On October 23 2011 03:20 Pufftrees wrote: ^ While the fan base does get progressively more whiney, this expansion is taking a beating from its player base. Cata was actually pretty well accepted (you can go dig up forums from last year on mmo champ or whatever to see), this expansion actually has a lot of people upset and going "wtf??". Wouldn't be surprised if blizzard drops another mil subscribers or so.
So whats blizz gonna do now completely redesign their expansion cause of the whiners? Wow came out in fkn 2004 it would keep dropping subscribers even if it was the greatest expansion of all time. But wow players just whine no matter what yet half of them keep playing and paying. You have dota2, d3 and swotor coming out in the next few months. If you dont like what blizz is doing just move on. All the whining is way past old at this point.
They're going to look at lore, and pick a sensible place for players to go instead.
Like I said I swear back in TBC Malfurion was stuck in the Emerald Dream with the 'nightmare' or some shit and Ysera was there to.
I also thought that Lady Aszara was down in the Maelstrom plotting some sort of shit.
If all the people that dislike this expansion on youtube would actually up and leave the game (give or take 50%) the game would still have about 5 million paying players left and it would still be the biggest paid MMO out there.
There are games like EVE that run their MMO with a 50k player base and it still turns a profit.
I would not be suprised if WoW is still around 10 years from now. It is just so massive and can take such a drop in playerbase before it starts losing money that it's ridiculous to suggest it's ever really going to die.
WoW will die when Blizz pulls the plug on it. Literally pulling the server plug. Until then it will turn a profit. Maybe it's the monstrous profit machine that it is now or maybe it will go to korean-mmo levels.
On October 24 2011 03:57 zalz wrote: If all the people that dislike this expansion on youtube would actually up and leave the game (give or take 50%) the game would still have about 5 million paying players left and it would still be the biggest paid MMO out there.
There are games like EVE that run their MMO with a 50k player base and it still turns a profit.
I would not be suprised if WoW is still around 10 years from now. It is just so massive and can take such a drop in playerbase before it starts losing money that it's ridiculous to suggest it's ever really going to die.
WoW will die when Blizz pulls the plug on it. Literally pulling the server plug. Until then it will turn a profit. Maybe it's the monstrous profit machine that it is now or maybe it will go to korean-mmo levels.
Pandas won't change any of that.
Although WoW is th biggest MMO out there, I'm pretty sure some other MMOs are in the millions of players too. But just go on the forums, there seem to be a huge shitstorm of complaining on it, but if you read the threads, most people tend to agree that its going to be a great expansion and they are eager to play it. I guess the ones complaining are only a small but VERY vocal minority
On October 22 2011 05:48 Thorakh wrote: Seriously, it starts getting better and better. What's with all the hate...
If you cannot see why, I don't have more to say. Either the fanboyism clouds your judgment, or you're a relatively new WoW player who don't know much about its past.
The game where one used to fight C'Thun and Illidan has turned into a game of pokemons and pandas. What is there not to hate?
I have played since TBC. I've raided pretty hardcore. I'm excited for this expansion.
Jesus, look past the pandas and pokemans and you'll see a rough gem. One that Blizzard will break, of course, but the potential is there at least.
The fact that you can use term "hardcore" implies that you dont play WoW anymore. It takes atmost 2 days to clear everything and be done for the week. I thought worgens were dumb, but this definitely tops it.
The worst race ever has been draenei but tbc was a good expansion even with them *edit also i dont know much about hardcore playing mmo's but arent those hardmode bosses actually pretty damn hard? according to paragon HM ragnaros10 has been the hardest boss to kill during whole wow.
The heroic version of the last boss is always extremely difficult. Heroic Yogg-Saron, Arthas, Ragnaros, Sinestra are all harder than M'uru. My guild used to raid 22 hours a week when I joined in late 2005. It's down to around 10 hours a week on average now and I'm actually glad. The game is not new anymore and I think most people can't raid that long for very long stretches of time.
There were very few bosses in vanilla and TBC that could hold a candle against the average heroic bosses in current raids. The biggest problem to me is the ridiculous difference in difficulty between normal raids and heroic raids.
I would agree with you, but everything ive read(and heard from people that have cleared everything) said Sinestra wasnt even the most difficult boss of the tier, for t12 though Rag is defiantly the most difficult
Blizz needs to make the game free to play. I would literally pick up Cata and whatever else expansion is out and play the game if there was no monthly fee. I cannot justify paying monthly for a single game. It puts you in a position where you have to force yourself to play to make the best of it. If I could just login once in a while and chill, and then play serious when I want to, it would be perfect. But that monthly fee is a huge deal breaker.
I like the new expo theme. And while all the flamers whine, I'm pretty sure of these things:
-A LANDSLIDING majority will buy the expo anyways. -The gameplay in the expo will be better than any other MMO, just like every other WoW product. -It will end up having gigantic release parties around the world. -The game will continue losing players at the same rate it has been for some time now
There's one more expo before the game ends, IIRC, it's probably going to be something related to Malfurion and the emerald dream.
I think it's a good change of pace, and re focusing on the conflict between horde and alliance is a GOOD thing, it's a breath of fresh air. Also, the environments look gorgeous, I'd be happy to explore them thoroughly.
On October 24 2011 03:57 zalz wrote: If all the people that dislike this expansion on youtube would actually up and leave the game (give or take 50%) the game would still have about 5 million paying players left and it would still be the biggest paid MMO out there.
There are games like EVE that run their MMO with a 50k player base and it still turns a profit.
I would not be suprised if WoW is still around 10 years from now. It is just so massive and can take such a drop in playerbase before it starts losing money that it's ridiculous to suggest it's ever really going to die.
WoW will die when Blizz pulls the plug on it. Literally pulling the server plug. Until then it will turn a profit. Maybe it's the monstrous profit machine that it is now or maybe it will go to korean-mmo levels.
Pandas won't change any of that.
Although WoW is th biggest MMO out there, I'm pretty sure some other MMOs are in the millions of players too. But just go on the forums, there seem to be a huge shitstorm of complaining on it, but if you read the threads, most people tend to agree that its going to be a great expansion and they are eager to play it. I guess the ones complaining are only a small but VERY vocal minority
What MMO has millions of subscriptions? I can't think of a single one. All the WoW killers have maybe 100.000 players. People often forget how big a difference there is between WoW and the 2nd up. Heck most of the MMO games have been drifting towards a free to play subscription model because they find themselves unable to compete.
As for forums, those are actually the perfect example of a loud minority. Forums contain maybe 2% of the player base. If the entire WoW forums decided to stop playing tommorow they would only be down 2%. The first decline in playerbase number was 5% and that was hardly cause for alarm.
I always found that strange. People were predicting WoW was on the decline since TBC got released. Each time they announced the increase in playerbase people said that next time things were surely gonna go to hell. Some people even suggested Activison was actively engaging in stockholder deception in order to win an internet argument.
Now a 5% decline has set in, nothing earth shattering when you consider how long WoW has been in existence. The playerbase had to plateau at some point. But now WoW is dead? Now people suggest WoW is in such shambles that it needs to "cater to kiddies and China" in order to survive?
I might sound like a dedicated WoW fanboy but i haven't bought any gametime for probably 8 months now. Played a little bit of Cata and that was it.
I admit i laughed at first when i saw the mists of pandaria but i read up on it and i watched at the artwork and i realised this is just gonna be another top notch Blizzard product. Blizzard has never done poor work but it suffers from the Pixar treatment where despite a near perfect track record the critics keep saying the next thing is gonna be a sure fail.
I won't doubt Blizzard until they give me a reason to. If this expansion turns out to be a bomb well i will have learned my lesson and will be carefull about trusting Blizz again. But let's be serious, hasn't Blizzard earned some trust by now? When has Blizzard ever done something half-assed?
I like how they're making a more ''relax'' expansion, since every expansion before always had that big end boss that was the goal of it all. At some point, they had to break away from that, they can't come up with ''the biggest threat to Azeroth ever'' everytime without becoming a joke. So this one should be fun.
But as some people pointed out many times already, they could do so much more with the end game content. Housing, mount combat, improved water navigation, there's so many features that were expected since the game was released. A pokemon mini-game is nice, but it's nothing people waited for or anything.
The arenas, the flying mounts, THOSE were major features that got extra people playing.
I believe the major factor of this xpac would be end game content: tbh, I don't even care if lv85-90 only has around 10 hours of playtime if they put a lot more effort into end game content so outside of raids people are not bored to death. Things like dailies and RDs quickly became a chore in my eyes.
Oh, @ the RD system. If you are a dps class you will still be waiting for 30 minutes for a queue, and have to potentially spend another 45 minutes in an instance if the players are not experienced/are just fooling around. Is that 1hr15minute time investment really fun?
One of the key points of mmorpg, imo, is that your past effort are accumulative (not just in terms of content enjoyment, achievements, and acquiring better skills). Working very hard to clear all hardmodes, then seeing people get better rewards than I did 1/2 a year later is kind of dismotivating. Some people even carry the mentality of "meh, I will just wait for the nerf before spending time on bosses"
actually, I'd guess they have two more expansions plotted. finishing at level 95 seems... awkward, unless they make the last one a 10 leveler. Which I doubt, given it's on the same release timer as this one
I think all the hate and angst is because of the poorly made trailer, and I mean poorly made in terms of representing what MoP is about. People think it's gonna be dedicated 100% to Pandarens, but when you look at the dungeon and talent panels, and listen to the devs talking about MoP, it's much more than that.
Checked a talent calculator, saw the new talent system, and concluded that it's either gonna be a great expansion, or just destroy WoW completely (depends on how much effort they put into it, as the change looks huge and risky ). Since I'm not interested that much in PvE, balance is my main concern and I don't think blizzard will be able to fix (or at least not ruin even more) the current imbalance between classes (my main is resto druid, no need to mention that there are only disadvantages comparing them with other healers atm).
I'm gonna buy the expansion of course, but the gamecards I buy will be even less if the game fails again.
Rather, people will be a lot more casual. I know that sc2 (esp when HotS comes out) and D3 will still take away a majority of my time. Do I really want to pay for $40 for MoP + $30 for 2 months to be casual? $70 is a lot of money for a game.
To top it off, lets say I play D3 enough to sell a few things off the RMAH: I can potentially make at least a few dollars farming content over and over and over and over and over. In WoW after I kill a boss for the 10th time I start to want to hang myself instead.
If WoW is a lot cheaper (lets say, MoP is free if you have an existing account) and I only have to pay for $10 a month. While I am not poor I still do not want to spend unnecessary money - towards the end of my WoW career I have been trading gold for game time.
On October 22 2011 05:48 Thorakh wrote: Seriously, it starts getting better and better. What's with all the hate...
If you cannot see why, I don't have more to say. Either the fanboyism clouds your judgment, or you're a relatively new WoW player who don't know much about its past.
The game where one used to fight C'Thun and Illidan has turned into a game of pokemons and pandas. What is there not to hate?
I have played since TBC. I've raided pretty hardcore. I'm excited for this expansion.
Jesus, look past the pandas and pokemans and you'll see a rough gem. One that Blizzard will break, of course, but the potential is there at least.
The fact that you can use term "hardcore" implies that you dont play WoW anymore. It takes atmost 2 days to clear everything and be done for the week. I thought worgens were dumb, but this definitely tops it.
The worst race ever has been draenei but tbc was a good expansion even with them *edit also i dont know much about hardcore playing mmo's but arent those hardmode bosses actually pretty damn hard? according to paragon HM ragnaros10 has been the hardest boss to kill during whole wow.
The heroic version of the last boss is always extremely difficult. Heroic Yogg-Saron, Arthas, Ragnaros, Sinestra are all harder than M'uru. My guild used to raid 22 hours a week when I joined in late 2005. It's down to around 10 hours a week on average now and I'm actually glad. The game is not new anymore and I think most people can't raid that long for very long stretches of time.
There were very few bosses in vanilla and TBC that could hold a candle against the average heroic bosses in current raids. The biggest problem to me is the ridiculous difference in difficulty between normal raids and heroic raids.
I would agree with you, but everything ive read(and heard from people that have cleared everything) said Sinestra wasnt even the most difficult boss of the tier, for t12 though Rag is defiantly the most difficult
The fact that he claims sinestra is more difficult than one of the tightest dps fight blizz has ever made strikes me as odd.
Yea yogg saron and the lich king were up there but nothing in cata comes remotely close to some of the bs naxx 40 prenerf tbc brought us.
Hell sinestra is a glorified chrommagus
As for this expansion.....LOL is all I have to say. Lets just have the sargeras raid already and end this. At least wrath had decent raids in ulduar and icecrown....cata has been total shit.
On October 24 2011 03:57 zalz wrote: If all the people that dislike this expansion on youtube would actually up and leave the game (give or take 50%) the game would still have about 5 million paying players left and it would still be the biggest paid MMO out there.
There are games like EVE that run their MMO with a 50k player base and it still turns a profit.
I would not be suprised if WoW is still around 10 years from now. It is just so massive and can take such a drop in playerbase before it starts losing money that it's ridiculous to suggest it's ever really going to die.
WoW will die when Blizz pulls the plug on it. Literally pulling the server plug. Until then it will turn a profit. Maybe it's the monstrous profit machine that it is now or maybe it will go to korean-mmo levels.
Pandas won't change any of that.
Although WoW is th biggest MMO out there, I'm pretty sure some other MMOs are in the millions of players too. But just go on the forums, there seem to be a huge shitstorm of complaining on it, but if you read the threads, most people tend to agree that its going to be a great expansion and they are eager to play it. I guess the ones complaining are only a small but VERY vocal minority
What MMO has millions of subscriptions? I can't think of a single one. All the WoW killers have maybe 100.000 players. People often forget how big a difference there is between WoW and the 2nd up. Heck most of the MMO games have been drifting towards a free to play subscription model because they find themselves unable to compete.
I think you're right. I know Lineage and Lineage 2 probably have 1-2 million subscribers (at 15$/month) between them but that's it. DAoC also has a fairly large player base but it's definitely not in the millions.
OT: I think that the biggest thing WoW has going for it is the gameplay. The way your character plays and the way the controls are very free, at least that's the only reason I've preferred WoW over other games I've tried. I'm not super excited about the pandas but I kinda like the Asian-theme, seems like a good new theme to WoW.
On October 22 2011 05:48 Thorakh wrote: Seriously, it starts getting better and better. What's with all the hate...
If you cannot see why, I don't have more to say. Either the fanboyism clouds your judgment, or you're a relatively new WoW player who don't know much about its past.
The game where one used to fight C'Thun and Illidan has turned into a game of pokemons and pandas. What is there not to hate?
I have played since TBC. I've raided pretty hardcore. I'm excited for this expansion.
Jesus, look past the pandas and pokemans and you'll see a rough gem. One that Blizzard will break, of course, but the potential is there at least.
The fact that you can use term "hardcore" implies that you dont play WoW anymore. It takes atmost 2 days to clear everything and be done for the week. I thought worgens were dumb, but this definitely tops it.
The worst race ever has been draenei but tbc was a good expansion even with them *edit also i dont know much about hardcore playing mmo's but arent those hardmode bosses actually pretty damn hard? according to paragon HM ragnaros10 has been the hardest boss to kill during whole wow.
The heroic version of the last boss is always extremely difficult. Heroic Yogg-Saron, Arthas, Ragnaros, Sinestra are all harder than M'uru. My guild used to raid 22 hours a week when I joined in late 2005. It's down to around 10 hours a week on average now and I'm actually glad. The game is not new anymore and I think most people can't raid that long for very long stretches of time.
There were very few bosses in vanilla and TBC that could hold a candle against the average heroic bosses in current raids. The biggest problem to me is the ridiculous difference in difficulty between normal raids and heroic raids.
I would agree with you, but everything ive read(and heard from people that have cleared everything) said Sinestra wasnt even the most difficult boss of the tier, for t12 though Rag is defiantly the most difficult
The fact that he claims sinestra is more difficult than one of the tightest dps fight blizz has ever made strikes me as odd.
Yea yogg saron and the lich king were up there but nothing in cata comes remotely close to some of the bs naxx 40 prenerf tbc brought us.
Hell sinestra is a glorified chrommagus
As for this expansion.....LOL is all I have to say. Lets just have the sargeras raid already and end this. At least wrath had decent raids in ulduar and icecrown....cata has been total shit.
While I do agree with most of the things you say, Cata has had far more challenging raids (pre-nerfs) then WotLK. On the other hand the main villain in WotLK was more believable and Ulduar was amazing.
On the topic of naxx 40 I think you're very much right. But we have to remember that back then people were much worse at this game. I remember watching some of our vanilla-wow server-first videos a couple of months back and all the people featured were clicking and back-pedaling like crazy. Nowadays, however, those same people (the ones getting the server-firsts) have everything keybound and guides and addons to help them achieve those kills. While this is all good; it is making it increasingly difficult for Blizzard to create content that is accessible to both the before mentioned "hardcore" gamers and the people new to the game. Obviously Blizzard are trying to do this by adding Normal (and even an easier version) and heroic version of raids and nerfing HC / Normal content after it's been cleared by the more "hardcore"-guild but everything has just become increasingly complicated for them.
The way I see it, WoW has always been somewhat like a popular anime series: full of comedic elements, but always with an overarching "cool and serious" quest involving saving the world. Gnomes were the original joke race of WoW, irregardless of being part of canon from wc2, and to a lesser extent the space goats...erm draenei had their fair share of ridicule. WoW had never taken itself too seriously, what with the abundance of poop quests and references to popular culture. That being said, each expansion had as its focus a villain that conformed to the usual stereotypes: powerful, bent on destruction and being an all-around badass. This focus seems set to change with MoP and thus comes across as rather jarring. If a tv series decides to switch genres from drama to comedy for its new season, you can bet people are going to complain.
From a neutral standpoint, what I can say about this change in tone is that it is bold, risky and very polarizing. Many will hate it and many will love it. The question will be if one group will vastly outnumber the other.
On October 24 2011 03:57 zalz wrote: There are games like EVE that run their MMO with a 50k player base and it still turns a profit.
Huh? EVE was 350k+ last I heard.
I can't say I really "play" WoW anymore. I don't care for it too much post TBC, partially because of the direction they took and also because I just had my fill, but the masterful production of it is still something I like to experience. With both WotLK and Cata I played for a few weeks, did most of the quests, hit max level, ran all of the 5-mans a few times and called it good. I plan to be doing the same thing here unless something crazy sucks me back in.
Unlike everyone else it seems, I think the curveballs Blizzard keeps throwing with each expansion are a good thing. The 5 more levels, 7 more zones, 4 raids and 1 archvillian routine by itself isn't going to keep people satisfied. Thus far every expansion has changed the very feel of the game and they'd be wise to stick to that I'd say.
As far as "WTF Pandas" goes. A) I can remember cries for playable Pandaren's since release. B) Blizzard has said many times before, lore will always take a backseat to better gameplay, and amen to that.
EPT
