Wow back to over 10 million subs

 

While I love Swtor and never really played Wow, I am definitely impressed at Blizzard's ability to constantly pull in new players / pull back old players to their juggernaut of a game.

 

We would definitely need some of their magic over here.

You see the new expansion is very close to their most popular expansion Burning Crusade.

I have a lvl 100 hunter in full pvp gear and must say the game is so much fun with plenty to do.

It's also the 10th aniversary of WoW so many fans are coming back just for that.

I ran a 10 year old raid in LFR(Looking For Raid same as Group Finder Story Mode 8 mans) 40 man Molten Core about an hour ago which gave me a free mount and epic(artifact) head peice.

The graphics are amazing even at low settings I am still getting about 100 fps, the new character models, garrisons are amazing which lets you pick and choose what crafting building you can have to enhance your crafting, send followers on missions, gather resources to upgrade your garrison and run daily missions for currency to buy raiding armor, hunt down mounts, go on treasure hunts, fight in gladiator style tournaments and get bonuses for doing the daily dungeons.

Questing is amazing with very smooth flowing quest lines, bonus questing areas giving lots of experience and some really eye catching landscapes.

Dungeons now require players to engage mechanics and not just tunnel the bosses with the heroic versions making every mechanic a must engage or wipe the group with entry level into to the heroic versions requiring a silver medal in proving grounds for your role chosen.

A new loot system called personal loot which stops the old NBG system which gives you the loot and stopping other from needing on the loot you need.

Stat squash and abilty prune have brought the game back into managable statistics and theory crafting a lot more enjoyable.

A new looking for premade in dungeon finder is a brilliant system allowing pug runs to simply add to their raid when players leave as normal/heroic allow you to redo bosses already done just no loot drops which makes interchanging people and roles a breeze, this is how I did Seige Of Orgrimmar normal and Heroic on my hunter to get both the bind on account warbows.

This is just a summary of what Blizzard have done for an old game bringing it into a new age of mmo's attracting many people back to the game.

Edited November 21, 2014 by keitzy

You see the new expansion is very close to their most popular expansion Burning Crusade.

I have a lvl 100 hunter in full pvp gear and must say the game is so much fun with plenty to do.

It's also the 10th aniversary of WoW so many fans are coming back just for that.

I ran a 10 year old raid in LFR(Looking For Raid same as Group Finder Story Mode 8 mans) 40 man Molten Core about an hour ago which gave me a free mount and epic(artifact) head peice.

The graphics are amazing even at low settings I am still getting about 100 fps, the new character models, garrisons are amazing which lets you pick and choose what crafting building you can have to enhance your crafting, send followers on missions, gather resources to upgrade your garrison and run daily missions for currency to buy raiding armor, hunt down mounts, go on treasure hunts, fight in gladiator style tournaments and get bonuses for doing the daily dungeons.

Questing is amazing with very smooth flowing quest lines, bonus questing areas giving lots of experience and some really eye catching landscapes.

Dungeons now require players to engage mechanics and not just tunnel the bosses with the heroic versions making every mechanic a must engage or wipe the group with entry level into to the heroic versions requiring a silver medal in proving grounds for your role chosen.

A new loot system called personal loot which stops the old NBG system which gives you the loot and stopping other from needing on the loot you need.

Stat squash and abilty prune have brought the game back into managable statistics and theory crafting a lot more enjoyable.

A new looking for premade in dungeon finder is a brilliant system allowing pug runs to simply add to their raid when players leave as normal/heroic allow you to redo bosses already done just no loot drops which makes interchanging people and roles a breeze, this is how I did Seige Of Orgrimmar normal and Heroic on my hunter to get both the bind on account warbows.

This is just a summary of what Blizzard have done for an old game bringing it into a new age of mmo's attracting many people back to the game.

 

Makes me want to try it. Unfortunately I barely have time for 1 mmo as it is.

Makes me want to try it. Unfortunately I barely have time for 1 mmo as it is.

 

I imagine you're not the only one around here with that sentiment.

I imagine you're not the only one around here with that sentiment.

If I had more downtime available, I would definitely have resubbed for the 10th Anniversary - was there at launch and have been a fan of Warcraft since Orcs and Humans came out twenty years ago.

 

I never stopped enjoying WoW, I just enjoy SWTOR more and only had time for one MMO, so after seven years of playing I finally jumped ship when this game launched. Of course now my best friend just resubbed to WoW and between his high praise for it and all the positive coverage and excellent marketing Blizzard is doing... it's getting hard to resist the urge.

 

Good for Blizzard on hitting that 10 million mark again - nothing like having a population larger than Sweden to show your game is still going strong.

I'm one of those subs that brought it up to 10 million. I'm also not going to stay there once my time is up. literally subscribed becasue I wanted to be there for the anniversary and to check out new expansion that actualy covers lore and characters that got me into Warcraft to begin with.

 

granted - I'm enjoying it far FAR more than I expected. (and watching Thrall interacting with his parents, while trying not to blurt out that they are his parents, is both hilarious and adorable) however. as fun as leveling is - it also goes almost obscenely fast :/ and at this time there isn't much to do at end game (and I'm not saying becasue there are not enough people at 100 - that's the scary part - there ARE enough people at 100, its just.. there isn't much new stuff to do, period. other than going back to old work and catching up on achievs or something)

 

so while I'm happy so many players came back.. I keep wondering just how premature this celebrating is? how many players will actualy stay?

 

pretty much all MMO's get influx of new players, whenever new content is released. and in case of WoD - this content tugs on every single nostalgia string, all the while asking a question of "what if? "

Edited November 21, 2014 by Jeweledleah

They're retain 4-5+ million subs at least for another decade at minimum. Current numbers will go down again but it doesn't matter. WOW's success may never be replicated again

 

Sorry that you feel threatened. I love Swtor as much as anyone but I'm also interested in the industry as a whole. Besides, this is in the off topic section so if you are not interested you are free to go back to wherever you came from.

 

Cheers.

WOW doesn't have 10 million subs. in fact, it has never actually had 10 million subs in its entire history. they have always inflated their sub numbers by counting people in china playing for 1 hour with a time card as a full subscription.

While I am eh over Blizzard hitting 10 million again, and like the poster above me said, their numbers are over inflated thanks to net cafe deals and the like, I do have to agree this seems premature, since I might have gone back to try it out if they didn't demand I pay full price for an expansion, and I didn't already try out patch 6.0.2 on live to begin with and found the whole hoohah a bit lacking to begin with, not to mention the characters I played lost tons of their utility all for the sake of the streamlining.

 

And while they were trying to tug at the Burning Crusade heart strings, Burning Crusade was not a great time for WoW, let's be painfully honest there. They didn't start the story stuff until the end of the expansion, and Outland was always a terrible zone, so terrible that when I make alts I try to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. I know I am not alone in that, though I've seen and read more than a few people making up stories about how many quests per hour they can do in Outland.

 

Do I feel WoW will retain the numbers they are announcing? Most definitely not. Do I think they made off like bandits for their overpriced expansion, most assuredly. Do I feel the story is any good? Oh hell no, since Cataclysm it's been poop quests and killing off main characters for some vindictive reason.

 

And while someone says there are weather effects over there... umm WoW's had weather effects since about the mid point of vanilla I believe. They just finally turned rain on in the capitol cities after nearly ten years. This is one of those things that the novelty wears off pretty fast.

f they didn't demand I pay full price for an expansion,

 

Oh the horror! How dare they ask you to pay for content!

i feel like swtor just gave up sometimes, no ads anywhere, no new cinematic - or even history timelines which were GREAT. no new races, cathar and torguta after 3 years. wowowow swtor could improve so much if they wanted it to.

WOW doesn't have 10 million subs. in fact, it has never actually had 10 million subs in its entire history. they have always inflated their sub numbers by counting people in china playing for 1 hour with a time card as a full subscription.

 

While creative accounting is tolerable to a point, let's not forget that Activision - Blizzard is a publicly traded company. It would be a felony for them to outright lie on their revenue or the number of their suscribers.

 

And while time passes do not equal suscriptions, they definitely constitute revenue which, for the sake of counting subs, can be divided by an average sub price and counted as # of suscribers.

 

At the end of the day, Swtor was my first MMO and I do not intend to leave it. However I am very impressed at Wow's ability to create hype and attract players and I wish Bioware could replicate some of it for Swtor.

Edited November 24, 2014 by Pathlight-

Oh the horror! How dare they ask you to pay for content!

 

When was the last time you had to pay for the price of a game on an expansion (aka full price?) I don't know of many expansions that even breach the $40 dollar wall, and there isn't anything in WoD that really demands a higher price tag. Really, stop trying, you fail at being a troll, or are you that ignorant?

Edited November 24, 2014 by Silverspar

Wow back to over 10 million subs

 

While I love Swtor and never really played Wow, I am definitely impressed at Blizzard's ability to constantly pull in new players / pull back old players to their juggernaut of a game.

 

We would definitely need some of their magic over here.

 

but subs ruin games and drive away players and there is a REVOLUTION going on that supports F2P over subs.

 

heheh, just being sarcastic from all the nonsense I read here everyday about how the genre only works for F2P

 

Personally I dont like WOW, beta tested it back in day for 2 weeks and hated it to my very being so never played after that

 

But Blizzard deserves props for rebounding their subs back over 10 mill after dropping lower

Normally in the Genre the decline of subs are almost impossible to turn around once they started so Blizzard has done something very impressive

 

I do think one of the things that help WOW right now is how stale the MMORPG genre is.

Everyone tries to copy WOW (even SW:TOR) rather then make their own special thing and that drives players back to WOW because lets be honest, what copy ever does it better then the original?

And for most of WOWs playerbase, they were original

(For experienced MMORPG players they know WOW was just a copy of the games that came before it and then dumbed down. But Blizzard was smart and went after the non MMORPG player and WOW became the first experience of a generation. And thus became the standard for that generation).

 

Props to Blizzard

They do so many things right for their customer base that they are managing to do what only a few MMORPGs have done before and remain relevant over a decade later.

 

And you dont have to like WOW to understand how impressive that is.

 

Now I just wish devs would quite trying to remake WOW in other titles and make original and create games for their titles.

 

The genre was at its strongest IMO when every game offered a vastly different gaming experience

heh. current expansion of wow is copies of multiple games, including SWTOR. so.. i don't know about that copying WoW thing.

 

either way, the more I play through expansion, the more I realize that I'm not adding more time to my account for quite some time. probably will give it a few patches before I play it again.

 

and incidentally, WoW was firt MMO I ever got into. I knew of existence of other MMO's and have tried a few on friend's accounts, but that's as far as I went. and even then, long before I tried out WoW, I knew that it was a copy/interpretation of various things. its kinda what Blizzard is infamous for.

 

(and incidentally, WoW has been dipping into Star wars lore and eventually TOR for 2 expansions now)

While creative accounting is tolerable to a point, let's not forget that Activision - Blizzard is a publicly traded company. It would be a felony for them to outright lie on their revenue or the number of their suscribers.

 

This is true, but in their shareholders reports they explain how they come up with the number of subs based on Westerns subs and some weird formula for calculating how the Chinese market is counted into that sub number: as long as you explain your creative accounting to your shareholders and the math adds up to what they report, it's not lying.

 

But, regardless of the fact that the actual subscriptions might not be exactly over 10 million as defined by Webster's Dictionary, even after ten years WoW continues to dominate the worldwide market, which means they're definitely doing something right over there. Not that I'll ever know: I truly hate Tolkien-esque fantasy, which WoW falls squarely into; thus in over ten years of playing MMORPGs, I've never played it.

Edited November 28, 2014 by WSRB

 

and incidentally, WoW was firt MMO I ever got into. I knew of existence of other MMO's and have tried a few on friend's accounts, but that's as far as I went. and even then, long before I tried out WoW, I knew that it was a copy/interpretation of various things. its kinda what Blizzard is infamous for.

 

 

/shrugs

 

Why do people think because THEY know better that a generalized statement is then false.

 

I've lost count how many times I've heard or read newbs state that WOW was the first MMO and when challenged they try to claim all MMOs before WOW were nitch games with very limited financial success.

 

Maybe you did know about MMORPGs before WOW

There is a whole !$@$@ load of players that started at same time as you that didn't and dont know about the earlier MMORPGs (and still don't to this day).

 

I stand by what I said

/shrugs

 

Why do people think because THEY know better that a generalized statement is then false.

 

I've lost count how many times I've heard or read newbs state that WOW was the first MMO and when challenged they try to claim all MMOs before WOW were nitch games with very limited financial success.

 

Maybe you did know about MMORPGs before WOW

There is a whole !$@$@ load of players that started at same time as you that didn't and dont know about the earlier MMORPGs (and still don't to this day).

 

I stand by what I said

 

Blizzard made single player games before they made MMO's. its an open secret that Warcraft is pretty much a copy of warhammer with some changes here and there (and starcraft is "interpretation" of Warhammer 40k). and sure there are clueless people - those are easily corrected. then there are trolls who are just looking to start a trade chat war. their opinions don't matter.

 

yes, WoW brought MMO's to mainstream. disputing that would be silly.

 

but I genuinely believe that main reasons for its success are:

 

1. timing.

2. inertia due to that timing

3. Blizzards ability to pick out the best emerging trends and run with them

4. great marketing strategies.

 

and as to OP, I will reiterate. bragging about subscriptions before first month of expansion is even out? is premature.

i feel like swtor just gave up sometimes, no ads anywhere, no new cinematic - or even history timelines which were GREAT. no new races, cathar and torguta after 3 years. wowowow swtor could improve so much if they wanted it to.

 

Yeah ive never understood that about some of these mmos, new cinematics and ads for mmos really work on me, but not counting wow mmos all seem to give up on them after the initial release.

I won't be trying it.

 

PLayed WoW from 2005-2010, took a two year break. PLayed MoP for a month, and promptly got very bored with the stupid story, stupid pandas, stupid heroics, etc. Got a free 30 day pass for WoW about two months ago, and gave it a whirl. It's still a relatively fun game, but it wears off pretty quickly.

 

 

I just came back to swtor after a year break because I like the setting and combat.

Yeah ive never understood that about some of these mmos, new cinematics and ads for mmos really work on me, but not counting wow mmos all seem to give up on them after the initial release.

 

It is probably mostly a money issue. A perception that the ROI for large scale advertising is just not there. Blizzard obviously has a much larger user base and is able to attract enough new and returning customers to make advertising worthwhile.

 

I've played pretty much every major MMO that has been released since Vanilla WoW. Only LoTRO, SWTOR, and WoW were able to keep me interested for more than a year.

 

WoW, well, it just seems like there is way more to do and part of my enjoyment is the fun the developers seem to have in creating the gaming environment, even the bad puns

 

I still play SWTOR from time to time and resub, but most of my time is spent in WoW and I no longer spend anything but my free cartel coins in the cartel market in SWTOR. It isn't a money issue, I just don't care for that part of the game.

When was the last time you had to pay for the price of a game on an expansion (aka full price?) I don't know of many expansions that even breach the $40 dollar wall, and there isn't anything in WoD that really demands a higher price tag. Really, stop trying, you fail at being a troll, or are you that ignorant?

 

I'd be happy to pay $60 to get another full chapter or two of class stories...

The ONLY reason World of Suckcraft has so many subbed players is any one can play the game its THAT easy you can have an IQ of 5 and be a master at that game oh and lets not forget you can go strait to level 90 now so there you go that's why they have so many players cause people today want it all given to them no one wants to work for anything or earn anything. no challenge at all if you want a game that is as exciting as coloring with crayons then its for you Edited December 4, 2014 by farleyzero