WoW Lost 600k Subscribers, down to 11.4MFollow

"I've reached the (probably flawed) conclusion that the LFG tool killed it for me. Before the LFG tool came out in its current implementation I strived to play with guildies or friends from my friend list. Whenever I had a good run or casual raid (I did most my raiding with my guild back then), I'd add people to my friends list. This gave servers a sense of community I believe slowly (or maybe not that slowly) died away in the months following the release of LFG and certainly with Cata. As a tank, I've used the LFG tool a damn lot, clearing probably 99% of the runs, but the feeling of getting to know goooooood players and chatting with them later did die. Which ultimately led to me feeling I was doing the same content over and over again (nothing new here) with complete strangers, most of whom are asshats."



I think that is a big factor.

The LFG tool pretty much killed PvE for me. If I have to play with random people, I'd much rather do so in a battleground setting.

Clam stacking was the first nail, LFG was the last. Somewhere in there they took away my hunter's ammo and gave him a free pet too. The slippery slope seen through the rear-view mirror. How naive we were...

Edited, May 11th 2011 12:31pm by someproteinguy

This expansion I am DEFINITELY a casual player.
I'm in a guild with maybe 5 people, I get BH in on my 85s ALMOST every week, and I do around 10-20 heroics per week.
If I see a promising raid looking for another, sure, I'll join it, don't have a reason not to.
If I don't, oh well, I have TONS of fun just doing heroics, leveling alts, and talking with my girl. A couple that plays together, stays together, after all.
Some of the stuff I see confuses me a bit to be honest. I mean, blaming the LFD on lack of social interaction is odd. I've found that most groups, if you start talking, they'll join in, even if they're from around the world on servers you've never heard of. What's the difference between chatting up Scubasteve the Hunter from the realm Aethien (We all know it's going to happen some day), or Dixiechick from your realm?
Sure you can friend the one from your realm and see if they wanna go at it again, but, with the way LFD looks in your server for group members before it looks abroad, you can still do that. I find myself getting at LEAST one other person from my server every single heroic pug.
I dunno, sometimes I feel like Blizzard should be paying me for 'defending' their product, but when I do, it's because I just can't grasp what the other party has against it.

I can definitely agree with that. It's especially uncool when I run into people I know from my old server who I used to raid with and can't friend them or anything to group with them again.

If this is the first time the player base hasn't grown (or at least the first time it's gone down), then one has to assume that the player base went up, or remained steady, during "WOTLK easy mode," which would indicate that the transition from WOTLK to Cataclysm is what killed the drive for the people who left.

It's hard to blame any one thing for the decline in players. I'd put my money on a mix of three main reasons:

1. New MMO games about to launch.
2. World of Warcraft getting old.
3. Blizzard disappointing a lot of players with their downright mentally impaired development plan.

QQ, I know, but that's what I've gathered from reading the official forums. Blizzard promised some things before launch, didn't deliver on those promises and instead proceeded to shred the game so they could rebuild it. And in the end, we've ended up here, where two new heroics now spew out more epics than Trial of the Champion ever did and classes being reverted back to the way they were before Cataclysm was launched.

You don't have to be a Druid to realize that the patch notes since December have made little to no sense. Druids are fine now, or soon will be, and I'm not talking about Blizzard nerfing or buffing certain classes. I'm talking about an inconsistency that has followed the game ever since December. One patch they change something and the next they change it back. They've completely ignored player feedback on several occasions, despite that feedback being correct (and would have saved them time). They've promised things that never made it into the game, but still managed to balance the game around those things (triage healing and "no AOE" anyone?).

I know that Blizzard officials have stated that nothing has changed in the development team, but it's ********* Unless the entire development team had a major case of the ADD, something changed.

Meh. Who cares in the end? We're back to easy epics and AOE spamming. It's likely that people just left because it's getting old.

Mazra's post reminds me of that news back during Wrath which basicalls summed up as "Blizzard's B team is now in charge," and I think we're finally seeing the real signs of that. IIRC, the B-team took over when Cataclysm was in production, meaning we didn't really see their work until now.

And I'm not sure I'm liking it, to be honest.

LONG REPLY

Speaking as someone who actually listens to these calls (I'm in the finance business) - the type of admission he made MUST be teamed with some sort of mitigating factor.

Example: We, Borsuk Company, have missed Q1 Revenue projections by 4%. We believe this was due to bad weather conditions in the North Eastern USA....

Right - so we didn't do something. We screwed something up. Something bad happened.... Right - it's a fact. But something we all know (Lots a snow) caused it.

However - on every one of these calls... Every one. The guy/girl talking always tells us why and either WHY THEY WILL FIX IT or WHY IT'S NOT THEIR FAULT.

When they say, "Hey, we F'd up and here's how we'll fix it." (Usually this means we'll cut costs or fire X management team or refine a broke process.) (SITUATION 1)

When they say, "Hey, we F'd up and it's not our fault." (Usually this is called a one time accounting adjustment, a market driven event, or some other similarly non-specific issue.) (SITUATION 2)


In situation ONE - they are admitting what we all knew. There is a legit problem and they are addressing it. This is a good sign. Their action plan might suck, but they working on it. A non-financial example: You're a huge fat-***. "I realize that I'm over weight. I am going to stop eating fast food and walk 1 mile every day until I can jog 1 mile every day."

In situation TWO - They are admitting nothing. We all anecdotally have all seen the issues (Less people at Zam, Less people on EJ, Some of our best posters quitting WoW, etc..) But they have claimed that it's not actually a problem - it's the fact that subscriptions are a non-linear function. A non-financial example: You're a huge fat-***. "I realize that I'm over weight. The real issue is that we have switched from Margarine and Splenda to Butter and Sugar and I have stopped drinking light beer and switched to Sam Adams 600 calorie beer."

SHORT REPLY

His answer was weak. If they had a "Good" answer, he'd have given it. The fact that the big-time Exec. didn't have a good answer means that there is no good answer.

True. Here is some additional information, from the financial viewpoint.

In terms of the game experience for most of those posting here, there aren't really 12 million players and there never have been. That was a number that included localizations outside of the NA/EU server groups; players in those localizations have their own servers and are essentially irrelevant -- except when Blizzard talks numbers. At that point, it might be useful to remember that roughly 5 million of those players were in China and their play experience is completely different.

If the NA/EU player base took a 600K hit, that is much larger than it appears in the context of 12 million players world wide. If that number includes China, there may be many factors but the only relevance Cataclysm has is that we don't have it yet. Since a 600K drop in NA/EU players would have been a dramatic decline, I would suspect that much of the loss came from outside those servers.

One possible reason for a drop in Chinese players would be a change in accounting. Chinese companies, even more than their counterparts in North America and Europe, tend to paint things in the most glowing terms possible. The old license holder (The9) probably interpreted player numbers rather liberally to make themselves look good. Although the transfer to NetEase took place in 2009, WOW didn't officially resume until 2010 and until that time Blizzard could have continued to report those numbers. After the change over, players had to reactivate their accounts and Blizzard would have to report the new numbers.

As I've noted before, accounts in China use a different system. We don't pay a monthly subscription, we buy a time card and time is deducted as we play. Bun-Bun tried WOW when The9 was running the localization and at the time of the change over her account still had money on it -- she would have been one of the five million. She didn't keep playing after the change to NetEase and did not reactivate her account. At some point, NetEase would have to report current figures and those would have been included in Blizzard's reporting. Since The9 was probably continuing to report all accounts with paid time as active accounts, the number of accounts NetEase 'lost' would have been inflated.

The lag in content here certainly hasn't helped and I can't guess what influence the release of Starcraft 2 would have had, although I have to wonder if that might not have had a strong influence on the Korean player base at the very least. At some point Blizzard is competing with their own products and that will probably become more noticeable as Diablo 3 approaches.



Edited, May 12th 2011 1:43am by Rhodekylle

A month-to-month view of subscription information, along with a break down by EU/US/etc would be useful. Without it, it's all just speculation. Anyone that's been through an expansion cycle knows that, right after a new expansion or content patch, servers start getting really crowded and you can't swing a gnome around by her pink pigtails without hitting an Orc, a Tauren, and three Forsaken. Then people go through the new content, the newness wears off, and people let their subs lapse.

I think things will pick up when Firelands comes out, and a lot of people will be geared enough to pug some of the easier T11 fights. Plus, there will be more pugs anyway with raiders not being locked to the old content. A downside to shared 10/25 lockouts, I guess.

Precisely what happenned to me. I transferred twice between september and novemeber '10 (guild falling appart and all that) and my friends list never grew past 10 people or so, and that included my bank alt. Even when I transferred to my last server, where I had friends from my 1st server, the friends list was something I never had to use again, whereas prior to LFG revamp I had to regularily manage the list to remove people. Shame.

I understand that the implications for wait time would be bad, but I still think LFG should be same server only. Still more useful than trade channel because it allows you to quest while you wait, but maintains the sense of community and accountability you get from having a smaller pool of people who are bound to become familiar with each other.