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United Kingdom20344 Posts
I think everyone is a bit surprised to see a subscriber cliff turn into only a 100k drop in 3 months
Update (11:30 AM EST): Blizzard will no longer report subscriber numbers. Updated post with notes from earnings call.
Does that mean no more numbers during the call or no more numbers ever? o.0
I do wish they went back to the Wrath/Cata way of having 2 starting zones that each faction shares. I feel that eases on the server load.
It's absolutely essential, i hope they're doing it for Legion. The reason they did it in wrath/cata was because of how much of a trainwreck it was in TBC and it was exactly the same in WOD when they only used one starting zone again. We had 2000 ping on the world server (not dungeon servers, just the Draenor world server) for the majority of the time in the first 36 hours as well as significant downtime in the middle of the evening.
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Well not to mention Wrath/Cata you had lots of kids not in those zones because they were making new races + new classes.
I think they'll release x people bought the expansion numbers. Maybe we'll only get the good numbers.
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United Kingdom20344 Posts
Well not to mention Wrath/Cata you had lots of kids not in those zones because they were making new races + new classes.
You had those in TBC too, they were even more popular because they were the first new races - especially Belf, which continues to be the most popular horde race today by a mile
WOD with no new class, no new race and 99% of some of the biggest servers in one zone was just awful - i think they really should have known better. On the medium sized servers with a 50/50 alliance/horde split it's not so bad but it's a very high load situation; on the very high population servers with everyone on one faction, it's unplayable since they have a load so much higher than normal operation and it's all channeled into one zone
We still have the restrictive phasing system as a result of changes done during WOD launch which has been annoying for me. Sometimes you fly over somewhere and you have to sit there for 2 or 3 seconds before any NPC's spawn because the server decides to phase you, that happens especially in Tanaan. A large % of the time i group in Stormshield, we're not in the same phase and have to go run somewhere else to trade (which is a little annoying as the three main points in WOD - stormshield, garrison, tanaan are all heavily phased)
I bet they could abuse this phasing system a lot to lessen/spread server load during Legion - but i really hope that they don't. It's destroyed the feeling of the world a lot more than flying mounts ever could, IMO. Releasing a few distractions (like new races or a hero class that's not immediately in the new expansion content) and making multiple zones open to both factions are much more natural ways of not setting fire to the server room
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On November 04 2015 07:30 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On November 04 2015 07:20 FinestHour wrote:
6.23 in 2 weeks boys season ending announcement No date mentioned. only "a few weeks from now" so bit premature. But it means that 6.23 is probably coming sooner then expected yes
They've used that wording before it's always 2 weeks or less
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I really don't get what people are still doing in the Game, its absolutely dead! o_0 My Guild stopped raiding a few weeks ago and I quit way before that.
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United Kingdom31255 Posts
On November 04 2015 10:31 Lauchboy wrote:
I really don't get what people are still doing in the Game, its absolutely dead! o_0 My Guild stopped raiding a few weeks ago and I quit way before that.
Some still haven't cleared mythic or have some achievements left to do while others are prepping for the next expansion (Nearly at 1 million gold here and due to WoW token I've got like 2 years of game time for free anyway)
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United Kingdom20344 Posts
I really don't get what people are still doing in the Game, its absolutely dead! o_0
My guild is raiding 10-25 hours a week and collecting gold. In a couple weeks there'll be a ton of mythic dungeon activity for about 2-4 weeks i guess
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On November 04 2015 10:31 Lauchboy wrote:
I really don't get what people are still doing in the Game, its absolutely dead! o_0 My Guild stopped raiding a few weeks ago and I quit way before that.
My scrub guild killed Normal Archimonde for the first time a couple of weeks ago. We're now working on Heroic HFC!
But yeah WoD is mostly over. I'd like to thank whoever mentioned Nostalrius earlier because I've found my time killer while waiting for Legion.
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I have been thinking of resubscribing I got burned out doing Highmaul how are the Time walk dungeons and did they do anything interesting with the Garrisons or is it still fill out missions and wait.
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United Kingdom20344 Posts
They've made garrisons a little worse by adding the shipyard, IMO.
Timewalkers are fun-ish but in a lot of cases, they chose boring dungeons over more fun ones IMO. For example that caverns of time TBC one, yet not Underbog or Ramparts (which i used to run all of the time).
They're quite open to abuse because the downscaling isn't amazing and they're on the easier side - It's like doing the dungeons in raid gear in the second half of the expansion, even if you're not playing with anyone who's farming them (so has an optimized gear set)
If you want TBC timewalking, it's open for 5 days every 7 weeks - so a bit of a small window.
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On November 04 2015 08:37 Cyro wrote:
I think everyone is a bit surprised to see a subscriber cliff turn into only a 100k drop in 3 months
It makes sense if you look at the number and the trend tho.
If you look at the trend and ignore the spike from MoP and WoD launch the game has been in a very slow steady decline since Cata. The cliff we saw the previous call was the last of the WoD spike leaving again. What we saw this time was the steady decline again.
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United Kingdom20344 Posts
^Yeah but it was hard to accurately guess at that without the data for when the decline would stop. I expected to go down to ~4m before slowing down that hard - a loss of only 100k is pretty magical after q1 and q2
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Casually leveling Nostalrius horde, forgot how god awfully terrible rogues are to level before like vanish at lvl 22 or something. Get a second mob and most of the time you are dead.
The nostalgia is real however and having fun so far despite dying like ten times per hour. Remember my first 1- 60 character had 18 days played which was like not fast not slow. Really don't feel like i can match that at my current rate.
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United Kingdom20344 Posts
Stuff used to be damn hard in the world, that's the biggest thing i remember from TBC. Not extremely hard, but like, relevant. From launch to two years into TBC i was eating/drinking during questing; WOD never made me do that in 6.0 and my damage had increased by 4x since. I actually enjoy fighting stuff in the world for longish-term objectives - "kill 1 million orcs on the server and the gates of hellfire will be breached!" - or even just for the sake of loot (cloth, elemental farming etc) but for me personally, it's not enjoyable if they fall over and die from one click instant cast from 50 yards away. It just becomes very boring after 5-10 minutes that way, especially if you literally can't pull enough guys to die.
+ Show Spoiler +Meanwhile ring is getting pretty powerful - i got a 1.07m damage explosion from opening on a single target with no heroism or stampede earlier. That's my luckiest, though i hit 1m more than a few times. I'm at 768 now (11/20 upgrades)
That means the ring itself was contributing around 130k DPS - augmenting a 163k DPS opener to 293k, roughly.
Full ring upgrade level and it would increase that to 337k!
I've done the math and taking Iron reaver mythic to 60-65% HP from full in 15 seconds is totally within the realm of possibility in a few months, much of that driven by the ring ilvl upgrade and +10 ilvls. For actual guilds in high mythic, not world class loggers. I get the feeling that this is intentionally broken to the point of obscenity; just throw an OP legendary out there that requires 20 weeks to scale after last patch +5-6 weeks to obtain it, no need to nerf the content / buff the players that way. That does feel very bad for rerolling to a different char though; It'd take 4 or 6 months to pull competitive damage even with the full force of a 13/13M guild on your back.
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Pre-purchasing gives you at least one week early access to the Demon Hunter class.
My first reaction to that pic was holy shit yikes what are they gonna fuck up - but after a minute i'm fairly happy about this. The LAST thing they want is for error 37 on the demon hunter starting zone. However, as i said a couple posts ago - they're redirecting the problem onto the Legion world server; hopefully not just on one zone.
Instead of a fraction of players going to play new class/race and the rest rushing the new zones, everybody will be rushing the new zone/s. Hopefully plural. Even worst case though, it seems like they're guaranteeing that demon hunters will have a fairly decent experience, just maybe at the cost of making it a bit worse for everyone else
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I've considered dicking around on Nostalrius until Legion came out or something but knowing half the specs are garbage is such a turn off.
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United Kingdom20344 Posts
On November 06 2015 12:19 TomatoBisque wrote:
I've considered dicking around on Nostalrius until Legion came out or something but knowing half the specs are garbage is such a turn off.
Even today they have a bunch of garbage specs, blizzard never truly learns there. Survival's gonna be unplayable for a straight year; they're in maintainence-mode for a bunch of other classes like DK's (10% buffs to a range of important abilities) but leaving the specs like Survival and Demonology in the dust, unplayable on purpose because they don't want them to be played until the reworks hit.
It was a more widespread and important issue in Vanilla; i really think TBC was among the best times for the game in some ways. That's a bit more modern and generally "unbroken" WoW.
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I mean, the only real garbage specs atm are like, Survival. They tried to dumpster Demo but it's still godly on some fights (like mythic manno)
But in Vanilla you've got like, Ret, Pally's Prot, Survival, Demo, BM, Balance, Shadow, Enhance, Elemental, Feral, Sub, Arcane, Disc or something absurd like that. Afflic too maybe? I don't recall when they made the debuff limit not tiny
edit: I agree that TBC's balance was much better. Some specs might not have had competitive DPS but they had utility that made them worth bringing
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United Kingdom20344 Posts
I think there's no justification to ever have a garbage spec for 2/3'rds of an expansion, if you can't handle that many specs then stop insisting on having like 36 specs in the game. Demon Hunters having a DPS spec and a Tank spec is a step forward there; they'll hopefully be reasonably balanced - not particularly at launch, but 3, 6, 12 and 36 months after. The swingy flavor of the month class/spec balance due to number changes degrades the game a lot, IMO; it's the biggest complaint of my best friend who plays occasionally and it's getting to me too
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On November 06 2015 03:12 unkkz wrote:
Casually leveling Nostalrius horde, forgot how god awfully terrible rogues are to level before like vanish at lvl 22 or something. Get a second mob and most of the time you are dead.
The nostalgia is real however and having fun so far despite dying like ten times per hour. Remember my first 1- 60 character had 18 days played which was like not fast not slow. Really don't feel like i can match that at my current rate.
Try a hunter and you can solo 3 mobs when you get your pet. Never realised they were so OP with lvling until I tried one on Nostalrius.
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EPT
