6121

I think they may be trying to gauge how many people post and say they won’t pay for it so they can take the posts back to Kotick and tell him to stuff it up his ass.

:)

6122

This whole feature seems half baked. Maybe I am too elitist but I think that the only reason to do 5 mans are to mindlessly grind VP cap. I just queue while doing hyjal dailies and it will pop sometime before I’m done. It seems like this method would be kinda annoying whispering a couple friends one at a time to see if they want to run a heroic. Half the people will be afk and it will end up taking 5-10 minutes just to get anything organized.
Now what they should do with this feature is make it applicable for raids / arenas and rated bgs. It would propably be better to get rid of the realid part and let you add friends with character-realm as there user id. Then it can be used with raiding guilds want to try out recruits before realm transfer or let you do 2s with your buddy on a different realm. This would make the feature somewhat interesting but for 5mans it really doesn’t seem worth it.

6123

You sound like you just really don’t like playing the game with other people. So yes, I imagine the feature would be pretty useless to you.

6124

5-10 minutes is time I would happily spend to guarantee a half hour or more of playing with friends, if the alternative is randoms.

6125

Hey, just came across this bit of info over on Gamespot, Blizzard has trademarked what may be a Pandaren expansion. I’ll say it here, I have never played World of Warcraft, but if they let me play a Panda monk, particularly one that carries a keg of magical beer, I will play this game.

6126

I bet it’ll be a TCG expansion.

Also, you can never play a panda because dead pandas make the Chinese rage and they’re a not-insignificant part of WoW’s player base.

6127

Yeah, that’s the response I got last time I asked about pandaren. But I say, fuck the Chinese, I want to play a drunken kung fu panda monk.

6128

I’m sure they’ll put them in the game in some form or another since they already have the non-combat pet. But I’m betting this is for the TCG or a comic series.

6129

Non-combat pets never die. That’s why that’s okay.

6130

Have you never witnessed the epic battles between Zerg and Murloc? :)

6131

Yes, I understand, but that doesn’t mean they can’t put in a sanctuary zone full of lovable, drunk Pandarens.

6132

But I really want to BE a lovable drunk pandaren. That also kicks ass. Drunkenly.

6133

Info from the investors’ call:

[ul]
[li]Worldwide WoW subscriptions dipped in Q2 to 11.1 million.
[/li][li]After launching Cataclysm in China a few weeks ago, they’ve seen substantially increased concurrency levels there.
[/li][li]They made more money this year than last, with plenty coming in from more of the paying features being introduced in China.
[/li][li]The next content update is coming “later this year”, and is the “largest content update since Cataclysm, with major new raid and dungeon content”.
[/li][/ul]

Content wise, the big question is whether they’re planning on cranking out a new expansion to hit next summer, and so this upcoming patch is the final tier of Cataclysm, featuring Deathwing. Or, if this is the penultimate tier, and Deathwing is coming next spring, with the next expansion not landing until the fall.

On the subscription side, it’s a question of whether any of that is good enough to keep people around, especially since it will be hard not cannibalize numbers from themselves when Diablo III comes out.

6134

Interesting. So they lost about 500,000 subs since they last released numbers?

I wouldn’t be surprised to see them lose 1M+ when Old Republic is released. The challenge for them will be if WoW goes from an 11M+ game to, say, an 8M+ game to see how they scale down gracefully. They may be able to shift people to D3 rather than do layoffs.

6135

They’ll just move more people to the Titan MMO. A lot of the senior WoW devs have already moved over to Titan.

6136

Blizzard has a lot of teams on different projects, if it comes to shuffling people off of WoW.

But for now, it’s still their cash cow; the question is whether they can continue to milk it, and keep people interested in playing. It was mentioned on the call that the subscription numbers are “seasonal and driven by content updates”. For now, at least, they’re talking about cranking out content faster, to keep people more interested. Of course, “faster” for Blizzard is still rather slow, compared to how quickly players consume it.

The real reflection of what they plan on doing will come at Blizzcon, where they’ll presumably be announcing the next expansion. If they’re serious about keeping subscribers, they’ll need to do something that shakes things up a bit; an alternate advancement system like they had previously talked about with Path of the Titans would be one way to do it. If it ends up like Cataclysm, just more of the same, it will be hard to stop the subscriptions from bleeding away.

6137

I’d have to imagine D3 release date is going to be the big announcement at Blizzcon this year.

~C~

6138

So, I decided to log into my WoW account for the first time in quite awhile. And of course it was banned. To WoW’s credit, they got the ban lifted in about 3 hours. So, I log in, and there has definitely been some shuffling of my main, but nothing wild. However, I’m now level 82. I’m pretty sure I was in the mid 70’s when I last played. I also have maxed out mining and herbalism. They didn’t even take all my equipment/bank stuff, not that I had anything truly valuable. At least I get to check out some of cataclysm now.

6139

You now have an authenticator on the account, right? At least the phone in one?

6140

Yeah, I switched over that and Gmail to authenticators just for extra comfort. There’s nothing really invested into WoW except the time it took to get into the 70s. I’ve never really raided or anything like that. I’m a bit lost with the new skill trees, though.