Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Will this be enough?
Lord.Bachus
Member RarePosts: 9,686
Will this expansion be enough to keep people playing the mother of modernday MMO's (Where EQ is the grandmother and UO is the grandfather and DAoC the father). They are finally adding the much needed fluff, but i hardly think this will bring back the people that left for other MMO's over the past year. Because there is nothing earthshattering to break the mold and the geargrind.
And with GW2 being subless, it will also be hard to find new people to join the game as there might finally be a free game of equall or maybe even better quallity. So young people wanting to jump intoo the MMO genre have other more attractive options.
While WoW and Pandaria might sound good in paper, WoW is definately getting old and on its return.
I highly doubt this expansion can break the declining number of subs, but then i might be wrong. WoW with its current number of players will be a top contender for years to come. but i think its way over its peak. So Blizzard should hurry up with their new MMO.
Do you think this expansion will be enough to bring back the lost subs?
I predict WoW going FtP somewhere in 2013.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Comments
Well I know their subs will jump to a high number when the expansion releases, but we will have to wait and see after its release.
I for one am looking forward to trying it, I know its not gonna be anything groundbreaking, but it looks to be a step up from cata.
There was a point where i considered going back to WoW, but i had forgotten all my provious accounts information, so i would have to start new. In order to do that with the most recent expansion, catatclysm, i would have had to purchase 2 other expansions. It really made little sense to me to spend that kind of money on a game that is really the same thing since i left it last.
So unless Blizzard rethinks how they charge for there expansions i will more than likely never play WoW again.
Lolipops !
I think it will bring subs back honestly, as of right now it is still the best Themepark MMO out there, if the Xpac is top notch and brings back the Vanilla feel to hit they might hit a homerun. Depending on their timing as well, not sure when they plan to release this but it could throw a monkey wrench into GW2.
WoW is cheap enough tbh the base box is not expensive, neither is TBC or Wrath anymore and cata was half price recently then you get Mists.
Who says you have to buy all at once just buy what you need when you need it.
To the OP, yes it will be enough expansions always bring old blood back and with all the noise is bound to bring new players in, I know of plenty of people who have started at each of the expansions.
Siege of Orgrmmar as a final battle will have a hell of a lot more interest than Deathwing when it finally comes around
In a way your question to me is almost odd and your prediction is... well...
If I remember right and that could very well not be the case... Blizzard said it lost around 2 Million subscribes over the course of 2011. Yet by the numbers they release with financials they still have over 10 Million Subscribers.
Now another angle on that is... during 2011 the number of subscribers they lost would have closed pretty much any other MMO (including TOR's claimed 1.7 million subscribers).
Yet they still retain over 5x the number of subscribers that TOR claims to have. Now I know that number is highly debated.. but the profit numbers reported in their financials come from somewhere... and of course they could be investigated by the FTC and heavily fined if they lied or mislead investors.
I'll agree the game is getting old.
I have no idea what this expansion will do for its numbers.... the current SOR is might bring back some that left. You get Cataclysm access... a free insta level 80... and a free realm transfer/faction change if you need it to play with your friend. (there are other details and restrictions but that's the basics). Of course if you are planning on coming back to be a Panda or a Monk most of that .. might not mean much.
My girl friends son likes WoW and its something we all play together... so that's why I'll be a fat drunk panda tank... family time.
Beyond that...
free to play in 2013? Even if Blizzard lost 50% of their current claimed subs... a game with 5 million subscribers (in my example) going free to play... just seems kind of stupid.
Oh and to be clear I don't mean you sound stupid. I mean.. why on earth would I go free to play if I have 10 million subs or even if I lost half of that and only had 5 million?
How many other MMO's out there have that kind of subscriber base?
I would expect at some point they will need to start merging servers at least.
Looking at the way this x-pac is going, i agree they wana bring us back to the old vanilla wow and more.
With farming as a start, exploration with hidden quest etc, its like wow have finally begining to put some sandbox elements into it.
And they could continue to add housing, tree cutting, furniture making etc into this game.
Side game like pet rearing, competition, adds more things to do in WoW than questing or pvp.
The more i think of it, the more im excited about this x-pac and beyond.
And i also agree with the poster a few posts above that the leading to Siege of Orgrmmar will be epic.
How dare puny ally step into orgi ! but im all hype to see how it happens, just like in Aion, where elyos and emos combine in patch 3.0 ( iirc ), and now we have in WoW, both ally and horde combine against a common enemy, standing side by side....
Really cant wait to see how it all pans out...
if nothing drastic happens, i'll be buying this x-pac for sure...
/fingers cross.....
ps: this will make the next mmo which trying to go themepark really think thrice...
RIP Orc Choppa
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
If you mean, have a "FtP" OPTION like LotRO, AoC or others, I don't think that's unrealistic. But I don't see WoW doing any worse than many other games considered successful, nowadays.
Far as the rest goes, compared to the 1-60 redo and the 2 new races/starter areas in Cat, MoP hasn't really inspired me to buy. Right now, there's so much free stuff to play, and I'm happy subbed to TOR and LotRO, and GW2 will be B2P. My gaming queue is lit up like a Christmas tree, already.
If WoW ever went F2P, their sub numbers would go through the roof. If a game like LOTRO/DDO got so many people to play it, then WoW will most likely even surpass LoL in the numbers department.
But I don't think Blizzard need to go F2P any time soon. Cata was a huge blow to their sub base because they didn't focus on endgame. We'll see if MoP fairs better.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
No expansion is going to help regain subs because it is old and people are just bored with WoW. Adding more of the same is not going to help. People will flock to the next big thing.
Grim Dawn, the next great action rpg!
http://www.grimdawn.com/
I don´t think WOW will go f2p any time soon. Remember, games like AOC, EQ2, LOTRO and DDO were below 100k subscribers when they went f2p... WOW is at 10M. People can debate the reason for the drop.. but a significant part of it was the greatly increased difficulty of heroic dungeons. This was partially the result of gear inflation in wotlk which made heroics absurdly easy for the last 8 months of the expansion. Whatever the cause, players went from facerolling heroics in wotlk to get stomped left and right for 2-3 months in Cata. The rampup should have been more gradual.
The second cause was simply not enough stuff to do at endgame. The devs have admitted that redoing 1-60 left them short on time to really flush out endgame for cata. You had grinding heroics, along with molten front, which for most players lasted a month or two tops. There simply wasn´t much to do.
LFR was a HUGE step in the right direction as far as subscriber numbers goes. It added another thing for players to do and is very popular.
But most importantly, with MoP, they are going overboard with different things for players to do at endgame rather than just heroic dungeons. There will be more LFR with every raid available.. there are also a ton of features like scenerios (group pve without tank-healer-dps roles), there are single player dungeons, challenge dungeons, and the base reputations are designed differently, where each of them will feel a little more like Molten Front rather than the original Cata reputations. Then there is the whole pokemon thing. I really think the biggest reason for the lost 2M subscribers is that heroics were hard for a few months and there wasn´t anything else to do to progress your character.
Sure Warcraft is getting old, but it's become like Basketball, Tennis, Golf, Monopoly, Solitaire etc. or other games and sports that have staying power. It's become culture and it's definitely a part of a lifestyle for millions of people. For example MMO-Champion.com gets about a million unique visitors per day and is around the 3000th most visited website *in the world*. That doesn't just end overnight.
It's actually part of culture now, people discuss it over dinner. And long as people talk about WoW, it wil be around. Haters talk about and follow WoW constantly. They're here on MMORPG, Massively, Gametrailers, MMO-Champion, IGN etc. just to name a few places. They talk and talk and talk about how much they hate this game, but they're still talking.
Objectively it looks like there's some years to go before F2P and then many more years beyond that.
As for bringing back people who no longer like the game, not sure that could ever happen, even less likely anyone would want them to.
I doubt they will have more then 500k return especially if it's released after all these new games coming out. The people who have played for years will be the ones to buy this expansion not the new people. And the old heads will only be returning because A: they are casuals and B: their friends are there.
I personally won't be joining them because i've been on a crusade to find a game that would give me the dynamic world i've wanted WoW to be with engineering as a major player in that world. I've found it finally and won't be going back to WoW ever again.
I have quit WoW as of one month ago and will be too busy with TERA to be interested in purchasing MoP.
Unless I see footage or reviews that seriously interest me, I will not be returning to WoW because of MoP, not to say that others won`t though.
Maybe Mists of Pandaria is World of Warcraft's final expansion, just play for fun and let it go, pals.
Occupy VoT, Occupy ORG, GO GO GO
Can people stop with this rumor?
Blizz already said the last Xpac will be the one that takes people to level 100
I believe people will play this game for years to come. Old MMOs are still running with a profitable playerbase, so I have no doubt World of Warcraft will fail, in that regard, any time soon. Any failings it currently has are not related to making money from gamers. If anything, Activision/Blizzard should be able to print it's own money between World of Warcraft and the Call of Duty franchise. It seems the majority of gamers are quite happy with old graphics and familiar objectives.