Item Stats and Exponential GrowthFollow

This. Either the LK system (separate but not equal) or the superior current model. The only real problem with Karazhan was that it was the endgame for 10-man guilds.

Personally, I prefer the slightly smaller raids like Firelands. T11 had too many bosses. My raid group barely finished T11 on normal modes before Firelands came out. I think we got it literally the week before. Our progression group got Sinestra down literally, the week before.

Comparatively, in Firelands my raid group got Rag down a month ago, and we've spent a few weeks farming him, and are now working on heroic modes. Our progression group got heroic Rag down three or so weeks ago, earning them a 600 world ranking.

People complained that 7 bosses weren't enough, the bosses were too easy. From what I've heard, some of the heroic bosses ARE too easy. But Rag is no push over. He's way harder than Sinestra was. They probably should have balanced the heroic modes a bit better so people didn't spend 2 months working on Rag after zipping through the majority of the other heroic modes. That said, I think Firelands was well put together overall. 7 bosses was enough to keep my guild's progression group busy for the vast majority of this tier, and now they have time to farm heroic Rag before DS comes out. Similarly, my group has time to work on heroic modes and feel some sense of pride at getting those down before DS comes out. Considering that only 599 guilds have done better than our progression group, that's not very many people who are left bored.

The connection is that I feel that Blizzard has been majorly slacking and half-assing things lately, with the "half" being quite literal.

And they're more or less continuing that way, giving us a whole lot of the "for now" business, like with doing the raid finder only for Dragon Soul initially. All while telling us that we should be using the previous tier raids to gear up out toons, especially in regards to shoulder and helmet slots.

Cutting stats is becoming necessary eventually and not a bad thing per se. But I can see that seriously messing with content below maximum level (or max tier raiding) if they keep up what they've been doing so far in Cataclysm. You only need to look at current PvP before 85 to see how badly things are off balance. Their response so far has been that everything is balanced around maximum level and that they'd look at everything else if they find the time - which is like never because it costs money.

Just saying that they should leave things alone unless they're again actually willing to do things right from the start and commit the resources to it.

Is it even worth it for that one last expansion that might follow MoP if they keep up the current 2 year cycle?

I think they should focus on making MoP awesome and leave numbers alone for now. Fix the combat text so it shows 100K instead of 100.000 and all will be good until they get to decide whether or not to even continue the game based on the number of subs.

Saying that it's all just numbers really works in both ways.

Honestly, it makes more sense to try the raid finder with only the most recent raid, considering the fights don't just have lower numbers, there are supposed to be significant mechanics changes to the fights to make them easier.

The three new 5-mans will have a full set of 378ish gear for each character, so beyond hitting the minimum gear level requirement for the 5-man, raiding old content will be optional.

PvP has never been balanced below cap. Even in vanilla, there was always one OP class in each bracket, based on who just got what talent or spell.

Rumors of WoW's impending death are always greatly exaggerated, and make the people saying it look rather foolish. WoW could loose 10% of it's total subscribers every QUARTER for almost 6 years and still have over 1,000,000 people playing; EQ is still up and running with far less than 1,000,000 subscribers. The impending stat crunch (or shift to MEGA-damage) shows the devs are looking at, not just MoP, but one or more expansions beyond that.

WoW will only die if Blizzard decides to kill it. Other MMO games run with subscribers in the hundred thousands. Even if WoW started hemorrhaging subscribers, it would take at least another expansion (after MoP, I mean) before it would drop below a million.

The question is: Would Blizzard euthanize the game at that point, or even before it reaches that point? They might decide that it's no worth the time and effort. They would probably withdraw even more developers to work on the next big thing.

Some companies are happy with what relatively small profit there is in their MMO games, but I doubt Blizzard would want to let their game bleed out. They'd probably end it with a bang so they could continue with the Warcraft story in another game.

Personally, I hope it happens that way. I'd prefer that the game I've loved (and hated - it's a delicate relationship) over the last six or seven years ended with some grand, server-crashing event.

I think it would give closure and allow players to look forward to the next generation of MMMO* Warcraft game from Blizzard.


* MEGA Massively Multiplayer Online

It's worth noting that the bulk of the subscription losses have been in China where, from what Rhode has been telling us, they have had all kinds of problems with the local WoW provider.

Also, I still think it's rediculous to think that a slowly declining player population means MoP is the last or even next to last expansion. For one thing, successful MMOs that aren't WoW consider themselves lucky to break 1 million subs. I might have missed it, but I don't recall RIFT advertising 2 million boxes sold, or any kind of active subscription figures being released. If Trion can maintain an active development cycle on 1 million subs, I don't see Blizzard pulling the plug on their cash cow.

Also, Developing Blizzard's own replacement for WoW hasn't begun yet. Titan is a new MMO, but it's not based on any existing Blizzard IP, and won't be a direct competitor with WoW. Blizzard is going to want somewhere for all their die-hard fans to go to get their MMO fix. Squeenix stopped active development on FFXI, but the servers are still up and FFXIV is out. Granted, FFXIV, last I heard, doesn't require a sub to play while they get all the problems fixed. I believe the same thing happened with EQ1/EQ2, where they slowed and stopped active development, but kept the servers up.

So, what is the point where you will say WoW is dead? The game being completely inaccessible except on private servers? The announcement of no new expansions or content patches? A notable decline in the content development cycle (only annual content patches and/or expansions 3+ years apart)?

The best thing a company can do is to listen to it's customers.

The worst thing a company can do is to listen to it's customers.

There are only 2 fates they can consider -

1. The Seinfeld fate - Pull the plug while you're on top. This would allow them to pull the plug in the next 3 years. Quickly followed up by their next "latest and greatest".

2. The fade away fate - Slowly stop releasing content. Minimize support. Keep servers running so long as they are profitable.



Both are risky. The first has you ending a major revenue stream without the assurance that your clients will follow you to the next "big deal". The second risks you ruining your reputation with your client base. There's a certain point when people realized that anyone could own a Cadillac.... Then there was a certain point that people realized ANYONE could own one and the brand suffered.

Honestly - My thought is they are attempting to fund the current system with as little as possible while avoiding major declines in quality. There have been a few issues, but nothing systematic and game breaking. The problem is that the tipping point - the point were Cost of fixing it vs subscriptions (Revenue) is a fickle thing. Meaning - A certain level of decline is to be expected and it's probably something that designers have talked about considering the age of the product and the current market. But what level of decline is acceptable to the masses of subscribers - a quick change - a bad patch, etc - Could push out a hand full of people. At a certain level of subscriptions - The plan will move from a "Minimal Cost Maintenance" goal to a "Let's respectively Ramp-Down the product" goal. The reason for this is as they slowly lose people, they can estimate and gauge their income. But any big tick down in subscribers will lead them to a decision point - Do we up the $$$ to get us back on that glide-path for termination, or do we accelerate the termination - Because there's now way they run a non-profitable product.

Edit:Example: If every month we Decrease funding by $50,000, we assume we'll lost X players worth $30,000. So this goes on for a few months... No problems. Then suddenly after 10 months something happens - perhaps they don't have enough man-hours of programing time and a Tuesday Reset causes the servers to be down for 48hrs... Players feel upset, "The quality is gone, I'm tired of this, etc...." And you see a big "Tick up in people leaving. Say $300,000...

Management is going to look at that and say, "Wow, we expected to lose those people, but not this quickly. We should be at those levels of losses in 10 months. What do we do? We can either dump money back into the system to get back some of those subscribers or we can cut the system to make it's funding level commensurate with the number of players (Revenue). What we can't do is operate at this level of cost with this level of players."


Edited, Nov 9th 2011 10:59am by Borsuk

Pre-WoW any MMO that had 100-300k subscribers was considered fairly large.


There really isn't another subscription based MMO that has ever been on the same level of subscribers as WoW. There also hasn't been one that has continued its amazing growth for the period of time as WoW. That being said the game has plateaued, or more accurately it plateaued in WotLK. There are a number of reasons why, the end of the story arc, age of the game and the population playing it moving onto new things, etc etc.


WoW has started to lose its juggernaut steam, however if anyone thinks that its shelf life is over they are probably the same sorry fools whose tenuous grip on reality led them to believe that Warhammer or AoC was ever going to stand a chance of dethroning WoW. We will probably never see "WoW reaches 13 million subs" news article. We are also not going to see "Blizz shuts down WoW" in the next 3 years either.


/shrug

Edited, Nov 9th 2011 7:25pm by bodhisattva

I don't think it will be a single game that will ever "de-throne" WoW. It will be a combination of WoW bleeding out slowly, as we see, and a bunch of new games coming up. No single one will reach what WoW got, but they will each take a chunk of whatever WoW had left. Games like Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, etc.

What I read this as.

Best game I ever played!



Obviously I never played it, but most Asian MMOs I have experience with were massive amounts of grinding.

Perfect World was quite fun up to level 20

After that the microtransactions, immaturity and bad design kind of spoiled it for me. But as far as I can tell from the emails I get its still going.

The rebalancing thing will undoubtedly lose some subscribers. From reading the O-board thread about it the new "talent" system will lose it some (although I'm not entirely sure that many of the posters in that thread have the intelligence to unsubscribe unassisted). Every time something changes some people won't like it.

On the whole though I've had less problems with WoW than with other games. I've tried to go back to EQ a couple of times because I liked the people there and it was a lot more social environment, but I cannot get my head around the changes. Too many new things have come into an old game with no real tooltip help or explanation and it gets overwhelming. WoW seems to manage change better and I have yet to feel that I have no idea what I'm doing. (Note this is a feeling and does not necessarily indicate that I do know what I'm doing).

Part of this is that they are willing to tear up basics - like talent trees - and replace them with another mechanism, rather than keep adding layer upon layer of modification. Nobody likes change but once its over it is usually livable with.

I was very sceptical about the change from mana to focus on hunters but I seem to have adapted ok and now it has no negatives for me - and the positive that I can laugh at hunters in INT gear