1861

I don’t really play the AH at all, so I can’t really speak to it. I haven’t had 60 minute queues though either. It’s more like 30 for me if I’m queuing alone as DPS. 3-10 if I’m queuing with a healer friend.

I ran LFR ToT wings 1 and 2 last night. I’m baffled at how much trouble Magaera seems to be giving the groups I’ve been in the last two weeks. I’m even more confused at how anyone who has done any tanking in this game doesn’t know, except in very rare cases, that you always put the boss’s back to the raid. Frost and fire breath for everyone! Huzzah.

1862

Sounds like bad luck with tanks, on LFR Megaera is one of the easiest bosses being pure tank-n-spank - at least until someone drops cinders in the group and half the raid fail to run out of it.

Come to think of it, the only LFR boss I wiped on this week was Lei Shen so perhaps players are getting used to the fights. The 3rd quarter is my favorite by far.

1863

This week was definitely bad luck with tanks. Between the afk Monk tank who decided to split for a while during the trash leading up Magaera, and the other one who didn’t know one of the basic tenets of WoW tanking, it was a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Last week was bad luck with healers. One kept dispelling Cinders in the middle of the group and one of the others queued as a healer but thought he was dps. Magaera is probably the easiest encounter in the place, but it appears that even one or two bad folks can make it quite difficult.

1864

I find LFR kind of goes in cycles for me. I got my first piece of loot in maybe 3 weeks (running 2 toons through each week). Other times, I’ve gotten 2-3 things per run. Between the dry spell and really long queues right now, I’m dozing off at my keys waiting.

I think a big part of this is alt population of DPS. The alliance is a lot bigger on my server. Queues on that side run 45 minutes to an hour. Horde side DPS queu, on the other hand, go 19 minutes to about 39. I suspect that the alliance is just playing a lot more DPS alts now, driving up the queue time for DPS.

1865

From MMO Champion:

"Activision Blizzard’s press release states that World of Warcraft is down to 8.3 million subscribers. This is a loss of 1.3 million, down from 9.6 million last quarter. Most of the loss came from the East once again.

Blizzard expects to have less subscribers at the end of the year than they do today.
Most of the decline in subscribers came from China.
There has been less engagement by casual players.
Blizzard is going to work on improving the experience for returning players.
Blizzard All Stars and Titan will not be released in 2013 according to the slide below.
Heart of the Swarm was the #1 PC game of the quarter, selling 1.1 million copies in two days.
Diablo III was the #2 PC game of the quarter
There has been increased competition with F2P games in Asia.
Players consume content faster and subscribe and unsubscribe as new content is added."

The old game doesn’t seem to be grabbing like it did. I think for me, the part where they goofed was in encouraging me to make a bunch of alts in cata, then flipping and making it a real grind to get alts up to speed in Pandaria. I just didn’t want to do the dailies again, or spend more time gardening, or wait an hour for LFR to finally pop. I still log on once in a while, but I’ve gone from being pretty excited about the warlock green fire quest to realizing I didn’t really have any excitement left for the game itself. Going through the prelude for that quest was the most fun I’d had in ages in WoW, and I realized there’s not going to be anything else like it.

I’m not sure what the thing for Blizz to do here would be. More content is what people like. Mandatory content they don’t like. But Blizz noted in Cata people didn’t need to do much on line, so they just didn’t. The game is so complicated that trying to really teach someone how it works (versus just teaching them simple rotations and stats) is crazy-complicated. Sure, you can function. But you’re basically a dog doing a trick at that point, not a competent player.

I tried Playing Fable 2 when it came out. While I didn’t like that game (too simple) I did like the fact that i could jump right in and go. Is that the future, I wonder, or are MMOs just going to fade in favor of smaller matching services?

1866

Well, I’m a Panderia n00b, still at level 88 with my main, but I’m surprised how much I enjoy this expansion. When I first heard about it, I honestly thought it was an April Fools’ Joke – pandas?! But now that I’ve played it, I’ve really enjoyed the quests, which reflect a lot of imagination, not to mention the beautiful artwork and the nicely-done voiceovers. It may be my favorite expansion. I didn’t care for the Burning Crusade, though I did enjoy much of Northrend and Cataclysm. In this expansion, unlike BC, I’ve yet to feel like an entire zone is dull or unpleasant or tedious (though to be sure, some quests and dungeon fights are a bit tedious). I like the new cooking and farming. I especially like the battle pets; they are cute, the turn-based combat is a nice change of pace, and Pokemon collection is fun for me.

All that said, I’m not surprised subscriptions are declining. There’s more to life than any one game, and sooner or later, most of us will get tired of WoW, at least temporarily.

1867

8.3 million subscribers for a game that’s been out for over seven years is still pretty remarkable. I don’t know what Blizzard could do to entice players to return, other than flat out make it F2P.

1868

Nov 2008 to April 2013, unsubbed after 4.5 years. Maybe it’s my signup date, but I think the game hit its pinnacle with WOLK. Cataclysm was underwhelming, content-wise, and I disliked the changes to crafting and questing. MoP continued right on with the changes that I didn’t like and added faction rep grinds. Blizzard is innovating in the wrong direction for me.

My fix list:
No more bind-on-pickup mandatory crafting mats. It’s alt-hostile and favors raiders over all other crafters.
No more arbitrarily scarce crafting mats When the most efficient way to gain SoH is to grow 1.6 per day on a farm, rather than going out into the world and killing stuff, you did it wrong. Farms should be a bonus for the dedicated, not a slog for someone who just wants to craft stuff.
The tank/healer/dps triad must be overcome. The grouping tools are great, but the excessive wait times kill the buzz. Why are there wait times? Because Blizzard can’t get enough people to play tanks and healers. I can’t blame this on anyone but Blizzard, who made their customers’ good time dependent on having other customers undertake a playing style that is insufficiently incentivised and has no in-game training mechanism. Questing makes everyone a DPS, so how do tanks and healers learn to be tanks and healers? Let alone enjoy being tanks and healers, the abuse-sponges of the multiplayer experience. Blizz claims to value interaction between players, but being a tank or healer for a pug is usually miserable.
Stop allowing the game to become ever more iterative and stale. When the next expansion comes, I know for a fact there will yet another set of quests, 5-mans, and raids. I know for a fact there will be ores and herbs to prospect, smelt, and mill. BFD. Surprise me, make me excited. Give me a reason to explore the dead areas of the game like the old world, northrend, and outlands. Reinvigorate old quests with new reasons to do them. Let me steal cool things like mounts or weapons from the other faction. Create a third faction or a neutral faction. Let me use an Orb of Deception and gain rep from the other side by doing their quests. Do something NEW.
Stop funnelling me. The questing model in outlands and northrend was better than the narrow chained model used in Cat & MoP. Trust me, I’ve done plenty of them across plenty of alts. The thrill of discovery has gone away in favor of the mandatory unlock. Let me wander and stumble upon a bunch of questgivers instead of stumbling upon a bunch of future questgivers that I could unlock if I would only backtrack and do it the “right” way.
Stop punishing me for having alts Rep grinds, gating crafting recipies, binding mats. All of these things make it frustrating to play the way I want to play. As Joe notes up above, people are unsubbing and resubbing to do the new story content as its released. I think that’s because there is less of a reason to stay in the world beyond your main character.

1869

The old game doesn’t seem to be grabbing like it did. I think for me, the part where they goofed was in encouraging me to make a bunch of alts in cata, then flipping and making it a real grind to get alts up to speed in Pandaria.

I’ve had this same thought as well. I think it was probably something they overlooked when they tried to address the “I have nothing to do” syndrome in Cataclysm. They gave us so much to do in MoP, and the side effect is there’s very little time to do alt progression. I think in the spectrum of “nothing to do” and “way too much to do” they went a bit too far the other way. Somewhere in between would likely feel just right. Of course no one is forcing people to partake of everything the game offers. I’ve mentioned a few times in this thread that you need to pick and choose.

That said, there’s way too much reliance on dailies and reputations right now, and reps are far too often a barrier. I think they started to get things right with the Dominance Offensive and whatever the Isle of Thunder rep is, but they just put way too much in at the start. Reps also feel mandatory (for the valor gear) and I’m really starting to feel like they need to be account-wide, like most achievements these days. The last thing I want to see when I get to the level cap on an alt is a bunch of empty bars staring me in the face that I need for certain things. Dailies are already repetitive enough.

I think there are also some issues in the current raiding model that are driving people away. I know there are some normal raiders who feel like Throne of Thunder came out too soon and they weren’t able to finish the 5.0 raids (let alone get into heroic modes). If they repeat the same release pace with 5.4, I think there are a lot of folks who aren’t going to get to Lei Shen in normal. It’s hard to argue against faster content release, but again, it seems like maybe they’ve gone a little too far on the spectrum.

For those of us who are raiding LFR only (like me), I’m starting to realize a few things. Once I’ve killed all the bosses and picked up some gear, I might as well unsubscribe for a bit. I’ve hit pretty close to my maximum iLevel potential within 2 months or so of Throne releasing. I’m sitting at 505 and my max is somewhere around 508. There’s no real reason for me to keep hitting LFR every week, hoping for a few more drops. When 5.4 hits, it’ll be even worse. Once I see the end of the 5.4 raid, there’s absolutely no reason to farm the place out…the gear will all be replaced early in the next expansion whether I’m at 510 or 530.

There are other issues (people with unlucky streaks for instance and gearing for off-specs) that are hopefully being addressed in 5.3.

The tank/healer/dps triad must be overcome. The grouping tools are great, but the excessive wait times kill the buzz.

I really think we’re going to see Blizz going to scenarios to overcome this more and more. The wait time for a scenario is next to nothing. What they need to do is put the rewards a bit more on par with heroic dungeons. I know you can run scenarios faster, but if there’s no real solution for the LFD queue issues, then maybe they need to just give up and officially focus their efforts on scenarios as the primary non-raid gearing up route.

Stop allowing the game to become ever more iterative and stale. When the next expansion comes, I know for a fact there will yet another set of quests, 5-mans, and raids. I know for a fact there will be ores and herbs to prospect, smelt, and mill. BFD. Surprise me, make me excited.

If they stopped updating the bread-and-butter content, I’m pretty sure there’d be a huge uproar. They did add a number of new things in this expansion (scenarios, pet battles, brawler’s guild, race/class, etc.), but maybe they just weren’t cool enough things for you (and there’s nothing wrong with that). I will be highly surprised if they ever shake up the core game design of the game (like a third faction) just in the interest of making something way out there and new.

1870

I agree with you guys, I think you have hit all the same reasons I would bring up as to why WoW is losing people. For me, my guild that has been together since ICC finally stopped raiding a few weeks ago. People just weren’t having as much fun. I also agree alts are a big negative now. In Cata, I had 4 or 5 85s, and my guild would have 1 or 2 alt raids every week, not pushing hard content, just for fun and getting whatever gear we could. For the entirety of Pandas we had zero alt raids, for all the reasons you guys have mentioned. No one wants to get to 90 and have to worry about reps and the stupid lesser charms.

I also had a big personal issue with class design this expac. I hate what they have done to disc priest, as each patch they pushed the spec more and more into a dps/healer hybrid. If I wanted to dps I would go shadow.

1871

The problem is that ~8m subscriptions is far too much to risk. If they go F2P, they would probably lose a significant proportion of those subscribers. They would join F2P, and probably spend something in the cash shop, but $15 per account, per month is difficult to match.

WoW should add monthly quests and veteran rewards that only accumulate for cumulative subscriptions. They should also do aggressive server merges and offer free faction transfers for imbalanced servers.

They could also do cross-promotions; e.g. “save $1/month from your Netflix account when you maintain an active WoW subscription”, or “get free turtle mount when you purchase the new Activision TMNT game” alongside “Leonardo can dual-wield Frostmournes if you link your WoW subscription in the new Activision TMNT game”, or “Get a free month of WoW when you purchase any Activision game over $50” and so on and so forth. They have historically never aggressively pursued that kind of thing.

All the other feedback in this thread about the game itself would help too. But really, Blizzard needs to develop a lot more content. They’re just way too slow. They should have multiple teams working on content patches; multiple teams separately developing dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, and so on. Instead it seems like they have one monolithic live team and one expansion team.

1872

I think they’ve stated they have two live teams now, one who are doing the inbetween major raid instance drops like 5.1 and 5.3, and one that is working on the updates that centrally feature new raid instances, like 5.2 and 5.4.

Ghostcrawler recently tweeted that they are putting out patches faster than they ever have before. I haven’t done the math on that but it seems they are aware of that concern. He’s also said that the main blocking mechanism for the “make more content faster” argument is the limit on good people with the right skills. So it sounds like they are hiring all the qualified folks they can find who are willing to work on WoW and live in Orange County.

1873

They are releasing patches faster, but every other patch contains very little actual content. 5.0 was the initial expansion, but 5.1 just had a new daily hub. 5.2 is a new raid and a huge daily hub, and 5.3 will be… a new daily hub, except it won’t even be in a new area, it’s in a phased copy of the barrens. This is the daily quest expansion. They obviously got together in late 2011 and planned out the entire expansion with an eye towards player retention, and they decided that dailies were the way to achieve that. They were obviously wrong.

I think you’re right in that they’re trying to hire people as quickly as possible, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that they’re staying with large monolithic teams rather than using small agile ones, so they hit the mythical man month issue.

They should have multiple small teams working on individual pieces of new content, at all the various phases of completion, to more efficiently utilize resources. You primarily need art and sound in the beginning of each development cycle, then you have the designers who place and tune all the monsters and whatnot, then you need QA. They should have 10 art teams, 10 sound teams, 10 design teams, 10 QA teams, etc, all working on different content at different stages of completion, but they don’t-- they have one, or maybe two monolithic teams. That likely produces higher quality content, but it’s inefficient, and slow.

Even if you cut it down to 6 million subscribers paying $15/month, that’s ninety million dollars per month. Per month! Trion’s rift has maybe 150k subscribers (and a bunch of F2P people now) and they manage to consistently match or beat WoW’s content production with an infinitesimal proportion of the resources.

Rift’s added content is high-quality, although you could compelling argue that it doesn’t compare with WoW’s. But there’s more of it, produced with dramatically less resources. Blizzard just needs to do better.

1874

Very much in agreement there. Unfortunately, it’s too well established in the gaming world that server merges = failing, rather than an attempt to provide the best possible experience for the player base.

1875

They’d also have to solve the duplicate name issue. Lots of folks would be upset to have their name force changed.

As for the rep grinds, I’m not convinced they are as necessary now as they were. I’m pretty casual because of time (and alts), but I’m not having too much trouble gearing up for LFR raids, without having all that many reps. I raised one or two for mounts, but the only one I’m actively working on (for my definition of ‘actively’) is Shadow-Pan/Kirin Tor Isle of Thunder stuff. The only other two factions I have are Cloud Serpents and Tillers. Sure, if I want loot faster I need to get some charms/runes/whatever - but that is a choice, not a requirement. Granted, this is from someone doing LFR. If you need to gear up in a hurry for progression or even moderate guild raiding, I’m sure it is a little more involved (but then, it should be at least a bit, shouldn’t it?).

Forgot: There was a blue post in the past week outlining a very nice plan for gearing up without hitting the dailies wall, with the changes that have come about in 5.2. Very worthwhile to read if you are still in the 5.0 mindset of ‘must get all exalted to raid’.

1876

I agree. I leveled my warrior up to level 90 six to eight weeks ago and have completely ignored the 5.0 and 5.1 faction dailies for the most part. I’m only now thinking of trying to get Shado Pan to revered to get the ilvl 498 stamina trinket which is apparently BIS by many measures. And I’m only 4k away from revered having never done a Shado Pan daily, just from doing the leveling up zone quests with the 200% bonus and subsequent heroic dungeon runs with that as the bonus faction.

1877

They should have multiple small teams working on individual pieces of new content, at all the various phases of completion, to more efficiently utilize resources. You primarily need art and sound in the beginning of each development cycle, then you have the designers who place and tune all the monsters and whatnot, then you need QA. They should have 10 art teams, 10 sound teams, 10 design teams, 10 QA teams, etc, all working on different content at different stages of completion, but they don’t-- they have one, or maybe two monolithic teams. That likely produces higher quality content, but it’s inefficient, and slow.

I don’t agree with any of this and am convinced of the opposite. They would’ve been better served had one team been cranking out raids every two months and another releasing five-mans on the alternates, since late classic to present day. The people I played with, who strove to maintain a “casual” schedule if not playstyle, mostly unsubscribed every time all available content was completed. Furthermore, that sort of disjointed bullet-point development leads to content that only gets populated when it can’t be avoided.

@Gedd: single_serving_raider.jpg

1878

That’s basically what they’re doing now, except it’s more like 6 months. How’s that development methodology workin’ out?

(Answer: not great)

1879

Blizzard has said themselves that content takes more time than that. While I’m sure everyone would love to see a new raid every two months, that’s just not going to happen. Maybe if they threw all pretense of lore/story/etc out the window, but they do try to keep those elements in there. Also, more cut&paste content wouldn’t equal desired content (see: scenarios). People want new mechanics, new textures, new models, etc. There is a point where throwing more bodies at it ceases to help.

1880

Didn’t they already fire all of their writers before they started working on panda?

The problem i have with wow these days is that it is a grinding game that does a poor job at encouraging the grind other than for the sake of doing it. Lets be honest, not even die hard warcraft fanatics play wow for the lore/story. It is a loot quest game where they drag out a low amount of content by having you repeat it many times, similar to diablo.

Blizzard completely forgot that people hated massive rep grinds early in wow’s life and ended up making them the main focus of this expansion. Then to top it off, most of them aren’t worth it anymore, the rep items made useless by a short, bland dungeon.

I could go grind the new dungeon once a week, maybe do a daily heroic a day for valor points, but why? getting a few more item levels to do nothing with?

The green fire quest was probably worth doing. Extremely frustrating at (most) times, but somewhat rewarding. Although blizzard really dropped the ball by removing the actual item reward. Sadly, after finishing this quest, i completely lost any desire to play the game.