Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
2011 Subscribers Predictions & Trends
ju2au
Member Posts: 4
It's hard to gauge the current subscriber status of WOW at the moment as Blizzard won't release their data. However, there is a website dedicated to tracking the subscriber population in WOW and that is warcraftrealms.com. With a dedicated band of volunteers, they take regular census snapshots of servers with a mod called "Warcraft CensusPlus UI mod". More info here:
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/censusfaq.php
One of the most useful parameters for measuring the health of WOW is "Weekly Activity". When WOW is expanding and attracting new subscribers, Weekly Activity goes up and when WOW is declining and losing subscribers, Weekly Activity goes down.
Below are graphs charting the Weekly Activity over a 12 month period:
Alliance:
Original: http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyactivity.php?serverid=-1&factionid=3
Image Snapshot: http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/5186/wowactivityalliance.jpg
Horde:
Original: http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyactivity.php?serverid=-1&factionid=2
Image Snapshot: http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/2888/wowactivityhorde.jpg
The trends in the graphs match what I experienced in-game. At the end of WOTLK in December 2010, there was a sharp drop in player activities as people wait for the new expansion. When Cataclysm was first released, there was a huge spike in player activity as players returned. In the Weekly Activity graphs, this is exactly what happened in all Classes across both Alliance and Horde.
The most concerning trend is in January 2011. As you can see, there is a very sharp decline in Weekly Activity from late December 2010.
For a new expansion, this decline is very unusual. At this point in time, you would be expecting people to have already reached the level cap (level 85) and be working on the end game (i.e. heroics & raids). A declining trend probably indicates that people reached level 85 then stop playing; they are simply not doing heroics, raiding or end-game pvp.
Currently, there are plenty of complaints on the forums about heroics, raids, TB and class balance and the data presented seems to support that there are very significant players' grievances about Cataclysm.
The interesting part is how far this declining trend will go and when will it bottom out? Will the changes in upcoming patches affect this trend? How will new content patches affect it? The data will be most interesting in March and June when clearer pictures of player activity trends should emerge.
Without any official data from Blizzard, this is most objective data we can use. It's not perfectly accurate but it does provide a reliable measurement of the current state of the game. If this thread doesn't get locked or deleted, I'll be back in a couple of months to update this post.
Comments
Well, I bought Cata, got to 85, and then it all felt like classic-, tbc-, wotlk-endgame all over again. In other words, there was nothing new. Same gear/dungeon/pvp grind again with nothing really new introduced. Same stuff with a bit of different graphics/textures. I know a bunch of people who quit for the same reason. I mean, we all knew that but you know, you want to check in on a new expansion to see for your self.
The way I see it, WoW has became a game for new players because of the recycled content, there's not much for old players. So maybe the stream of new players is starting to dry up and the old ones are not so interested in the same stuff they see all over again every new expansion?
I dont know, but it's a nice game for anyone who hasnt tried it yet.
You neglected to take real-world influences into account for your worry with the trending.
Most concerned with the spike occuring in late December (ie, holidays, when a large portion of people are off-work/out of school on vacation, having excess free-time to spend in-game), which led to sharp drop early January (when people go back to school/work, attempting to recover from the inevitable debts the holidays bring with them, losing free-time).
Totally a representative of the games quality/state. Yup, couldn't have anything to do with the world at large.
As to people complaining, people always complain. Even your post couldn't pinpoint any one specific, glarringly bad point of concensus from people. How many of the things people complain about are being conflicted in someone elses complaint post.
And granted, all of that hinges on numbers which can only be generated by opting in and using a specific addon, which then raises the question of how remotely accurate any of it could be. Maybe in that time period, the large drop was more from people switching over to play without addons, not affecting the actual game population, but screwing with the numbers just the same.
Fewer people who play WoW using that addon are playing now than a month ago. Thats all the data says.
Lets Push Things Forward
I knew I would live to design games at age 7, issue 5 of Nintendo Power.
Support games with subs when you believe in their potential, even in spite of their flaws.
My experiences in game matches the data fairly closely.
I can name probably 20-30 people at least that simply "disappeared" once they hit 85 in mid-to-late December. (From a relatively small "community" circle.)
This expansion so far has a far higher turn-over at max level than even late WOTLK did, let alone TBC (Which kept people hanging around far longer, or vanilla for obvious reasons.)
I can't imagine why late Jan activities would be lower than Mid-Dec when most would take their Xmas/New Year holidays. /sarcasm
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
But, in a closed-community within the WoW community, people tend to be noticed once they go-amiss.
There's a difference between the common Dec/Jan holiday playstyle of "Play as often and as long as you like" which is quite noticeable in comparison to "Not been online in over a month and a half."
Stats on that website need to be taken with a bucket of salt due to the way the data is collected.
Cata sold 4.7million copies in 1 month (not avaliable in china) so I would say right now WoW's non-chinese population is easily over 4million. What it will be in the future? who knows but that website is usless for anything but wild guesses.
And if we talk about trends then (not including china)..
TBC sold 3.5 million copies in the first month
Wrath sold 4.0 million copies in the first month (increase of 500,000)
Cata sold 4.7 million copies in the first month (increase of 700,000)
if anything trends (based on real figures) show WoW's population increasing with every expansion.
Interesting.
I unsubbed a week or 2 after Cata came out. But I only had one account. I wonder how many people have multiple accounts?
I finally quit the game for good early January this year after playing it since 2007. I've seen alot of complaints from the official forums about many aspects of cata, from pve dungeons/heroics/raids being too difficult, to pvp balance being really off.
I can only speak for myself, but the reason I left the game is that after I leveled my new goblin rogue from 1-85 in 26 days, I found myself faced with nothing but the same old grind. I only cared about pvp, mainly wpvp or the odd battleground. Why I left exactly is:
-1) The item models in this game look aweful in my opinion. The majority of them have looked terrible since TBC. If you go look up the current rogue pvp gear set, you will see exactly what I mean. In a game I want to look bad-ass, not like a clown. This really de-motivated me to do anything at the end-game. Why bother if i'm going to look lame.
-2) Grind. The time it takes to get points/honor has increased in my opinion. Blizzard are asking people to grind more bg's for less honor than we did in wrath. The time I spent in wrath doesnt give me the same amount of reward I was getting then, now in cata.
-3) Repeated Content. Ok, i've been playing Eye of the fucking Storm since TBC & Strand of the fucking ancients since wrath. Why oh why when it comes to my battleground grinding do i keep getting the old battlegrounds I've played for the last 2-3 years? Seriously, I only got the new Battle of Gilneas & Twin peaks about 15% of the time. It wouldnt have been so bad, but if i'm going to be forced to grind alot more battlegrounds than i had to in wrath, can't i atleast do the new cata one's?!!!
-4) Que times. Too long for pvp to only wind up with some old battle ground from 1 or 2 expansions ago. I also read the hc's ques are like 45 mins long as dps, glad i didn't try to do pve!
-5) Tol Barad. Excellent zone, loved the lay-out, dailies and as a wpvp fan loved the fact you couldn't fly in it. However, the battle for it is just 100% broken. Fact. Firstly, maybe it's cause i played horde, but i could hardly ever get into the battle when it was on. What am I paying the sub for when i can get locked out of the content? On the 20% of the time i did get into the battle, it was an unbalanced zerg that attacker's could hardly ever win, and the time it took vs the reward given was not worth it. (This was after they nerfed the 1800 honor if you won as an attacker because allies/horde win-traded the zone to each other every battle)
So, in summary, the Time you invest does Not Equal the Reward given in Cataclysm. Blizzard are just asking too much of me for the reward they now want to give in return.
What the OP said is exactly my experience. Before Cata i was not playing WOW. In fact was on my longest break from the game ever, almost year. Cata launch so i bought it, played for a month level my main to 85 had lots of fun doing it. Then i hit 85 and find out what end game is now. 1 hour queue to endup in group of headless chickens. So i quit. My cata experience lasted a month. I have no intention of coming back anytime soon, especially with everything i read now, all the upcoming nerfs to mobility (main is a druid).
I stopped playing at the beginning of the year as well. So the trend on the charts pretty much coincides with my experience. However, there are some circumstances that probably have affected acitivity as others have pointed out (holidays, school being out, etcetera).
What I can say is that the guild I was in has had their activity cut in half from december to january. I think a lot of longterm players are just burnt out on the same old endgame, I know I am.
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyactivity.php?serverid=-1
Players' activities still dropping sharply two months after I started this tread.
I played WoW since it began and took a couple breaks along the way but Cata really was the end of it for me. I bought it in hopes of some rejuvenation for the game but it really just turned me off more. I just grew tired of the same ole same ole but with a slightly different scenery.
I kinda miss the old days of having to think and figure things out instead of having arrows and guides to point the way and hold my hand through the whole experience.
I know my whole circle of friends locally that played have dwindled drastically to only one guy occasionally logging in for lack of anything better to do.
As has been said already, it is a new players game now but Blizz will hang on to a lot of old timers since it has become such a social network for them. I can't begin to count how many people I would see in Trade every time I logged in, sitting near a Dalaran fountain or SW AH just yappin it up all night.
I think I would have to agree with the OP in that subs are declining as opposed to increasing. I am sure the customer base is a little less content as well.
Actually the player numbers CLIMBED steeply after your last post.
In Jan (also why double Jan ???) they were almost 150% higher than when you posted this a few months ago.
Just click on your link ... I linked. So people can see it ...
)
The graph only confirms one thing.
With the values ranging from 180 to 60 in over a few days time ... the samples are simply too low to have any meaning. Nobody uses census plus anymore in game. Census plus is a 6 year old add on no one ever uses these days and certainly not the new kids.
A nice side note: ALL those posting above in Jan and said they saw this "decrease" in game ... were simply wrong as the moment they posted ... the graphics went up with a 100% ... while they typed in Jan .
Good laugh...
A first post showing something which isn't there...
? I took a quick look out of curiosity, but as far as I can see, I see a decrease, like the OP posted about.
At least, looking ath the links posted here. I did see a strange dip in december though, strange because that's the month of the CATA launch.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Nope, the funny part is that the moment he posted his first message (he necromanced) , the data went up with 150%. There is 2 times a Jan month. So the Jan/Feb stats were 150% higher than when he created the post.
Nice manipulation on that graph too
Like I said: census plus is a 6 year old add on, that no one uses these days. By the spread of the 600 servers, only a handful of people are sampled (may be as low as 1 on zero per server).
That makes your graph go up and down in a 300% bracket range. I am quite sure no one installed it in the last 3 to 4 years.
Like you said: in Jan/Feb activity was twice that from Dec - launch.
Simple: no valid data.
Usually a large enough sample suffices to notice and measure trends, looking at the numbers it seems the sample is large enough. And so far I don't see much of an increase, rather a decrease in those graphs.
Nevertheless, the charts and the tool seem to be screwy, there's a very strange dip in a timeperiod that you wouldn't expect it at all, namely December, and then there's 2 times a month of January and no March at all.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
This chart said Dec/jan had less players than Feb. Impossible within a 300 % bracket.
It is due to the very low sampling of that old add on.
Look at the number of players sampled .... around 1000 spread over 10 races and ... more than 600 western servers.
This means an average sample of 1.6 persons per server ...or one and a half men
It is enough that one or two no longer play on a server and that server simply is no longer sampled.
But the funny part stays: he was posting 2 months ago, while the fake stats climbed behind his back.
I don't think this a issue it will stablize around the same players it had Pre Cata launch. I would put money on that.
Warcraftrealms.com, while once a great site, has been extremely lackluster for years. The information is extremely inaccurate because it relies on players to download a mod, use the mod ingame to scan everybody in each zone, then upload that data to the website. Oh and that scan is only for that time of the day. All for a chance to win a raffle...
Too few people do this and therefore the website has a huge amount of holes in in data gathering.
While I like the website and it has actually helped me track down some old guildies, warcraftrealms receives too little support from players to be deemed as a relibale source for accurate playerbase numbers.
Sorry OP.
I will stand to be corrected on this, but just took a quick look over the warcraftrealms site and even by their own admittance, the data is no-where near accurate. Over 30 of the EU realms have no data at all, my main server has less characters listed than there are in my guild alone and only 34 have their measure of enough data to be 'accurate' . On the US realms over 2/3rds (roughly) say there isn't enough data to form accurate results???
You could at a stretch maybe say that it gives a rough idea of a possible trend, but to be fair that would really be stretching the 'rough' part as well.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Well, I dunno about the trends or the validity of what was posted in the OP but I quit after I dinged 85 in Cata, I unscribscribed and about 3 weeks later I started playing again because I missed it. I ended up only lasting two weeks it was so boring. Guild leveling and achievements are cool but other than that it just didn't feel new at all. More of the same with a different skin. Its been a good run since 2007 though I suppose, I just need something new and Cataclysm was anything but that.
You do realise when companies do political polling, or things like TV or radio ratings, they use a small sample?
The sample size of warcraftrealms is extremely adequate.
There are 1,332,603 level 85 players scanned from the NA realms ALONE. That is an EXCELLENT sample to measure the activity and popularity of WoW.
We'll never again know the number of subs in EU/NA (which includes Oceania and Latin America) since they group all regions in announcements.
They didnt use to do this. For example:
"Over 1.5 million European gamers are enjoying roaming the land of Azeroth, with 2 million North Americans and 3.5 million Chinese making up a majority of the rest of the subscription figures. World of Warcraft has also been launched in Taiwan, Australia, Korea, New Zealand, and Singapore. The first expansion to the game, The Burning Crusade, is due out next Tuesday (January 16th)."
Jan 11 2007 (a couple of days before the release of Burning Crusade.
That was the press release for 8 million clearly giving the numbers.
Here is the press release for 10 million:
"IRVINE, Calif. — January 22, 2008 — Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. Interest in the game has remained high in all regions, with thousands of new and returning players signing up through the holiday season. World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia."
Taken from http://www.zeroinitiate.com/world-of-warcraft-subscriber-base-reaches-10-million/
Funny thing though, the official Blizzard press release no longer exists. http://us.blizzard.com/press/080122.shtml
So why was Blizzard announcing regional breakdowns for EU, NA and Asia up until 11 million. Why?
Its obvious that growth in EU and NA has stangated years ago and the growth has been in the vastly less profitable Asia region, mainly China.
I'm in the same boat as a lot of the above posters. I've been playing, and mostly enjoying World of Warcraft since it's release date. I started playing November of 2004 and trucked along until Cataclysm. I took a pretty extended break in WoTLK and decided I'd at least try out Cata for myself. Same sh*t new skin, which was to be expected but I honestly wanted to see for myself. I just can't enjoy the game anymore so I quit. Honestly, I thought I'd have some trouble not having the game to fall back on once I quit since it's something to do when I'm extremely bored. However it's not even been an issue at all honestly. I'm actually being productive in other things now that I've dropped the game.
Should be noted: I did get to level 85, and did a few heroics. Didn't even bother staying around for the raid. I know how that party goes.
So over all it's for the best, that is until Blizzard's new MMO comes out. Then the cycle repeats all over again. Oh, and...
GUILD WARS 2, FU*K YEAH! MUST PLAY.
Have to give WoW credit for providing so much content for so long. I wish Blizzard would move to a new mmorpg title - but that's just me.
My entire raid guild from WoW Moonguard server moved to Rift. They all had many of the same reasons for leaving that people have posted here. We've had some fun times there - and we've moved on to something more, in our humble opinions, that is immersive and old school meets new with believable graphics, character models of people that look like people, and endless customization to meet your own personal concept of a class in a fantasy mmorpg - who wouldn't want that?
The biggest influence was the developer outright stating "No epeen competitions with gear raids and the such here..."
Anyway, hat's off to Blizzard for their success. It was just time to move on to something more adult fantasy orientated.
/my 2 cents.