fast Vivendi would be destroyed if investors/stock holders found out that they've been telling lies?
Yes if you boil it all down its a server merge, but it's so much more than that from a players perspective (which is what matters), no forced transfers, no forced name change, no risk having your guild break up, more players out in the world (great for PvP), vastly more players avaliable to form and join guilds. Aside from meeting some with an * after their name it's completely transparent that it even happened. Sadly I'll still encounter queues of 20k around the launch of an expansion but I'm ok with that.
When most companies merge servers they don't close some down and give each player a transfer, they take the population from 2 servers and stick it to one. The big issue about it is character names, not really guilds splitting up.
I played EQ2 and my server merged 2 times, there the highest level character kept the name and if they were the same, the one who had played long (if both were active that is).
Not really a problem frankly even if it was annoying that the server named changed. Larger servers are of course always good but I don't like cross server content except in PvP contests since a big part of the charm of a MMO is that you actually learn to know people on your server when you PUG. In fact I have recruited many good guild members that way in the past in more than one MMO.
Login waiting can be solved easy, like GW2s overflow servers for example. No, I think Blizz is doing all of these because they have said that merging servers is a sign of a dying game in the past, or maybe to get the money for server transfers from players. High population server is very important in a MMO.
I don't really care if Wow have 9,6M, 8,3m or fewer players but they really should use fewer servers with more population on. Then again, I don't play it so if the Wow players disagree they have my blessing if they prefer the current system.
My guess is everyone is too spread out along the servers. If you're questing I rarely saw people either unless it was a new zone, a place for dailies, or something special for being there. Most people were either in SW or Org waiting for ques to pop
Playing: TSW, D&D NW, Defiance (more the tv show than game >.> ) LotRO, DCUO
Say $50,000,000 is from digital/box sales and cash shop/services, no idea here, but from reading things and such, this seems like a decent guess.
That leave $225,000,000 in traditional subs and pay per hour players in a quarter.
Divide it by 3 to get monthly = $75,000,000 a month.
If this was all traditional sub money, it would equal 5 million players. 6.1 million if you say they sold nothing in the cash shop/services, and no box/digital and did the whole $275 million.
So, I would guess they have probably 2-3 million traditional sub players, then the other 5-6 million are pay per hour players on non-traditional subs probably.
Not sure why we care, besides trying to use the numbers to judge other mmos.
The regardless of the date/time/group of WoW subscriber base, the numbers Blizzard/Activision give tend to be far more forthcoming than any other MMO. Most player bases for other MMOs are rounding errors for Blizzard. The OP is correct in his stance that millions of WoW players are waiting for a better MMO to jump ship too. Almost nine years and still waiting.
Yes if you boil it all down its a server merge, but it's so much more than that from a players perspective (which is what matters), no forced transfers, no forced name change, no risk having your guild break up, more players out in the world (great for PvP), vastly more players avaliable to form and join guilds. Aside from meeting some with an * after their name it's completely transparent that it even happened. Sadly I'll still encounter queues of 20k around the launch of an expansion but I'm ok with that.
When most companies merge servers they don't close some down and give each player a transfer, they take the population from 2 servers and stick it to one. The big issue about it is character names, not really guilds splitting up.
I played EQ2 and my server merged 2 times, there the highest level character kept the name and if they were the same, the one who had played long (if both were active that is).
Not really a problem frankly even if it was annoying that the server named changed. Larger servers are of course always good but I don't like cross server content except in PvP contests since a big part of the charm of a MMO is that you actually learn to know people on your server when you PUG. In fact I have recruited many good guild members that way in the past in more than one MMO.
Login waiting can be solved easy, like GW2s overflow servers for example. No, I think Blizz is doing all of these because they have said that merging servers is a sign of a dying game in the past, or maybe to get the money for server transfers from players. High population server is very important in a MMO.
I don't really care if Wow have 9,6M, 8,3m or fewer players but they really should use fewer servers with more population on. Then again, I don't play it so if the Wow players disagree they have my blessing if they prefer the current system.
they will not have to close any servers cause that would turn out to be a bad picture of the game's state of population/popularity. They are very clever and instead they will implented (at next patch) a new system the virtual servers.. its a system that combine servers into a virtual one..now people from cross servers can do practicaly anything together..and even Auction Houses are linked to the battlegroups . problem solved. with the LFR/etc it was hard already to see too many people outside big cities..thats why they had for sometime so many mandatory daily quests...but that backlashed cause people hate dailies... even more if dailies are a must do thing to get reputation so you can gear up properly for the next tier... now they have mostly fixed that..
Those X mio subs has always been a number fabricated around asian internetcafe-accounts which people over there can buy for a few cents and that technically never expire.
The people saying that WoW will be around for another decade should consider that only a few bad design decisions costed Blizzard millions of subs in return. It only takes another few of those bad decisions and say some other trouble with chinese regulators, they'll be down to 5mio worldwide in a flash.
Blizzard as we know them by now shurely has some more bad designs in the pipe and will keep them coming.
While "another decade" is likely, i wouldn't bet on that on the other hand.
Originally posted by emperorwings Why is there only 5 people hanging around SW and 3 of them speaking Russian. Unless everyone else rolled horde
exactly - and this new feature will fix that taking a horde heavy server (which mine is) and having a good portion of the horde show up on an alliance lite server, thus helping fix faction imbalance on severs while also boosting the population on low population servers. Surely from a players perspective this is WIN WIN? - if this were any other game people be singing it's praises but it's WoW so it must be bad, there must be some evil motive behind it.
Originally posted by Lugors The regardless of the date/time/group of WoW subscriber base, the numbers Blizzard/Activision give tend to be far more forthcoming than any other MMO. Most player bases for other MMOs are rounding errors for Blizzard. The OP is correct in his stance that millions of WoW players are waiting for a better MMO to jump ship too. Almost nine years and still waiting.
actually a good chunk of WoW players who stop playing WoW simply stop playing MMOs, not all mind you but a good chunk.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
Originally posted by Lugors The regardless of the date/time/group of WoW subscriber base, the numbers Blizzard/Activision give tend to be far more forthcoming than any other MMO. Most player bases for other MMOs are rounding errors for Blizzard. The OP is correct in his stance that millions of WoW players are waiting for a better MMO to jump ship too. Almost nine years and still waiting.
actually a good chunk of WoW players who stop playing WoW simply stop playing MMOs, not all mind you but a good chunk.
^^^This.
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Comments
It's a standard quote about conspiracy theorists or more appropriately, conspiraloons.
Works just as well for forum posters on MMORPG.com. Same style of reasoning, different target.
who says they can't? The law? How many companies have broken the law that got caught and I wonder how many continue to break the law and haven't got caught? So saying they can't is wrong since they can, but are they willing to take the chance on getting caught?
That is the most accurate, logical, dead-on, unbiased summary of the "subscriber" situation in WoW that I've seen in quite a while if not ever.
/reported
We don't do that here....
You would be surprised at how many people have year long or 6 month subs that are not always actively playing the game..
Contrary to popular belief subscriptions are not always a valid indication of how healthy a game's population is.. And I think it's becoming a less useful metric to boast about..
To be fair though, the majority of "subs" they lost were from Asia. So they mostly lost these 3 cent people.
Fair comment, i promise that this will be my last attempt to put together a logical argument :-)
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Its more like Server-Mergers-PLUS™, what blizzard are doing is so much more than server mergers (i,e closing a bunch down and forcing players to transfer - that's easy). Blizzard have spent time,money and manpower developing this new technology - They're keeping their infrastructure (servers) in place should they have a sudden influx of players to their low pop servers yet making it so all servers should show a marked increased in player activity. If you've ever tried to log into WoW with a few days of new expac you'll know why keep all their servers alive is a good idea.
It's server mergers without the merge.
Looks like this could be the first steps towards having a hand-full of MEGA servers™ rather than 400+ regular severs that they currently have. All why avoiding the stigma of server mergers, this is win win all round.
Yes if you boil it all down its a server merge, but it's so much more than that from a players perspective (which is what matters), no forced transfers, no forced name change, no risk having your guild break up, more players out in the world (great for PvP), vastly more players avaliable to form and join guilds. Aside from meeting some with an * after their name it's completely transparent that it even happened. Sadly I'll still encounter queues of 20k around the launch of an expansion but I'm ok with that.
My Colour Is Vomit green, I puke on the tards with stupid colour sigs. My symbol is ,,!, O ,!,, My enemies are any prat with a colour sig, a meaningless personality test, or a pointless list of games and classes.
Regards Hexcaliber
The whole issue of the number of WoW subs is becoming rather pointless. Since more and more online games are transitioning to F2P, WoW is the "leader" in a rapidly dwindling market.
The last official number I heard was 8.4 million subs, with Activision execs stating they expect that number to continue to decline. The last 2 expansions were rather lackluster, combined with the growing number of F2P games most likely led to the (continuing) decline.
WoW has the illusion of being bigger since Blizzard, for some reason, refuses to merge servers. Merging servers would only benefit both the community of players and Blizzard itself. For Blizzard, less bandwidth costs and less hardware to maintain. For players, larger communities. Blizzard tried to say they "couldn't" merge servers since that would "congest" Stormwind and Orgrimmar. This is an absurd statement. The only reason said cities are "congested" is because of Blizzard's design philosophy. You put all the Cata and MoP portals in only those 2 cities, so of course players are going to congregate there. This was the same problem in early vanilla with the Auction House. The easy solution: put portals in all major cities. Behold! Congestion solved.
When most companies merge servers they don't close some down and give each player a transfer, they take the population from 2 servers and stick it to one. The big issue about it is character names, not really guilds splitting up.
I played EQ2 and my server merged 2 times, there the highest level character kept the name and if they were the same, the one who had played long (if both were active that is).
Not really a problem frankly even if it was annoying that the server named changed. Larger servers are of course always good but I don't like cross server content except in PvP contests since a big part of the charm of a MMO is that you actually learn to know people on your server when you PUG. In fact I have recruited many good guild members that way in the past in more than one MMO.
Login waiting can be solved easy, like GW2s overflow servers for example. No, I think Blizz is doing all of these because they have said that merging servers is a sign of a dying game in the past, or maybe to get the money for server transfers from players. High population server is very important in a MMO.
I don't really care if Wow have 9,6M, 8,3m or fewer players but they really should use fewer servers with more population on. Then again, I don't play it so if the Wow players disagree they have my blessing if they prefer the current system.
Playing: TSW, D&D NW, Defiance (more the tv show than game >.> ) LotRO, DCUO
275,000,000 sales/subs in a quarter.
Say $50,000,000 is from digital/box sales and cash shop/services, no idea here, but from reading things and such, this seems like a decent guess.
That leave $225,000,000 in traditional subs and pay per hour players in a quarter.
Divide it by 3 to get monthly = $75,000,000 a month.
If this was all traditional sub money, it would equal 5 million players. 6.1 million if you say they sold nothing in the cash shop/services, and no box/digital and did the whole $275 million.
So, I would guess they have probably 2-3 million traditional sub players, then the other 5-6 million are pay per hour players on non-traditional subs probably.
Not sure why we care, besides trying to use the numbers to judge other mmos.
they will not have to close any servers cause that would turn out to be a bad picture of the game's state of population/popularity. They are very clever and instead they will implented (at next patch) a new system the virtual servers.. its a system that combine servers into a virtual one..now people from cross servers can do practicaly anything together..and even Auction Houses are linked to the battlegroups . problem solved. with the LFR/etc it was hard already to see too many people outside big cities..thats why they had for sometime so many mandatory daily quests...but that backlashed cause people hate dailies... even more if dailies are a must do thing to get reputation so you can gear up properly for the next tier... now they have mostly fixed that..
Those X mio subs has always been a number fabricated around asian internetcafe-accounts which people over there can buy for a few cents and that technically never expire.
The people saying that WoW will be around for another decade should consider that only a few bad design decisions costed Blizzard millions of subs in return. It only takes another few of those bad decisions and say some other trouble with chinese regulators, they'll be down to 5mio worldwide in a flash.
Blizzard as we know them by now shurely has some more bad designs in the pipe and will keep them coming.
While "another decade" is likely, i wouldn't bet on that on the other hand.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
exactly - and this new feature will fix that taking a horde heavy server (which mine is) and having a good portion of the horde show up on an alliance lite server, thus helping fix faction imbalance on severs while also boosting the population on low population servers. Surely from a players perspective this is WIN WIN? - if this were any other game people be singing it's praises but it's WoW so it must be bad, there must be some evil motive behind it.
actually a good chunk of WoW players who stop playing WoW simply stop playing MMOs, not all mind you but a good chunk.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to
Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
^^^This.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.