Thayos wrote:
I'm simply not seeing the evidence that droves of people are cancelling subscriptions, and this is bolstered by the fact there are roughly 500,000 people who log in and play on a daily basis, plus many more who just play every two or three days.
What I do see evidence of is more people logging in less frequently with Patch 2.2 on the horizon -- and that makes sense. As more hardcore players hit the wall and get bored, they're likely to back off until the next wave of content hits.
The same holds true for midcore/casual players, too. In my FC, most of our members are now logging in once every two to five days, rather than every one to two days, simply because they're a bit bored with the existing content and they're waiting for 2.2 to land.
By the end of this month, I think some people will be pleasantly surprised by how few people actually quit playing.
People do not just quit a game they've invested a lot of time into just like that, Thayos.
What you see evidence of is bad pacing: not lack of content. There is no sign that this same cycle will not repeat within the next 6 months.
It is absolutely foolish to make a statement like this:
Thayos wrote:
I'm simply not seeing the evidence that droves of people are cancelling subscriptions
when 14 was JUST released for another platform. Do you expect to see growth or decay when a game is released for another platform? Were you able to see the effects of people who quit when 11 was released for the 360?
I am not claiming that 14 is dying or that people are leaving in droves. Most of us are just concerned about decisions the developers are making with a game that we have high expectations of.
I will pose the question to you again since you didn't answer me in the other thread: what exactly would you suggest, to people that are bored, to do? I logged in last night. Queued for Titan Ex in DF just for fun. Took 25 minutes on a healer to get into the instance. No one showed signs of communicating, the same people kept failing repeatedly, and it became clear we would not be able to do it. So then I queued for Garuda HM and the same story happened except we were able to do it just because we outgeared it so much after a couple attempts. No communication, though, and the same two to three people kept making the same mistakes. Logged out after these two episodes.
I want to improve my character's DoW and DoM jobs. How would you recommend going about that? Remember: I have quite a few. How would you tell someone who has just one to go about improving it? Would you tell them to level another job that they have no interest in? Was it necessary for me to level BST in 11 (something I had no interest in) to remain entertained or to continue to improve my main job? No. I simply could level another job. However, leveling another job was a huge project and often took months. What about when we had everything we wanted at max? What did we do then? Well, eventually a system was implemented so that we could improve our characters even once they were at level cap. This system was created within the same company that also created 14. For a game that supposedly starts at level 50, there is surprisingly not much to do if you spend a moderate to high amount of time in the game on a daily basis.
Pacing is the key. I can tell you WoW suffers from similar issues currently but can hide behind the massive amount of content they've developed over the years to compensate the bored players. Want to improve your character? Well..you can't really do that. However, what you can do is farm old raids for vanity items and test out your solo capability! That kind of thing.
Edited, Mar 13th 2014 3:57am by HitomeOfBismarck 
