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If I already pay a subscription for a game I bought at full price, why shouldn't I be able to access everything in the game without dumping more money into it?

Blizzard is getting shaky and its showing. Premium services are a giant red flag and the good players are leaving only to be replaced by the brain aids, so they have to dangle free pets and mounts in order for people who hate the brain aids to deal with it and get them gear.

RETIRED.
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Mayonaise[/armory]
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Jerkonaise[/armory]

Personally, I strongly believe that sub-based games are fundamentally superior to F2P games because a sub allows the game to be more than the sum of its parts: not every component has to be cost-justified, and the game doesn't have to be designed so all roads lead to MT-based monetization.

With this move, WoW becomes basically impossible to cost-justify. What's the justification for paying a sub when you also have to buy a tetrad of boxes that cost at least 50% more than newer MMOs and pay a bunch of MTs? You're paying more, for less.

WoW's age is a problem not because of its graphics or because the gameplay is stale but because the game paradigm - the EQ model - was dated when the game first launched and now it's totally obsolete. Its obsolescence is accentuated, not diminished, by trying to kitbash the EQ model with elements of Halo or Steam-type gameplay that mesh badly, even more so because the implementation of a lot of these Halo/Steam elements such as RBGs and LFD flatly sucks.

This is also why Rift is a stupid game. Why play a new and inferior permutation of a paradigm that was obsolete years ago? The very fact they've blindly adopted the worst ideas of WoW such as LFD and endless porting, clearly demonstrates their devs don't have any better ideas than Blizzard.

Honestly, I think if Blizzard had tried to refine or improve the EQ paradigm, rather than trying to bastardize it or water it down in ways that contradict the nature of the beast (i.e., make the game grind-based with dailies and such then try to make those grinds as fast and homogenous as possible, so the player is bored, and bored quickly) they'd have had better luck, and the game might have lived quite a while longer.

I think putting WoW into "run it into the ground mode" is a bad business decision built on circular reasoning and a faulty assumption: that because the game is doomed, it therefore should be run into the ground until it peters out. And of course what's really at work is that Activision runs otherwise successful franchises into the ground for the simple reason that their business team doesn't understand how to run anything as a going concern.

Blizzard obviously feels that squeezing their rapidly diminishing playerbase for more funds per head until they can get more revenue from Bnet and Titan is the way to go. In purely business terms, it's a big gamble, and I think the gamble is a much more dubious proposition than they believe.

WoW is clearly collapsing faster than even Blizzard expected - there's no way they expected a drop of millions of subs in the first year of Cata. Titan will never be as successful as WoW because a Halo FPS won't have WoW's mass appeal and Activision will Murphy it up. Bnet's chances against Steam are dismal.

So, yeah, it will be interesting to see how this pans out. It's entirely possible that within a decade, Blizzard will become the next Sierra or Maxis.

Also, has anyone read CM responses in CSF forums on blue tracker recently? "We aren't obligated to do that by the TOS...we can't spare the time to treat every customer like they're special...it's your fault you didn't do the quests in order..." It's really mind-numbing how bad Blizzard's CS has become.

I think the truth is that the company has become totally out of touch with their own game because all they listen to are their own sycophants and their employees never leave the hermetically sealed unreality of the Irvine campus. Seriously, try to imagine what life is like for all the Blizzard employees living on the Blizzard campus, and all of a sudden their take on reality becomes a lot more comprehensible. These guys live in an echo chamber.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

...they seriously live, like have an apartment, at Blizzard HQ?

That's just...mind-boggling.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

I chian-queue LFD. If the instance isn't in-progress, on the last boss or nearly, I leave. It's a fast way of getting satchels and chaos orbs.

I hate LFD DPS with a passion. I don't even pretend to be civil or considerate. I treat them worse than junkyard dogs because in my opinion they are the lowest form of life on this planet.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

It's more than that. The place is self-sufficient. It has recreation facilities - arcades, courts, swimming pools - and eateries, and the entire place is like a big Blizzard museum. Being what it is - a corporate edifice - the walls have ears and it's a study in mass group think.

Try to visualize working and living in that kind of environment.

Read about it and all of a sudden the baffling "we are better than our customers and Blizzard can do no wrong" attitude comes into focus.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

That sort of insulation is never a good idea.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

I think Google has something like this. Or maybe the exact same thing.

Druid: Meowth
« Steam »« Xfire »
Glorious Death Metal Music

This is very true. I would probably have tried to get some RL friends into WoW with Cata if it wasn't so expensive to buy the game and all 3 expansions. The initial cost is so high it's hard to see how many new players are going to get into the game.



You can't really say that WoW is collapsing from a single data point. The released subscriber numbers have been fluctuating around 11-12 million for several years now. The drop after Cata was released might be the start of a trend, but I don't think it's possible to be confident that the big decline is beginning yet.

Laelia Komi Anomalocaris

Most of that 12M figure is C-WoW which is of basically no relevance or value since their hourly rate is a fraction ours and the profit margin is diminished because of high localization costs and the subcontractor which runs it for Blizzard taking a large share of the profits.

For years, NA/EU-WoW have made up less and less of the whole as C-WoW's share has increased.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I think you can when you view the data through the prism of anecdotal data such as nearly everyone on this board having left the game despite several years of fairly extreme loyalty to it. They honestly fuckerized the game to the point where there was just no point in playing it anymore.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

15-year-old munchkin segment is not adequately represented here

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Like those expansion packs that you didn't need to buy, but needed to if you wanted to have access to everything in the game?

I think there are less than 20 people who regularly post on this board, which is hardly an adequate sample for a population of 11.5 million (besides, WoW lost about 5% of its subscribers, while I suspect at least 75% of those who post here don't play anymore). Besides, we're almost all vanilla-era veterans, who are probably more likely to get bored and quit, and many were in the same social circles in game, which means that a few people quitting makes the game less interesting for those who remain.

Laelia Komi Anomalocaris

I really don't think the drop in subscribers means anything at all. I'm sure we all know people who only come back for expansions or big patches, play a bit then leave again. Blizz knows it happens, that was their response to the problems with the additional servers issue. 'Wait it out, it's busy after an expansion then it gets slow again.'

Dvergar /
Quisling

Say what you will, but if the game continues in its current vein, it's going to continue to lose subs. That's more a prediction based on my view of the quality of the game than it is my view based on the subscription numbers Blizzard posted.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste