World of Warcraft Lost Over 1 Million Subscribers This Year

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[citation][nom]mavroxur[/nom]I LOL'ed at this. But don't forget "A VGA graphics adapter" as a requirement. Because, ya know, those people still using EGA need to upgrade already![/citation]

Help! my new ATI 6900 video card doesn't fit in my intel 386 rig :)
 
"Blizzard previously reported that a sudden loss of subscribers -- nearly one million at that -- was due to seasoned gamers re-activating their accounts for the release of the third expansion, Cataclysm. These customers quickly chewed through the new content and then canceled their subscription when the cataclysmic meal was fully consumed."

Yeah, that's totally why.
 
I just don't have the time to play MMOs that require ridiculous amounts of upkeep to maintain characters. That's why the only one I really enjoy anymore is CoH/V because it's so casual friendly. I can stop playing for a few months, come back and pick up right where I left off and enjoy new content without the need to continuously grind in order to do so.
 
[citation][nom]maestintaolius[/nom]I just don't have the time to play MMOs that require ridiculous amounts of upkeep to maintain characters. That's why the only one I really enjoy anymore is CoH/V because it's so casual friendly. I can stop playing for a few months, come back and pick up right where I left off and enjoy new content without the need to continuously grind in order to do so.[/citation]

in wow you could get to 80 in a about a couple of weeks or so depending on how u played, but it was continuous questing and soloing and i couldn't get into it i think i only subbed a total of 5 months at most, and not all at one straight time period about 3 different points when I'd go again a month or two and not really finish the last month on the sub lol.
 
[citation][nom]crackfiend[/nom]"Blizzard previously reported that a sudden loss of subscribers -- nearly one million at that -- was due to seasoned gamers re-activating their accounts for the release of the third expansion, Cataclysm. These customers quickly chewed through the new content and then canceled their subscription when the cataclysmic meal was fully consumed."Yeah, that's totally why.[/citation]
The problem with this arument was when did these 1 million re-activate? BC ended with 11.5 million subscribers and a year into Wrath Kotaku had an article that WoW still only had 11.5 million. After Wrath was released in China they got a bump of 500,000 from that, but China hated Wrath so much they pushed Cataclysm out there after only seven months. After Q1 they reported a loss of 600k down to 11.4 million, Q2 showed another 300k loss and now Q3 shows 800k lost. So not seeing where one million come back to explain these losses.
 
Bring on another expansion and lose another mil.

This is the cycle of the great MMORPGs.

Don't feed your cash cow too much Blizzard, it may explode. Look at Everquest.
 
About 90 percent of the people I know who used to play WoW no longer play. There's basically 1 casual player that's still enjoying the game, but it's the type of person who has an underpowered machine, and enjoys The Sims.

Somewhere along the way, WoW went from being unique, and having plenty of hardcore content... to becoming a skilless, generic grindfest, where everyone is equal.
 
[citation][nom]necronomnicon[/nom]in wow you could get to 80 in a about a couple of weeks or so depending on how u played, but it was continuous questing and soloing and i couldn't get into it i think i only subbed a total of 5 months at most, and not all at one straight time period about 3 different points when I'd go again a month or two and not really finish the last month on the sub lol.[/citation]
Well, the leveling isn't what I was referring to, hell in CoH/V you can get to 50 in 2-3 days if you know the right people. It was the gearing up for endgame content I was talking about. Almost every 'mainstream' MMO required weeks of killing the green boss dragon to get people geared up to geared up to kill the blue boss dragon and then weeks of killing the blue boss dragon to get that level of gear so that when the expansion came out your guild would be ready to kill the red boss dragon. Of course, if you quit playing for a few weeks during the green boss dragon farming you'd be behind the rest of your guild and couldn't participate in the red boss dragon runs (or be kicked). Of course, you could always join a casual guild but then you wouldn't get to do some of the endgame stuff.

It's that constant character maintenance structure that most MMOs have that I really disliked, the nightly grind, to the point where it's almost a second job.
 
I don't know how they have ANY customers with those 1999 graphics. When they finally decided to make it free for the first 20 levels i said ah, what the heck i'll give it a try... less than five minutes into it i had to quite before those pathetic graphics made me puke.
 
[citation][nom]maestintaolius[/nom]Well, the leveling isn't what I was referring to, hell in CoH/V you can get to 50 in 2-3 days if you know the right people. It was the gearing up for endgame content I was talking about. Almost every 'mainstream' MMO required weeks of killing the green boss dragon to get people geared up to geared up to kill the blue boss dragon and then weeks of killing the blue boss dragon to get that level of gear so that when the expansion came out your guild would be ready to kill the red boss dragon. Of course, if you quit playing for a few weeks during the green boss dragon farming you'd be behind the rest of your guild and couldn't participate in the red boss dragon runs (or be kicked). Of course, you could always join a casual guild but then you wouldn't get to do some of the endgame stuff.It's that constant character maintenance structure that most MMOs have that I really disliked, the nightly grind, to the point where it's almost a second job.[/citation]

Originally, MMO's weren't quite like this for vast majority of their life. Leveling took months if not years to reach max level. Every day was an adventure that required grouping to advance at a decent rate and you'd group to quest as well.

Due to the extended leveling time, and the social requirements to level at a decent rate, you gained much of the fun that raiding has today, without the requirements of special gear earned by a raid worth of grinding.

Of course once you did reach the top, which took ages, there were some raiding guilds that took it further and it more like today, but for most people, you got your enjoyment leveling. I really dislike the new system of having you grind for max level solo to be able to raid at the max level. The old group leveling method was more rewarding for those who enjoyed grouping the entire way through.
 
i've played for more than 2 years, we've spend almost $1000 already for this game alone (3 accounts for family). thanks for the fun but we no longer wish to spend any more.
 
[citation][nom]bildo123[/nom]What's in the next expansion? Tigers? By any chance is Blizzard cutting Nat Geo a check by any chance? LoL at jn77, it's true this game is so old and hardly ever had any significant graphic revisions. At least give the players with beast computers a little something to chew on.[/citation]

I might be able to load WOW in the Ram on my video card 🙂
 
[citation][nom]bystander[/nom]Originally, MMO's weren't quite like this for vast majority of their life. Leveling took months if not years to reach max level. Every day was an adventure that required grouping to advance at a decent rate and you'd group to quest as well.Due to the extended leveling time, and the social requirements to level at a decent rate, you gained much of the fun that raiding has today, without the requirements of special gear earned by a raid worth of grinding.Of course once you did reach the top, which took ages, there were some raiding guilds that took it further and it more like today, but for most people, you got your enjoyment leveling. I really dislike the new system of having you grind for max level solo to be able to raid at the max level. The old group leveling method was more rewarding for those who enjoyed grouping the entire way through.[/citation]
That pretty much sums up why I quit EQ when Luclin came out.
 
Quote "Blizzard plans to retrieve its lost customers with new updates and expansions like the just-announced Mists of Pandaria"

Are they serious? Do they think a panda race is going to make people back? I think they will just continue to lose subs from now on tbh until its just the hardcore players left, but there are alot of hardcore players so they will have a reasonable playerbase for quite some time atleast.
 
[citation][nom]isamuelson[/nom]Oh please, give me a break. Why punish the masses for the stupidity of the few? These people would have found some other "addiction". I've played the games and I have NO problems stopping. I don't spend 8+ hours a day, etc. It's amazing how people will jump to extreme measures like this. Well, technically they are "free to play" up to level 20. I saw "free to play" because what it really is, is the trial version sans a time limit. So, you can play up to level 20 and that's it. If you want to progress beyond that, you have to upgrade to the paid version, but for now, there is now time limit.[/citation]
You`re actually wrong with that lvl 20 , Lineage II went free to play last year in december, and the only things that are buyable are some potions, supplies, some lvling improvement runes and some accesories that doesn`t affect the overall gameplay and you are free to lvl till lvl 99 .. you can do it without any restrictions whatsoever, but if you want to lvl up somewhat faster you`ll prolly spend some 20-30 dolars on some runes for xp bonuses.
 
[citation][nom]g00ey[/nom]I have never played Wow nut I get the impression that it is the kind of a game that you have to spend *a lot* of time to build your character and gain levels. You probably start up very small with a strong sense of feeling "incomplete" and inadequate that indoctrinates you to get even more and more. If you choose to join a mission that could last for several hours you can't just leave it without paying a considerable penalty.This game is utilizing all powers possible to capitalize you time. That's why we have people such as the one who totally demolished his computer after his gf erased his account, a couple left their baby unattended a whole f*ing day because they were sitting in an internet café WoWing, a Korean guy spent a total of 60 friggin' hours non-stop without eating, drinking or sleeping - his gameplay session ended abruptly with a fatal heart failure, a mother was killed with a knife because she confiscated her son's computer after spending too much time WoWing, there was this boy who decided to end a dispute on WoW in real life by going to his friends house with a kitchen knife and stab the poor guy to death.So let's end all this blasphemy and wickedness by banning all MMORPG and shutting down all WoW servers altogether! Whip hard all those spoiled kids' bony white a*es and put them back to school already so they start to actually _learn_ something![/citation]

You started off very well in this comment but it went to s**t in the third paragraph.

[citation][nom]jn77[/nom]Seriously....WOW in. Hardware requirements:SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS386DX/40 Computer (486DX2/66 strongly recommended)2 meg of free memory (A 4 meg machine is recommended)7.1 meg of Hard Drive Space (for shareware)15.8 meg of Hard Drive Space (for registered)OPTIONALLY SUPPORTEDMouseJoysticksThrustmasterGravis GamepadAdlibSound BlasterSound Blaster ProSound Blaster 16Sound Blaster AWE32Wave BlasterPro Audio Spectrum 16Gravis UltraSoundRoland Sound CanvasAny General MIDI DeviceIts really time for WOW to grow up, I haven't played games that require that much hardware in like 15 years?[/citation]

WoW could not be played with that old hardware. WoW can be played on pretty old machines at the minimum settings but not that old. My P4 630 (hyper-threading model at 3.0GHz) with an old Radeon (x200 or something like that, utter garbage) was about the absolute minimum you could play at in most places, some times it was unplayable in major cities although this became less of a problem as time went on and my server was split several times to help the overpopulation problem on it (Elune, one of the original servers).

WoW couldn't be played all to well without a minimum of 1 or 2 GB of RAM in Win XP, would need at least 2GB in Vista/7. That's a lot more than a few megs... I know this because I had to get a RAM upgrade from 512MB to 2.5GB (2x 256MB and 2x 1GB, dual channel DDR2 667MHz) in order to play in places with water. Water was opaque before the upgrade meaning I could not play in water-based areas because I couldn't see anything.

I don't play WoW anymore for several reasons, the big one being how they screwed up the talent system for PvP players. PvP was the only challenging thing to do after they redesigned the game for noobs (the other big problem) and Blizzard ruined it for anyone whom didn't go almost or completely into a single talent tree and going partially into two talent trees tends to offer the best results in PvP. You can no longer go half/half in the talents and that pretty much ruins PvP for anyone whom was a heavy PvP gamer in WoW.
 
[citation][nom]Anonymous[/nom]Quote "Blizzard plans to retrieve its lost customers with new updates and expansions like the just-announced Mists of Pandaria" Are they serious? Do they think a panda race is going to make people back? I think they will just continue to lose subs from now on tbh until its just the hardcore players left, but there are alot of hardcore players so they will have a reasonable playerbase for quite some time atleast.[/citation]

The panda race is one of the most asked for things for every expansion by the players. It's around the top five, maybe even the most asked for. It very well could bring in more players or at least decrease the amount of quitting players.
 
[citation][nom]legacy-za[/nom]Personality, I think, that it differs from person to person, it does not necessarily mean that it will happen to every gamer out there.[/citation]

Same as Heroin. I mean not everyone becomes an addict, so why not try it?
 
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