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On August 07 2014 00:25 Serejai wrote:
All of that being said, my posts were intentionally worded to stir up some hostility. I'm just curious how people feel about the sub losses and you get a lot better (ie more enjoyable to read) responses if you manage to make people angry in the process.
A lot of these arguments and explanations for WoW's or any form of media's decline sound intuitively logical, but are mostly based off of large scale statistics that have misleading explanatory power, anecdotal evidence with no explanatory power, and a healthy dose of confirmation bias backed by putative assumptions with some post hoc rationalization thrown in. I'm not taking shots at Serejai here (I know he's trolling to some extent), but I fall into the same pitfalls all the time (while actually being serious).
Everything will come to an end eventually, with some dying slow deaths. Yes, WoW is the very antithesis of emergent gameplay (which seems to be the new hot thing in gaming these days), but that, to me, is an itch to be scratched sometimes. For example, I'm a relatively antisocial guy, so I don't go back to WoW purely for the social aspects like many others do, yet there's still something there for people like me to revisit. I know that there are many theories in behavioral microeconomics, cognitive science, psychology, etc. about this, but to me, all that I need to know, at least when it pertains to WoW, is that I enjoy it in its many iterations that have little to do with community. Doesn't matter if it's the skinner box effect that keeps me going, or the illogical and irrational sunk cost fallacy (in this case, time and effort) that we commit on a regular basis, and probably a whole slew of other explanations.
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Norway3381 Posts
Fml, did not get Shoulderwraps of the Shattered Vale this week either  But did get an awesome weapon!
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Is there a group for this like there is for Tera? (Nony is actually part of the Tera TL guild lol). I'd love to play with people who actually know how to play their classes/roles :D
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On August 08 2014 15:50 Advantageous wrote:
Is there a group for this like there is for Tera? (Nony is actually part of the Tera TL guild lol). I'd love to play with people who actually know how to play their classes/roles :D
find any good guild and people will know what they are doing Oo
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Apparently there isn't right now, but I hope TL NA can muster up a guild for WoD.
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Norway3381 Posts
What happened to the EU guild?
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do you guys know any running wod beta key givaways? tried a couple no luck yet
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On August 12 2014 03:49 Ottoxlol wrote:
do you guys know any running wod beta key givaways? tried a couple no luck yet
Don't think there has been an invite wave in a while so you may well be out of luck. Release date is being announced this thursday and expected release is mid/late October so I doubt they are expanding the beta pool at this point.
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Well, some streams, like Hobbs still have beta keys to give away. Can try your luck there if you want.
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On August 07 2014 05:26 TheFish7 wrote:
Hows that work? Keeping servers up just that much cheaper these days? Fewer customer support reps & GMs? Less development cost?
easy, sell mounts for 25$ and pets for 10$
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You'd be surprised how little they spend on the game itself. It only cost ~200m total to run the game from 2004-2008, and that's back when they had 10-12m players.
That 200m includes payroll for all employees at the company, customer service, and hardware. Obviously their operating costs have gone up since 2008, but they've also downsized the company a lot since then as well.
To put things in perspective... Blizzard (WoW) makes a hundred times more profit than Trion (Rift), and yet up until December of last year Rift had a larger development team than WoW did. Blizzard could very, very easily hire another 100 developers, push out new expansions every 12 months, new content patches every 3 months, etc. They just don't, and it's brilliant from a business standpoint; they have found a way to do as little work as possible for as much profit as possible.
So, in short... even if WoW dropped down to 500k total subs Blizzard would still make a profit without even having to fire anyone.
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On August 12 2014 06:47 Serejai wrote:
You'd be surprised how little they spend on the game itself. It only cost ~200m total to run the game from 2004-2008, and that's back when they had 10-12m players.
That 200m includes payroll for all employees at the company, customer service, and hardware. Obviously their operating costs have gone up since 2008, but they've also downsized the company a lot since then as well.
To put things in perspective... Blizzard (WoW) makes a hundred times more profit than Trion (Rift), and yet up until December of last year Rift had a larger development team than WoW did. Blizzard could very, very easily hire another 100 developers, push out new expansions every 12 months, new content patches every 3 months, etc. They just don't, and it's brilliant from a business standpoint; they have found a way to do as little work as possible for as much profit as possible.
So, in short... even if WoW dropped down to 500k total subs Blizzard would still make a profit without even having to fire anyone.
It might be brilliant from business perspective, but is quite disturbing when you know they are satisfied with putting in minimum work just to do enough to keep earning money, and don't really care about a quality product.
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Norway3381 Posts
Welcome to the capitalist world.
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On August 12 2014 22:29 ViperPL wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2014 06:47 Serejai wrote:
You'd be surprised how little they spend on the game itself. It only cost ~200m total to run the game from 2004-2008, and that's back when they had 10-12m players.
That 200m includes payroll for all employees at the company, customer service, and hardware. Obviously their operating costs have gone up since 2008, but they've also downsized the company a lot since then as well.
To put things in perspective... Blizzard (WoW) makes a hundred times more profit than Trion (Rift), and yet up until December of last year Rift had a larger development team than WoW did. Blizzard could very, very easily hire another 100 developers, push out new expansions every 12 months, new content patches every 3 months, etc. They just don't, and it's brilliant from a business standpoint; they have found a way to do as little work as possible for as much profit as possible.
So, in short... even if WoW dropped down to 500k total subs Blizzard would still make a profit without even having to fire anyone. It might be brilliant from business perspective, but is quite disturbing when you know they are satisfied with putting in minimum work just to do enough to keep earning money, and don't really care about a quality product.
You can't just add 100 developers to a project and expect a linear increase in development progress. Every extra person slows the work down some and at a certain point there is almost no return for adding more manpower. I'm not contradicting that they could hire another 500 developers, but it wouldn't help a lot with development of content.
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On August 12 2014 06:47 Serejai wrote:
You'd be surprised how little they spend on the game itself. It only cost ~200m total to run the game from 2004-2008, and that's back when they had 10-12m players.
That 200m includes payroll for all employees at the company, customer service, and hardware. Obviously their operating costs have gone up since 2008, but they've also downsized the company a lot since then as well.
To put things in perspective... Blizzard (WoW) makes a hundred times more profit than Trion (Rift), and yet up until December of last year Rift had a larger development team than WoW did. Blizzard could very, very easily hire another 100 developers, push out new expansions every 12 months, new content patches every 3 months, etc. They just don't, and it's brilliant from a business standpoint; they have found a way to do as little work as possible for as much profit as possible.
So, in short... even if WoW dropped down to 500k total subs Blizzard would still make a profit without even having to fire anyone.
If that was true then the Rift developers did a terribad job, because their game is miles and miles away from WoW. The difference in quality in about every aspect is so big that I actually dont believe this is true.
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You're in a minority that feels Rift is a terrible game. In fact, Rift is literally vanilla/TBC WoW with additional features and massive improvements to existing ones, so I'm not sure how anyone could say Rift is "miles and miles away from WoW" because they're pretty much the same game.
It would be like saying DOTA is amazing but DOTA 2 sucks.
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On August 12 2014 22:48 Redox wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2014 06:47 Serejai wrote:
You'd be surprised how little they spend on the game itself. It only cost ~200m total to run the game from 2004-2008, and that's back when they had 10-12m players.
That 200m includes payroll for all employees at the company, customer service, and hardware. Obviously their operating costs have gone up since 2008, but they've also downsized the company a lot since then as well.
To put things in perspective... Blizzard (WoW) makes a hundred times more profit than Trion (Rift), and yet up until December of last year Rift had a larger development team than WoW did. Blizzard could very, very easily hire another 100 developers, push out new expansions every 12 months, new content patches every 3 months, etc. They just don't, and it's brilliant from a business standpoint; they have found a way to do as little work as possible for as much profit as possible.
So, in short... even if WoW dropped down to 500k total subs Blizzard would still make a profit without even having to fire anyone. If that was true then the Rift developers did a terribad job, because their game is miles and miles away from WoW. The difference in quality in about every aspect is so big that I actually dont believe this is true.
There is a reason Blizzard doesn't hire a million developers. They demand high standards and quality from their people and you cant just find those anywhere.
They are unwilling to sacrifice quality for quantity but I guess that's something the haters don't understand
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Because Dragon Soul and a year of Siege of Orgrimmar are the pinnacle of quality game design. It's really depressing when someone posts factual statistics (even when they weren't posted in a negative light) and your only response is "HES JUST A HATER". You're the exact reason why Blizzard is able to get by doing the bare minimum, because people like you accept "good enough".
I'm still curious where all of this quality is, though. Many MMOs have better communities, better PvP, better leveling experiences, better storytelling, etc. The ONLY thing WoW does better than any other MMO on the market is encounter design for raids, which less than 10% of the playerbase actually experiences according to armory data that MMO-C parses every raid tier. I guess you could consider their accessibility to be great, too. Everything else is average and the other 90% of the subs plays casually and likely doesn't even know other MMOs exist due to the great marketing and word of mouth behind WoW.
Next you're going to tell me Diablo 3 sold 10m copies at launch because it was a quality game. It's great to be a fan of a company but constantly stating your opinion as fact and calling everyone who disagrees with it a "hater" doesn't really do much to help your case. The Twilight movies sold extremely well but it sure as hell wasn't because Kristen Stewart is a quality actress.
I enjoy playing WoW when I play it but I'm not naive or blind enough to think it's a perfect game like you seem to.
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On August 12 2014 23:33 Serejai wrote:
Because Dragon Soul and a year of Siege of Orgrimmar are the pinnacle of quality game design. It's really depressing when someone posts factual statistics (even when they weren't posted in a negative light) and your only response is "HES JUST A HATER". You're the exact reason why Blizzard is able to get by doing the bare minimum, because people like you accept "good enough".
I'm still curious where all of this quality is, though. Many MMOs have better communities, better PvP, better leveling experiences, better storytelling, etc. The ONLY thing WoW does better than any other MMO on the market is encounter design for raids, which less than 10% of the playerbase actually experiences according to armory data that MMO-C parses every raid tier. I guess you could consider their accessibility to be great, too. Everything else is average and the other 90% of the subs plays casually and likely doesn't even know other MMOs exist due to the great marketing and word of mouth behind WoW.
Next you're going to tell me Diablo 3 sold 10m copies at launch because it was a quality game. It's great to be a fan of a company but constantly stating your opinion as fact and calling everyone who disagrees with it a "hater" doesn't really do much to help your case. The Twilight movies sold extremely well but it sure as hell wasn't because Kristen Stewart is a quality actress.
I enjoy playing WoW when I play it but I'm not naive or blind enough to think it's a perfect game like you seem to.
Not sure who you are referring to but I will just assume its me. I didnt say anything about Dragon Soul (dont even know what that is) or Siege of Orgrimmar. I played very little of WoW the recent years and I dont care about defending Blizzard or w/e let alone think it is a perfect game lol. I played some Rift though because its free.
It is just the very basics of WoW that are miles better. You really just need 5 minutes of playing around with a character and attacking a few monsters to figure that out. The fluidity of gameplay, the animations, the way the spells work in combination with each other etc. It is a different level really. Not even talking about dungeons or PvP or balance etc although one could also make a pretty good case there.
I think it is pretty funny that you called my opnion a minority opinion just after stating that WoW makes 100 times more profit than Rift btw. Most people probably dont realize why they like WoW better than the competition, but the fact is that they do. And that although the majority desperately wants to find a new MMO for years now.
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I was referring to Gorsameth, but I can comment on your remarks.
You say WoW is very fluid, the spells are nice, there's no learning curve, etc - and I agree with all of that. However, Rift has the same spells (literally), the same fluidity, and the same learning curve; even the same graphical style. So how can you possibly say WoW is on a different level when Rift is quite literally a clone of WoW at the basic level? In fact, Rift is even more fluid than WoW because the game engine is newer and more refined. It would be one thing if you wanted to argue that the endgame in WoW is better than the endgame in Rift, because it is. But to argue things like spell animations, gameplay, and other basic design elements are "a different level" when they are quite literally the exact same doesn't make any sense at all and screams of bias.
Also, the subscriber count of WoW has less relation to the game itself than you seem to think. There are many reasons why WoW has so many subscribers; it had great timing coming to market (something that no other MMO will ever have), it was insanely casual and easy compared to other MMOs on the market at the time (yes, I just said vanilla WoW was casual - compared to Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, etc), and those two initial factors gave them the revenue to market it in a way that other MMOs at the time couldn't. From there it snowballed due to word of mouth.
Success is not a measure of quality, though. The success of WoW was more to do with timing and circumstances than anything else, and that's not at all an unusual concept. The original iPod was inferior to offerings by Samsung, Microsoft, Sony, and a few other companies... but guess which one became a household name? How about the Nintendo Wii? It sold infinitely more than the PS3 or Xbox 360 even though both of those had better hardware and better game libraries. That's not to say the Wii is good or bad, but rather that the specific timing and circumstances of the market enabled it to do well. If Nintendo had released the Wii two years earlier or two years later it probably would have flopped.
In short, it doesn't really matter if WoW makes more profit than Rift and you can't use that as a basis for your argument that people prefer WoW. Most people have never driven a Bugatti Veyron but I'm fairly certain they would like it better than their Ford Focus if they did, even though the Focus has more owners and makes more revenue (which by your standards would mean it's the better car).
There will never be another MMO that comes anywhere close to having the subscribers that WoW has because the circumstances won't present themselves again, so people waiting for this "WoW killer" MMO to materialize are idiots.
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