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Have Blizzard Ruined WoW?
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I personally loved bg's that werent timed. I miss three hour warsong's and 5 hour av bridge fights. I miss when after a long hard fought bg the whole team stayed to talk about your epic win or loss. IMO from a technical standpoint WoW has been getting consistantly better, but the amount of quality social interaction has gone consistantly down.
edit: i wish blizzard would concentrate more on class balance at every bracket and at end game pvp. so many flavor of the month toons decked out in boa's wreckin bg's(myself included at one time or another lol). Also i think top tier hardcore raiders need a raid designed for them with gear exclusive to said raid. Finally, thay should have opposing cities ruler kills give mass honor and some kind of defensive honor mechanism. I should get paid to consult on games...=P
They were planning on the city leader stuff and many more world PvP incentives.
And then... Tigole came along and ruined it all. "lol hi raid is what everyone wants, no one likes PvP etc".
All WoW is now is a lobby game with a dungeon que
".what most people wants..." is it, not everyone. Were they wrong?
Sure, it wouldn't have hurt the game to add more PvP too but Blizzard have always been good knowing what the majority of their players want. That doesn't mean everyone will like it but the difference between Wow and EQ is that EQ had a "vision" it tried to create while Wow is trying to give it's players what they want.
There is no clear right and wrong but if you want to maximize the number of players you need to do like Blizzard.
It doesn't work for me personally but that doesn't mean I can't understand why Blizzard do it like this and I can't say that they are wrong.
Let me get this straight.
So you are disputing the fact that WoW subscription base has been increasing from Vanilla to Cata? o_O
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
I don't really see him say that?
He say that Blizzard have made more small annoying things lately than before, not the same thing.
I'll just post this again { mod edit}-
Anyway, if we look at a fairly reliable source of MMO subscription data:- (taken from mmodata.net, link to bigger image here)
We can see that WoW grows massively pre-Burning Crusade (9 million subscribers in two years). Despite the fact that WoW has became a cultural phenomenon SINCE then and has released 3 expansions WHILST EXPANDING INTO VARIOUS OTHER MARKETS, the total subscription base has only increased by around 3 million.
This means the game has either saturated the possible user base (not at all true, again, cultural phenomenon, expanding into other markets etc) OR that the turn over rate (people leaving versus people joining) is absolutely fucking massive suggesting large amounts of people quitting.
{Mod edit}
Oh really?
Let logically look at the series of posts shall we?
This is from your OP: "I've watched as Blizzard ground everything I enjoyed in the game into dust. It started with The Burning Crusade's "FILL UP EVERY SINGLE PART OF AN AREA WITH QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS"
Which tells me that this whole 'ruined' thing (as your title of this thread suggests) started from TBC.
Now lets look at this data sheet.
Vanilla was launched on November 23, 2004.
I'm not exactly sure where this 'pre-Burning Crusade 9 million sub' is coming from.
TBC was released on January 16, 2007 which will be about 6.5 million (according to this data sheet).
10 Million was on Jan 22, 2008, which is a year after TBC. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17062
Looking at the data sheet you provided, we can see that there is roughly about 3 million sub increase per year.
This continued until Wrath with WoW hitting the 12M mark on Oct7 2010. http://www.pcworld.com/article/207188/world_of_warcraft_subscriber_base_tops_12_million.html
Can't find a source for that drop in 2009 but I assume it is the whole 'China's Ministry of Culture vs China's General Administration of Press and Publication' (internal power struggle)
This data sheet also provides us with data that non-chinese subs are around the 6.5M mark.
After the internal power struggle is dealt with (for WoW anyways) the subs are back on the 12M and going slightly up.
So what does these numbers all mean? Back to the 2nd post of this thread
"They 'ruined' WoW so much that WoW subscriptions keeps on increasing! /Sarcasm"
Btw, I don't think 'ruined' means what you think it means.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
A new player would have a blast playing Warcraft. It is the most simple game on the market. People like simple.
{mod edit}
Big image here.
Admittedly it's closer to 8.5million than 9million, {mod edit}
Vanilla WoW sub increase: 4.25million per year (50 months and 8.5 million subs)
The Burning Crusade sub increase: 1.25million per year (47 months and 2.5 million subs)
Wrath of the Lich King sub increase: 0.5million per year (49 months and 1 million subs)
Was that so hard?
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
EDIT:{mod edit} (Big image here.)
EDIT2: In fact, they might be worse off. I've tried to link it up as closely as I possibly can to a "round figure", but if I move the WotLK release date to where it more accurately is, then they've only gained 0.5 million subscribers within two years.
{mod edit}
I like how there is a drop when Aion is released, and then suddenly everyone goes back to WoW.
That's because the Chinese government prohibited WoW, basically. And, yeah, when WoW comes back they just quit it.
Blizzard ruined WoW by doing basically nothing to police their community. Now the game is full of rude, impatient, whiny children whom treat their fellow players like crap. These people get reported, but Blizzard does nothing about it, and lets them spout racial slurs and other vile crap so long as they pay their $15/month.
There are good people out there. They've just quit playing WoW. Which is a shame, as I do love the game itself.
Moved on to STO, and am actually enjoying the game and the comparative maturity of the community.
Is the game i tself any good, though?
The only thing thats gotten worse over time with the game is the catering to casual players.
They make more money for it tho so i cant blame em.
Jeremiah 8:21 I weep for the hurt of my people; I stand amazed, silent, dumb with grief.
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The trouble with casual gamers is that they have a far larger turnover rate than hardcore gamers.
Which would explain the far slower graph ascent, to be honest.
Blizzard ruined WOW so much that over 6 years they made 6+ billion dollars.
I smile when I see people in this thread discuss if it was @ 7 million or 8 million Subs 3 years ago.
And if it is @12 M now and if it will be 10M or 13M in 2012 ...
While the rest of the bunch is struggling to get over 100K 1 year after launch.
"ruined" ?
))
Perhaps a lot of people's lives were ruined by playing too much of it, but I can't see any other meaning with these figures in video land.
{Mod edit}
I like debates and heck, I'm not always right but I try to stick with the 'PG' rating and not deal with words that would be considered 'not safe for work' types.
If NSFW forum is what you want; you won't find it here.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Seriously, another thread on how WoW is ruined. There are a million of these, WoW is dead, WoW is dying, Wow is ruined, WoW is this, WoW is that. Stop making threads on the subject and use one of the many other threads dedicated to the fall of WoW. For a ruined game which is on its last legs, its doing pretty well. Get over it.
I self identify as a monkey.
Did Blizzard ruined WoW? No. Not from a business perspective at least. It is not a coincidence the game became the Juggernaut it is today.
Blizzard created the most beautiful mmorpg world ever. However, somehow Blizzard managed to rip out the mmorpg out of Azeroth. So in the eyes of 'true' mmorpg gamers, yes, you could say so.
Instead, you could look at a year in (2006 til the release of TBC) and see that WoW was still growing faster during vanilla than during the other expansion pack years (2 million per year, which is still 0.75 million per year over The Burning Crusade).
The simple fact that the rate of growth has slowed so rapidly is enough of a factor to suggest, to me, that people preferred Vanilla WoW. It doesn't matter if you say, "OH WELL VANILLA GREW SO RAPIDLY BECAUSE PEOPLE WERE BUYING THE GAME" (remember that it's active subscriptions, not game purchases, completely different things and the major reason that you are wrong), the simple fact that rate of growth dropped from vanilla to TBC then from TBC to WotLK tells you the story of WoW's slow death by Blizzard's damage to the game.
Aye, hence I said, "if that analogy is too much to...",and I'm afraid now I can see it was.
I was trying to say, there's a lot more factors to it than just a direct proportional math taking two periods of time in account and nothing else. There's an important aspect of an extent of market depletion, which you completely avoided in your OP and each subsequent post. And I could give you other factors, but I'm not sure if it would serve anything as you seem to be completely sure about your direct proportional math.
REALITY CHECK
And you're completely missing a major factor here. If we were talking about total box sales, I would agree with you. These factors would come into account with total box sales. Because they effect total box sales. I will keep saying that it's total box sales over and over until you get it, if you like.
These, however, are not total box sales. These are total active subscriptions. Market saturation doesn't really come into account here (I did mention it in my OP, by the by, WoW expanded into lots more markets post-vanilla, became a cultural phenomenon massively increasing advertising etc etc) simply due to the fact these are total active subscriptions.
Basically, I'll put it simply for you:
More people stuck around to play Vanilla than stuck around to play The Burning Crusade. More people stuck around to play The Burning Crusade than stuck around to play Wrath of the Lich King. It's not due to market saturation because I know a lot of people who didn't start playing the game until WotLK, Cataclysm etc.
{Mod edit}
BC was the death knell for PvE. BC started the decline by making levels come too quickly. You would outlevel a zone well before you'd completed all the quests it had to offer. Half of those quests would award no reputation, so most players just skipped them for farm-grinding. Having entirely new factions that were merely variations of the old ones also made no sense and was nothing but an excuse for a new rep grind. The ease of leveling vs. the difficulty of getting rep has never made any sense to me. By the time you are revered, let alone exalted with a faction, you've outleveled all their rewards. Little wonder the only rep gear anyone cares about are mounts and pets - even endgame faction stuff is inferior to anything you get from doing BGs. As for raids, only a handful of heroic drops are even worth pursuing. Most players are only interested in the ones that are BoE so they can be sold.
Another huge mistake was adding new gear that was completely OP compared to the old. When a random Outland green is as good as a classic raid purple of the same level..something is seriously wrong. This was never addressed has gotten progressively worse with each expansion. Its as if Blizzard doesn't even care. It renders old endgame instances like Kara completely obsolete - nobody does them now. Why bother when the AH has stuff just as good?
The respective "OP and useles classes of the month" rebalancing has always been annoying, and pretty inexplicable most of the time. Can it be THAT hard to determine things like max theoretical DPS and then work the talents and spells to fit those numbers? Now its hunters who are utterly worthless and warlocks who are insanely powerful..for the moment. The evidence is pretty compelling: Bliz is listening solely to the voices of the hard core PvP crowd and no others. Their answer is to contiuallly change which classes are OP and pathetically weak. To insure that everyone has every class at max level, they make leveling a laughable affair requireing zero effort and very little time. To insure that PvE isn't a challenge even to the nerfed classes, they make it even easier. Is this their idea of good game design? Or is it really just whatever keeps the addicts running those same instances and BGs over and over? Call me cynical but I'm leaning strongly towards the latter explanation.
Perhaps one of the most annoying factors in the whole "Bliz ruined WoW" discussion for me is the way they expanded their world. IMO they released their expansions in the wrong order. While I'm imagining a balanced and sensibly paced WoW, let's take it a step further. LIch King should've come first. I mean, think about it - the big threat of the first game was the scourge. Suddenly that threat just goes on hiatus while we all shuffle off to Outland? It made no sense. WOTLK shoudl've been the 61-70 content. Once Arthas was dealt with, then we should've gotten Cataclysm. Imagine if 2008 would've brought a refreshed Azeroth and new races that figure directly into game lore (horde gob, worgen) instead of unknown races with ties to some other world that we've never heard about till now. You could've had some new instances open only to L70's where we are made aware of the Bunring Legion looming on the hoizon, perhaps in Cata's new island zones. And finally, last of all - we get BC. A whole new planet (or what's left of one) complete with two new races. And you would have to be L70 to pass through the gate or teleport to Shat. FInally, there we'd be, facing the penultimate threat..because that's what the lore has always painted the Legion as being. And we didn't even directly get to see Sargeras, the main baddy of that whole storyline. This version of BC woudl've capped out at L75. And next in this alternate Blizzard timeline? A new expansion that would take us from 76-80 and open up a new continent on Azeroth. This continent would be on the other side of the planet roughly equidistant between Kal and the EK. It would be an exotic amalgram of a fantasy Far East and Austrailia.. There could be NPC human races who've barely heard of the horde or alliance. And pandarans. Definately pandarans. Ah, I can dream..