was pondering all the negativness there is about wow and well games in general now, I am starting to think it is a trend,that you have to be negative, I have no idea why it is so, but it is everywhere, not only in wow, but literaly all over the place.
be it a movie, some youtuber do not like it, 100s of people start to say the same, it is like people can not think for them selfs at all,
heck even in wow, almost everyone who has something negative to say, says the exact same thing as someone else already said, and never anything new to complain about.
now I am not saying BFA is perfect, heck wow never been perfect in anyways, and there has been over all expansions something realy lame going on at times, heck even in vanilla there was, but the difference is, that now people scream about it like crazy, something that almost never happend 10 years ago.
it is realy odd that for the past 5 years, people seem to become more and more negative about everything, how can it be.
The difference is that not only the playerbase shifted from traditional nerds to a more mainstream kind of player, but also that game makers shifted from traditional nerds to people who simply want to make money.
yeah specialy if you meen pay to win games, but wow aint that yet, yes you can argue that buying tokens you can essential use gold to get better items, but not realy still.
think the problem is or should I say bane to the gaming industry is microtransactions, something that should be banned buy law, for every countries, becuse that destroyes so many games, and not to talk about peoples lifes, due to some spending way to much money on games, due the human nature, you could almost say it is same as an gambling addiction.
yes Blizzard is going mobile also, becuse that is a huge market, and gaming companies have to get a piece of that cake, before it is to late, and it is most likely way more lucrative than pc gaming ever will be, pc gaming is a dying breed unfortunately.
Still no reply on how the company structure works. Guess I am not as ignorant as you claimed.
As for the subs in our region, I said 100k in total, not just EU, or where ever you are based.
As for recent numbers, they are down, but the main brunt of it is being taken by developers that produced crappy titles. Fallout, BFV and ofc WoW’s BFA, not to mention the whole Blizzcon fiasco.
WoW does make a good deal of money from additional services, but you are wrong about the stock holder part. If subs are not payed you can bet anything that no additional services are being bought, I mean who buys a transfer or race change when you are not playing the game, its illogical.
WoW is still making a killing, but not what it is use to, and as a stock broker any kind of loss and not growth is seen negatively, hence why they try to produce as much growth as possible so shareholders do not get scared away.
Are you seriously trying to argue that BFA is a good xpac and that Activision Blizzard is profiting as much as they wanted to ? You think the game is looking up? Who cares what 8.2 is bringing, its like 8 months away, cant you see that all the new content is mega bugged since its been heavy rushed so they can stop the mass bleeding? I cant be the only one that sees it.
@Triumvir: I will let Someoneelse make his own reply, so these are just my thoughts.
If Classic adds a total of 100 000 on top of retails figures, it will still be a pretty big bunch of cash, especially since costs will be pretty low outside servers. WoW’s GMs can handle both retail and Classic related matters. If the total is only 100 000 world wide, the concurrent numbers will not be very high, so only a handful of servers / region. Maybe something like 5-7 US, 1 Brazil, 3-5 English, 1-2 German, 1 French, 1 Spanish, 0 Italian, 0 Portuguese, 1-2 Russian, 1 Korean and let NetEase worry about China.
8.1.5 will come before 8.2… and it is far more likely to appear within the next about 37 to 50 days (possibly January 23rd or 30th) than 7+ months from now. I am only guessing, but I think even 8.2 will be out before the end of April (possibly on April 17th or 24th) and 8.3 strategically just a bit before Blizzcon 2019 (October 9th/16th?). I need to stress I am just guessing, but Blizzard really can not afford to leave 8.1.5 to June or July.
But now I better get some sleep. Good night to all!
Thats all fine, and I am man enough to admit if I have been wrong about the current state of the game, as soon as Q4 comes out, if we see that its all stabilizing or growing, no worries take it as me being in the wrong.
As for the 7 months thing, I was naming 8.2 as when the next tier will come out, and thats what I was referring to. 8.1.5 can come out before then sure, but if its on the same leaves as when 8.1 came just now its not much of a patch content wise.
As for Vanilla, we will have to see, we are all just giving best possible guesses.
The x.x.5 patches are systems patches. The x.x.0 are content patches. Patch 8.1.5 is a systems patch, so it won’t have a lot of content like raids and such.
They talked about it at Blizzcon.
It’s Kul Tirans and Zandalari Trolls.
Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin remastered.
WoD timewalking.
Darkmoon Faire rollercoaster.
Brawler’s Guild.
A new PvP Brawl with Arathi Basin PvE or something.
The portal rooms.
Profession updates.
Updates to Children’s Week and more micro holidays.
And the Worgen & Goblin model updates.
That’s what’s in store for patch 8.1.5. It’s not a huge new raid or a new PvP Season or anything like that. It’s mostly updates to existing systems, because it’s a systems patch.
Yeah, so no real content, while its still nice, it wont really make people come back to play more.
And I don’t think 8.2 will be out by what Trelw hoped it would, end of April. I don’t have the feeling that they are even close to that, or rather I fear as much.
We are on a down trend and it will NOT get better, especially not while dumb Fsdfsdfs keep buying micro transactions and store products incentivizing anti consumer practices and transfering content from achievable to pay only.
Not that it is terribly important, but I do not think this statement is true.
You earlier mentioned that an average player has about 3.5 characters. I don’t know how this number is computed, but whatever it is, it is quite likely a useless measure, because players are - quite likely again, because I have no proof for WoW, but that’s how it usually is in games - separated on that into two groups: those who don’t keep alts active in any amount, and those who do even if only a little. The difference is usually big in that when you log in, you either just go to your main or to whatever alt you are currently playing, and then you are in the first camp. Or you quickly cycle through your alts and it is after you do this, that you go to one of your characters, and then you are in the second camp.
Again, I don’t know how the 3.5 average characters per player figure is computed, but whatever method we use, we will end up with it being an average of something very low for the first camp and something much higher for the second camp. The average thus has no meaning, all the information is in the extremes.
Getting back to you seeing ~70k characters and reasoning that “the actual figure might be closer to 50k” - it is quite likely much lower. Like 30k or 25k. Because while “most players do not constantly swap characters or even use all of their characters within a span of only about 10 hours” might even be technically true (although it also might not, because 10 hours is quite a long time), it is the second camp that dominates character counts because of how many characters they cycle through. Hey, I don’t consider myself to be in the second camp because I keep alts just for things like professions, bank / ah duties, etc, yet my routine is to cycle through 5 characters every evening because we have a holiday running.
@Jito: Thank you for the list and the additional notes.
@Triumvir: I did emphasize that my thoughts on the dates are guesses. What I disagree is your assessment of said patch effects. I believe (and I admit I can be in error here) that Kul Tirans and the Zandalari in particular will bring back people.
@Mellinora: I can see the reasons for many of your thoughts, but you forgot a critical factor… The available time. I know the numbers are again up for debate, but based on what I have been able to scrape together, the typical player spends less than 3 hours / day online. People like me, who have 50+ characters and occasionally manage to play 40+ in a single day are definitively rare outliers. While not all of us belong to a certain community, my estimate is that there are less than 100 of us total and only around 20 of us active in the entire EU region.
In an older sample I took among friends and guild mates with a size of just about 170 people (not very big, I know), but in it… over 80% only had one or two ACTIVE characters above 20 (CensusPlus cuts off at 20 due to Blizzard eliminating the 1-19 from API many years ago), I was the only person who had 30+ and only about 5 others had more than 10. A very common answer was something along the lines of “I have one old main that I rarely play, one newer 120 and working on an (allied race X) alt… Ohhh, and a couple of level 1 bank alts, of course.” In that specific sample the average was actually below three, but I have taken a look at some other opinions / samples other people have cited as well and they indicated that 3,5 was probably closer to the truth than 2,95 or so.
So yes, it is not an exact figure by any means, but I think it is sufficiently accurate. If you think it is really far off, what number of ACTIVE level 20+ characters would you say a typical player has?
@Mellinora: I took a new look, because there were problems and delays yesterday… I recorded 9 100+ updates with one file failing to process correctly… So, I saw somewhere between roughly 54 400 and 101 100 characters yesterday + whatever was in the failed file. Even if I go for 6 actives (or overlaps) / player that translates into a minimum of more than 9 000 players… at the other end (with a lot of singles), the figure could be almost 80 000.
And the probable… around 33 000 or a bit over as we have to keep in mind that I get no credit for anything at level 19 or below even if I see it in person standing in the AH or a bank.
Let us look at individual days of late in terms of updates… The critical comparison values being the May 2016 average of 3 946 and the beginning of month non-adjusted of 3 316… Yesterday 9 100+, Saturday despite spending about 4 hours away from home during prime time to see a movie in a movie theater 2 500+, Friday… 3 840+, Thursday…5 000+, Wednesday with one file failing to work 4 300+, Tuesday 4 200+… I have collected some data for today, too, but have not submitted any as of yet.
The change might not be huge, but 8.1 did alter the trend, at least a little. How much impact it will have remains to be seen and the time to 8.1.5 is a CRITICAL factor. That is why I said Blizzard can not really afford to have 8.1.5 too much later.
Blizzard only have themselves to blame for all this, despite warnings from myself and many, many other older players, they still pressed on with all their new systems, and more often than not, they would hurt the game in the long run but now they have done one that has hurt it in the shortrun AND simultaniously done one that hurt it in the same longer term:
DX9 removal (short term, trust me that one is huge)
Azerite armour (longer term, were stuck with it for while)
