BFA is the worst expansion by player activity

Community General Discussion
84

But its more then just HP there is in each mode different mechanics if you want to be perdantic about it.

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85

WoD was terrible, way worse than Bfa is. Stop lying to yourself. The only thing good about that expansion was the class design and the fact it had PvP vendors.

I hate bfa with all my heart, but even I am not blind to the pile of diarrhea sh*t known as WoD. The only thing I liked about it was the class design and Trashran. PvE was trash. There was no content. Everything was trash.

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86

Indeed. And those extra difficulties could just involve bumping up their health to compensate for the increased ilevel. Very cheap.

That’s what they’ve done with world content, after all. Why shouldn’t such a revolutionary and brilliant approach work for raids, too?

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Auction house doesn’t tell anything.
Youtube dislikes don’t tell anything.
Metacritic scores don’t tell anything.
Reddit golds don’t tell anything.
Kotaku articles don’t tell anything.
API leaks don’t tell anything.
Stock price don’t tell anything.

But the harbour was busy today so BFA must have 200million players!

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88

@Mellinora: That is actually a pretty good idea, though certain technical reasons will require some extra work from me… and even as is, it would still be only my data. I am not sure whether there is enough interest from other posters for such more detailed list. I will think about it, at least.

As for the statistics, while Trahardt did not explicitly say so, I think he was referring to the statistically excessive amount of zeros (aka bandwagoning / trolling). A large number of unusual ratings / votes can lead to rather silly results. If I am not entirely mistaken, at least one US community has a cat as the town mayor… and the cat even got re-elected, if my memory serves right. :smiley:

@Triumvir: I am not going to agree with your assessment of the situation. If Classic / Vanilla can hold about 30 000 to 50 000 players world wide for a period that exceeds 8 months from launch it has already served its primary purpose… If it can retain 20 000 until the end of 2020 it will probably already be “in the black” and by then, we will already be in the next expansion.

Just out of pure curiosity, what kinds of odds are you giving Classic having LESS than 19 999 players world wide on December 31st, 2020 to have such a negative view on WoW’s future?

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89

I am sure in the first months classic will have more then a mill playing it actively. The thing is many who never played it don’t understand that it is nothing like what WoW is today. In half a years time I see around 100k playing it still, and sure, Blizzard can make money off it, but I don’t think they see that as a success, not will it be at any point what it was 14-5 years ago, it cant be, everything is known, the “magic” will be missing.

The only thing I see that Blizzard might decide to do is start bringing the old expansions back, so after vanilla they could do TBC and so on. And again, it will make money, for a time. But in the end it cant be as big as it was, nor popular, and its just a matter of time before they get called out for not bringing anything new, but just going the lazy way about it.

Again, I could be wrong, and I have never been much into the whole “The game is going to die” but I simply can not ignore the leaked subs, or rather the alleged leaked subs after seeing how many people just raid log and even more quit.

I refuse to believe that a mass exodus has not happened in BFA.

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@Triumvir: A lot of people ARE gone, some for a while, others permanently, never to return. Nobody is denying that. But as I noted in my posts to Mellinora, we are currently not as low as we have been at times. The critical question is not about today, but tomorrow, next week, next month, next year… What kind of remarks will I type in December 2019? Or even much earlier as I am sure this will not be the last thread about populations. :D:D:D Will Mellinora or you be there to read them? Will there be anyone to read them? I would like to hope so… :slight_smile: (Naturally, I have to hope that I will still be here to write them… Have seen too many people far younger than I am or of my own age frame pass away, some without any prior warning… :frowning: )

I am also not sure if you realized… but 100 000 active players on classic might mean 33+ full or high classic servers during prime time, if Blizzard goes through with a “No changes” scheme and actually edits the population column to account for the lower CCU cap? I would not call that something to sneeze at or a failure… Would you? If I am not mistaken, we do not have 33 full retail servers at our disposal even world wide right now.

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91

Im not an expert on servers, but the fact that we do not have enough of them right now can clearly be seen when you go into a zone to do any kind of content, the lag is clearly vanilla like, so at least they are getting people used to what it will be like.

I do not think 100k is a bad deal, I just think a company like Activision wont be happy with 100k in a mmo that use to have 11m+.

I played vanilla, a lot, I for one will not do it again, and I am sure that anyone who pushed it back then is still sick of it.

To the new players ? Good luck, you are going to need it. 50%+ will quit before they hit lvl 60 in my opinion.

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92

My primary objection to the Metacritic score is the potential bandwagoning, which is mentioned in my first point. WoD has 10/10 ratings saying that it was the best expansion ever since Vanilla… Was it the best expansion ever? No, it was a Legion waiting room in our garrison. Yet there were people (and not just a few) who went there and rated 8-9-10/10 and said that the whiny community is the problem not the content drought. At that point sub numbers were still released and its not a secret that the expansion launched with more than 10M players and 4.6 million left when they released the last sub numbers and most likely a few millions after that.

It just shows that hundreds of people can’t speak in the name of millions. Hundreds there thought the expansion was great, millions left the game because they were bored. This is why i think that the reviews of a thousand people about BfA doesn’t mean anything on that site (or about any other game to be honest). If i log in and what i see is only low population servers and no groups in the group finder then i will believe that the game is hated by the majority. But as long as i log in and see 7-8 full servers and 20~ high pop servers and tons of medium pop servers and enough groups in the group finder that gives me the chance to always do the content i want… I can’t really take the reviews seriously. That is because both the credibility and the amount of the reviews…

93

Google boaty mcboatface if you want to see silly results from things :grinning:

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94

This is a technical issue that they’ve had since prepatch.

Look at how the company is structured and you’ll see how ignorant these Activison comments are.

12 million was a peak not a sustained amount.

Let’s take this 100k as real for arguments same. This would be the concurrency not the subscriber amount like the magic 12 million. When 12 million subscribed did all 12 million log in - No. How many I have no idea. I have been subscribed to FF14 since relaunch but I dont log in for weeks at a time. (I know I should unsub.) I count as a sub but I dont count as an active player.

Blizzard have said that china accounted for about half of the subs. So that leaves about 6 million. WoW is also split into may regions like NA, Europe, China, and other far eastern countries who I ave no idea they spit it. For arguments sake let’s say we were 2-3 million.

It’s probably fair to say that we’re half of the subs at it’s peak so 1-2 million in Europe. Europe is split into several languages, English, Spanish, Italian, German and Russia. How popular is the census addon in those languages.

Remember that not all players play every day. 100, 000 doesn’t seem that bad really.

FF14 is hugely popular still and they have a concurrency of about 500, 000 globally. They dont release subs, just accounts made!

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95

@Dejarous: I do not have to, I vaguely recall that story, too. :D:D:D

@Triumvir: Your lack of expertise is understandable, my knowledge is far from perfect, too… But I do know, that if one runs an artificial 3 000 CCU cap on a server that can to an extent handle a 6 000 CCU cap, it will work rather well. Unless Blizzard botches things REALLY badly, Classic servers will be a lot less laggy than the retail ones. Also, if I am not mistaken, some of the problems are more related to CRZ, which will not be active on Classic, I believe. Sharding, however, might, even though it did not exist back then. There is not that much public data on the Classic backend (or if there is, I have not seen it, sorry).

@Trahardt: That depends a bit… Finland has something like 4 000 000 eligible voters, I think, when we elect our parliament. A poll of about 1 013 (or was it 1 103, not sure) adults ages 18 to 100+ will give the people working on result predictions about ±3% accuracy / party, of which we usually have about a dozen taking part. So a PROPERLY presentative sample does not have to be huge to be fairly accurate. The problem with Metacritic and some other places is the bandwagoning / trolling.

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I’d make a shocked face but no #"%" sherlock works better.

No !#%! sherlock it’s the worst, they keep pushing moronic decision after moronic decision.

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97

Sure, in some cases it can be accurate. In this case i was only talking about Metacritic ratings, because its pretty rare that the ratings on that site reflect what most people actually think about a game, even if we don’t count the trolls.

98

Yep. You are correct - and the logic is intentionally silly. It’s easy to present a lot of things as “more content”, and multiple difficulties is one of them. The point I was trying to make is that amount of bosses won’t make a raid tier better or worse. I think the game becomes stagnant because of the multiple difficulties not because of the number of bosses.

Having to progress through difficulty A, farm gear and then start progressing again through difficulty B makes things stagnant imo. I had friends quitting in ICC already during hc progression. “Is this the future of raiding? Progress through a raid twice? That’s not fun”. 10 years later and nothing changed - those friends just do a tourist round every couple of years.

More isn’t better, that was my point :slight_smile: Perhaps poorly expressed.

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How the company is structured? Sure, explain please.

As for the 12 mill peak, yeah it was not sustained, but by that logic no amount of subs was almost ever sustained, it went up or down. I said it had 11m+, not that it had that much for 10 years. The average is prob somewhere around 6-7m, and regardless of how many log if they pay their subscription thats all that mattered to Blizzard/Activision, so I am kind of missing what point you are trying to make.

100k while sounding nice, and probably a very generous assumption on my behalf does not sound like something too impressive for what they aim for. Sure, the costs will probably be low, since no updates needed, no real fixes, no real patches, it is all known ahead of time so that might tip the scales, but I still don’t really see it.

100

“To the new players ? Good luck, you are going to need it. 50%+ will quit before they hit lvl 60 in my opinion.”

“50%+ will quit before they hit lvl 60”

I think the % of quitters will be much higher. Somewhere like 80%.

101

Imho WoD and especially Cata are worse than BfA.

The difference is that the game is really starting to show its age and its limitations now. Technical and server issues are abundant, the game starts to lag when there are more than 10 players partaking in an activity. The game didn’t have so many technical issues back in WoD.

BfA feels the same as Cata in that regard; the devs simply don’t really seem to give a damn, and it shows.

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@All: Well… Because I have been playing a large part of the day, this is is not a concurrent number as such… But when I run census, I typically achieve roughly one update for every 6 to 11 characters I detect on my runs… I have already exceeded 6 400 updates for today, so I have seen somewhere roughly between 38 400 and 70 400 characters. Given that a typical player has an average of about 3,5 characters… At the absolute minimum, I have seen almost 11 000 players today and the actual figure might be closer to 50 000, because most players do not constantly swap characters or even use all of their characters within a span of only about 10 hours. There will certainly be a bit of “overlap”, because I have censused some factions more than once by now and might have seen the same character on two different levels during the day and/or the same player playing two different characters. Considering my list barely covers 10% of all existing EU servers… A LOT of people have played WoW today. :smiley:

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103

A few hundred K of active users is quite good in our region. I refer you to my previous reply why. I can’t make it any clearer.

While we dont get sub numbers now we get a general health of the game, financially and it’s rather well. Recent numbers have not been so great but that’s not limited to WoW. If I was a stock holder of Activision-Blizzard I would not care how many subs they have i want to know how much money it makes. WoW makes more money that ever from additional services; the WoW Token is very popular and makes more than a standard sub. Also to note is that WoW is not Blizzard’s only game now, never mind the other titles on the parent companies portfolio.

I’d bet most of the cost is not development costs but upkeep in the data centres around the world.

We dont know how WoW structures it’s realms but we can look at it from a high level perspective. When WoW was launched we had a realm based design where each realm was it’s own little ecosystem. Wrath or Cata moved some of that to shared instance servers. We then got cross realm zones that allowed us to visit each other’s realms and then as an evolution we got sharding that basically instances the world. This seems more like a mega-server.

I suspect realms now barely exist. Blizzard probably spend millions keeping dead realms ‘alive’. Next to stop full mega server Blizzard-style

Also, dont forget that WoW team absorbed a some of the Titan team during Legion development so that has increased costs too at a time when subs are on a realistic downward trend.

Do you think that Blizzard only work a few months of the year. While we do get periods of little content they are still working on updates and expansions. (I suspect the Azshara patch is going to be huge.) Do you honestly think they finish the last patch and then work on the next expansion. Whether you liked BfA launch content or not that took much longer than 8(?) months to make. They are always making future content - and that does of course problems with feedback as it’s too late to make significant changes but that’s another argument.

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