I'd really like to see digital salesFollow

You're forgetting a complete revamp to PvP (how gear was acquired and also the introduction of arena as a way of getting PvP gear and balancing/competing in PvP), heroic dungeons, 25 man raids, flying mounts, and Paladins and Shamans weren't faction-specific anymore.

I just remember that TBC changed the game far more than MoP has. It's definitely number two, but I'd still say that TBC was by far the biggest change to how the game was played. I was PvE-only pretty much prior to TBC being released. I only made it to the Horde equivalent of Knight on my rogue, but in TBC I had a few seasons of 1800+ and one of 2k+ in arena.

This is all just at release, btw. There's more stuff that changed in TBC, but I was leaving that out because we haven't gotten any content patches for MoP yet.

UBRS was a 10-man raid, wasn't it? I'm pretty sure I remember doing one of the BRS dungeons with nine drunken Spanish guys.

At least, I think they were Spanish. I was drunk, too.

According to mmo-champion 2.7 million copies sold, which pushed subscribers past 10 million. To give some frame of reference here are some numbers from previous expansions.

I am curious what the sales will be like one month after the expansion.

I think the word of mouth reviews will push this expansion into 3.5 million units in the first month. There was a lot of skepticism going into this expansion but i think it has been fairly well received.

Blizz is going to have a very hard time of attracting new players at this point and old players have moved on with their lives and/or interests. At 10 million players it is still absolutely massive, even if it loses 50% of its player base it will still be absolutely massive.

If they hit 3+ million copies in the first month I think they'll be happy. I'm predicting 3.4-3.6 in by 10/25.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2949-2-7-Million-copies-of-MoP-sold-WoW-passes-10M-Subscribers


2.7 million, so just below WOTLK,

Of course I actually read it and realize that is the first week, not including China on Oct 2nd. So that number is not all that hot, considering wotlk was 2.8 million in one day.



Edited, Oct 4th 2012 7:21pm by bodhisattva

WotLK was still being sold on discs. Of course there was an illusion of huge sales on day one, all those pre-orders got picked up. Today, with digital downloads, there won't be that kind of surge. WotLK was also positioned to take advantage of the Christmas buying rush. MoP won't see the equivalent boom until later in the sales cycle.


The economy is a mess the world over. Even people who want to play might tend to wait until closer to the year's end before buying their copy.

MoP: As for sales figures for China, we went live on midnight after National Day and I'd played for half an hour before I realized MoP was up and running. Every single copy of the game here was upgraded to MoP at the same time and it went as smoothly as an in game holiday or DMF showing up.

Subs: Total subscription numbers for China are going to be hard to track since we don't use a subscription system here. In total, I probably pay slightly more per month than NA/EU players. One game card is 30 RMB (just a bit over $5) and that gets me something like 2 days, 18 hours of play time for one sub account (not the battlenet account). Let's say that I have an account under noreply@gmail.com and two sub accounts -- every flight path and stack of materials converted burns time. Furthermore, let's say that I have most of one sub account filled with Horde toons and the other with Alliance toons. I play one faction more than the other (server imbalance has me playing mainly Alliance), so time on that sub account gets burned through much faster than the other. Across the various sub accounts, I run roughly through 3-5 cards per month, depending on whether or not I'm between semesters. The catch, however, is that I don't play the secondary account very often and it sits there with unused time, sometimes for a month at a time.

Tl;dr: OK, Rhode, what's the point? Let's say I want to go play Loong 3D for a bit. That time sits on my account, unused. A month, two months, even more may pass and the time still sits there. When does Blizzard count me as a subscriber and when do they count me as unsubscribed? When WoW was a new game, it would have been easier to track, the license holder would have been able to report new accounts created. Now, year after year of students have graduated, gotten caught up in work and discovered the opposite gender. They're busy. Some have drifted away and some have just cut back on their play.

Bookkeeping: Some of the huge subscription losses reported in Asia are probably the result of bookkeeping here; at some point the license holder will have to decide when to call an account active or inactive and that will create surges. Cata would have been worse than normal for that because it came fairly close to a change in license holder here and the old license holder seems to have been less than cooperative about turning over records to the new license holder.

My realm feels very much alive, heroics are on the easy side, rep grinds are brutal.

2.7 million copies sold after a mostly lambasted expansion seems like a pretty good start to me.

Rhode, why do you guys not have a subscription thing? Chinese don't own credit cards or something?

Hmm, I can see the benefit of only paying for the time you spend playing, especially if you don't play so much, but something about it just feels like a bad deal. But it's not, is it? Almost three days /played for $5 is pretty good. You could play two hours a day (every day) for a month with that amount of time.

Meh, I need more coffee before this makes sense, I think. Definitely need more sleep before I get more coffee, though.

On a plus note, I am going to become less of a sad forum troll & actually pick up MoP and start playing wow again.