The elephant in the room

A casual player picks up the game, play for a few months, and then quits for a year and comes back at a later time.

A hardcore player tends to stick with the game for years at a time, keeping a continuous account active and actively playing the game regularly.

I know the difference, I was what I would define as "hardcore" during my 6 year stay on wow, and I watched the casuals come and go for years, raids being made up of different players despite sticking with the same guild for years, and trust me, it's not the casuals that truly support or keep a game alive.

Casuals come and go, they're going to play whether you specifically trim your game for them or not, but they're always going to move on to something else in very little time, it doesn't matter how much you bend over backwards for them, they aren't staying for long, so really, expending so much effort to appeal to the casuals has been a waste of time, and one of the things that has really crippled the game so much.

TOR perhaps won't last a full year.

I love Armchair Analysts.. they're almost as fun to watch as Armchair Developers and Armchair Attorneys.

I'd say WoW lost about 25%(give or take) subs overall during the recession. The only thing that would have kept their sub loss from going down even further was their tie in with Diablo 3 and the annual pass.

oo wait, lemme imitate you. . .

lol at you who thinks that no MMO loses more than 25% of their subscriber base 3 months after release. there's a reason why swtor is said to have the BEST retention rate after launch than any other MMO to date.

So? There's soooooooo many more casual players playing the game. Even if half decide to take 6 months off at a time, that's still gonna bring in WAY more money than the hardcore raiders.

And it's the casuals that also use less server processes while they're on(not hammering a boss fail after fail after fail for hours on end). So again, more money to be made off the casuals.

Come on dude, think about it. You dont see games like WoW and Angry Birds and Farmville strive because of the hardcore fanbase. It's the casuals that bring it into the 'mainstream' and give it the success that they have. Seriously think about it.

If it were the hardcore games that really made the money, then game developers wouldn't keep making these casual games. You wouldn't see game developers making content so easy to complete.

I understand it's hard to think open-minded about it, you see it from your perspective only and that's about it. But games wouldn't be evolving into what they are today if gamers weren't voting with their wallets. There's a reason why people say WoW is for 'causal MMO players' and that it 'does everything for you'.

No the reason the population is low is because people don't like the game and have quit.

I find it rather funny people keep using the number of servers at launch as an excuse. Now just slow down and think about this a moment. With the number of people that were playing at launch and most of the servers that they had up and running had queues to get in, what do you would have happen if a lot more of those people who paid for the game could not log in and play at all?

They should have expected this to happen and should have already had a plan in place to consolidate the servers over time oh and stop using the community bullcrap as an excuse as to not merge servers.


So many people were crying about waiting to log into a server and play.......really do you people just stop a minute to listen to yourselves. Who the heck likes to buy a game and bring it home not able to play it?

Oh and they will never ever tell us the current accurate number of subscriptions. They are sure fast to post record breaking numbers and try to inflate things, thats what companies do, but when things start looking bad or take a turn for the worse, they wont tell you that.

At the end of March they stated in the EA quarterly report they were sitting at what 1.1 million active subs? Bioware never stated any numbers at all. You can also bet your butt they tried to inflate those numbers as much as they could. Free trials, free months, whatever. The 3 month subs ended in April, the 6 month subs will end in Aug with the free month slapped into it. Then you have the people who buy subs one month at a time as well. Who really knows where we stand at with subs at this point besides Bioware but what we do know is the servers are becoming ghost towns fast.

Not really IMHO he nailed most of the game issues.

Ok a few are off like same gender romance, but hey it's a BioWare game, their customers do expect that.


But in a very specific order, without pointing at the top one being server population and faction balance issue:

1. No PvE end content / incentives: nothing interesting to do at 50
2. No world PvP at all and PvP solely based on gear
3. Suboptimal graphic engine

Then once all the above will be worked upon we can speak about things like poor character customization down to the world that feels like a graveyard.

My 2c.

It doesn't need to be D3, it's any game forum.

WoW went from 12 million subs in WoTLK to 10.3 million that is not 25% of their subscription base; not to mention this is in a game that is 7 years old. http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/02/09/wo...riber-numbers/
To the first bolded statement; while MMO's do lose some of their subscriber base, a 25% loss is not good. This graph was done before the 1.3 million was announced and shows that those MMO's (having a peak active subscriber number greater than 1 million) don't lose such a huge percentage of their customers right after launch. http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png As to your second statement, who says this? Do you have an actual source for this information?
EDIT: also TOR pads it's numbers just like WoW it's called business that is what they do. They gave everyone a free month which will extend the 6 month subs to pad the next quarterly report as well.