Originally posted by Mwaji

Originally posted by templarga

The only reason you think WWO has 6 million subs is because China is (or was) off-line. It is that simple. And until the China servers are completely back online and subs can be calculated again, nobody really knows how many players WOW does or does not have. No doubt WOW will lose some subs and for various reasons but the exact number is unknown.

At some point, since December when the 11.5 million number was reported (press releases confirm it and are easy to find), and in June, WOW grew to 11.6 million subs. The Guinness Book of World Records confirmed this when the award was received in June. Link is here: http://news.mmosite.com/content/2009-06-08/20090608030537350.shtml

According to you, ~5.5 million players have left WOW since December which is laughable at best.

 

It is still in beta Temp, you can argue they will come back I am not disputing that, I will argue there are NOT that many as of this moment, until they get servers back in working order you will NOT know.

And I agree with you. So you can technically say WOW has 6 million players because it is technically true. However, that is like saying WOW has 0 players from 3am-1pm on Tuesdays in the US (which is patch day).

The players have not chosen to leave because WOW sucks or is bad or for whatever reason (which is being implied in a lot of posts that discuss this issue). There is a huge difference between leaving because the game sucks and because you cannot play for X amount of time.

But I think its very, very negative to think all Chinese players won't come back when the game returns fully and WOTLK launches.

I'm a diehard EQ fan, or was until EQ went to crap a few years ago. Anyways, I hated WOW when it first came out. It was boring, easy, and there was no pvp. Now, that WOW has matured I actually really enjoy it.

My favorite part is PvP. I love the BGs. I can't wait until you can level in the BGs, ala WAR. I find leveling to be tediious, unreasonably long, and still far to easy to be of any use. If you can tolerate the boring grind to 80(I keep a toon at 39 to bg with to combat the boredom) its excellent.

Originally posted by oblivitar

like player housing or city sieges......gimme a break. Its popular because it doesn't require a powerful computer to play.

I agree with what your saying that WoW is only popular because it doesn't require a powerful high end computer to run, but it isn't the whole reason for it's popularity.

Originally posted by Zorndorf 

Zorndorf is here to put you all back with your feet on the ground.

I am almost the only one here giving facts and general comments about "success" without resorting to PERSONAL frustration and feelings ... towards a game.

I look into the broader picture and see the economic drive.

The guys talking about very personal emotions about playing ... a game are the ones that lost the ground under their feet.

And for some of them ... it takes years to overcome a hate about a game.

I merely talk about stats, subs numbers and overall succes rate.

Not about personal feelings about a game.

I have been reading the forums at this site for many years, but i never cared enough to reply. However this time i will make an exception. Zorndorf if you truly believe that you put up with an generally uncolored view in your posts, i really feel sorry for you. I hardly ever during a decade of MMO playing and forum readings, experienced a more biased person. 

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by Zorndorf

I say it ONE more time for those not READING WELL : Wow is not only popular.

Wow is the most succesful game in revenus in 30 years of video game history.

THAT'S a complete other meaning of being "popular".

Wow is the ONLY PAY to PLAY game on www.xfire.com in the top 10.

NO other game that COSTS a monthly  western sub fee can even come CLOSE to World of Warcraft.

YES it is THAT good.

It has NOTHING to do with being popualr, it has ALL to do with people willing to PAY it to even PLAY it ... every month.

It has nothing to do with marketing, people WANT to PAY to play it on and on and on....

 ----> The pockets of people NEVER lie. People always vote with their pockets. And in WOW they do vote every month 10 to 100 times more than the so called "competition".

 

 

It generates the most revenue because its so popular, that sort of makes perfect sense. I think most of us get that message and would not deny that WOW makes the most money. 

But countless examples have been used to show that the masses don't always buy what is best, just what is more popular and sometimes advertising plays a huge part in shaping their tastes, WOW is no exception to this phenomenon.

There's lots of reasons for its popularity of course, and it does many things well, (not great mind you, at least to my tastes) and it has lots of followers.

By why post this in the first place? OP asked why WOW was so great, and its revenue streams and popularity really aren't part of the answer, unless of course being part of the crowd is an important factor to the player. (for some it is, I realize)

WOW is polished, had great depth of play, is updated regularly, you can always find someone in RL who's playing the game (my son's friend just got the game for his birthday and is playing for the first time) and a dozen other reasons that make it a great game.

But it also has a number of aspects that make it not the game for me and some others, and we're going to go play the other games that come out that are not WOW.

 

 

WoW does earn alot of revenu...ALOT! 0_o

Saying WoW is "great" is like saying Walmart is "great".

Both are cheap (since you don't need to get a new top of the line PC to play).

Both are convenient and easy to use.

Both are the biggest in the world.

However both are full of unrestrained 10 year olds, people that make you feel much better about yourself when you encounter them and cheap watered down product/content.

One thing WoW did great at was bringing casual gamers to MMO's, as most original MMO players from past games were on the more hardcore side of the fence.  Casual gamers make up the largest available market for WoW.  They (for the most part) are an instant gratification group, that gets frustrated by real challenges.  So while WoW is financially smart for catering to their biggest available fanbase and increasing their potential customers exponentially, they end up providing a polished but watered down product that provides brief (if any) satisfaction for the original MMO player fanbase.  To maximize it's $$$, it's a jack of all trades and master of none.  That is just the nature of trying to please the masses.

It's success is great.  It's marketing is great.  It's profitability is great.  It's allure to casual gamers is great. However, its game play is far too shallow, repetitive and generic and the pvp system is far too atrocious to be considered great.

They're raking in the dough so I don't blame them, but success and greatness are not correlated.  Pizza Hut is successful, but Uno's is great.  N'SYNC was successful but Whitney Houston was great etc. etc.

Someone somewhere in the thread asked why a game "has to be great". I never said that it had to be but so many people play it that it's not odd to wonder why. I know not everything makes sense (I think a lot of fads/whatever don't make sense in hindsight) but I go to a tech school so gamers aren't uncommon. A guy I know plays WoW, I remember him talking about an expansion pack I think. This was about, hmm...a little less than a year ago? I dunno, he was waiting for something to come out/happen.

Anyways, he told me about how much the makers were pulling in a year (I forget what the figure was that he gave me but it was definitely no where near small) so I wondered what kept people playing. I mean, I've played quite a few games, some longer than others, some more than once. I have a fair idea of what pulls me in so I wondered what was attracting so many people to it for so long. I once watched a video of a kid whose mother had cancelled his WoW subscription after he hit like level 60 or something and he flipped, I think he tried to shove a remote control up his, ahem, butt... You just sit there watching like, "O_O" and wondering if it's real. XD

Originally posted by Zorndorf

Wow is by FAR the MOST expensive game of them all.

It is the ONLY game you have to PAY each month to even play in that absolute TOP 10.

--- WOW is also for the HARDCORE.

Proof for PVP?

Try being the sole  Deadly Gladiator in the ladder based system PvP game: Tx to clustered PvP servers: that simply means the best of 200.000 potential players. (20 clustered servers).

That's MORE than any other  fantasy mmorpg can even offer because of .... NO players.

  Reading is your friend....I said the reason it's cheap is that you don't need to invest much in the way of hardware to play it.  Any bargain pc for the last 10 years can play WoW.  Most other games have higher PC requirements, making additional hardware investments required which = $$$.  It's cheap for the consumer, which is why it's attractive to casual gamers, and non-gamers as they can play it with their existing rigs. 

WoW is not for the hardcore.  Any putz with 9 friends can clear the content in 10-man mode.  That takes away much of the feeling of accomplishment for true hardcore players.  They want to see what others not on their skill level can't see, not the same crap 4 times on different difficulty levels.  Also, when content is cleared by top guilds the weekend it's released, it's not that hard.  With such a casual customer base, of course only a small % will make it to the hardest of hard content, because the numbers are skewed by the overwhelmingly casual player base.

The pvp sucks. You don't have to be good at pvp to be able to go into an arena and do the same thing 1000 times over to earn points.  Constant world pvp, constant risk, consistent challenge, and non-repeated non-garbage instanced pvp is quality pvp.  WoW pvp is casual gamers pvp.  It's predictable, it's repetitive, it's simple, it's gear and class absed not skill based, it's unbalanced, and it's boring.  Hell in most BG's people don't even pvp, they just blitz the objectives to win.

The world pvp in original WoW was pretty good, but that's almost nonexistant anymore.  Now the pvp has no substance.

Nothing you said points to WoW being a great game.  Only successful.

I played WoW for a long time - release to about the middle of TBC.  Saying it's not a good game and arguably the best of the themepark-style MMOs is a great disservice - I honestly think WoW is about the best you can do using the DIKU-style EQ model of MMOs, and I'm pretty sure Blizzard knows this too simply by the steps they've taken to try and minimize the stagnation  that inevitably occurs over time in such games.

As a virtual world / sandbox WoW fails spectacularly.  Again, Blizzard knows this, they're smart people.  I fully expect Blizzard's new MMO to borrow heavily from MMOs that have enjoyed long-term, sustainable growth, such as EvE and even Second Life, and do the same voodoo magic to those mechanics which are currently exclusivly in the domain of the hardcore (and furries) they did to EQ and other DIKU-style MMOs and hopefully come up with the next 'big' thing.  I've been a Blizzard fan since the days of the original Warcraft, if anyone can make an accessible, fun sandbox game that will have mass appeal it's Blizzard, and I doubt they'll want to make a WoW 2 since WoW fans will play WoW until they're tired of it, and I can say with certainty that once you've burned out on one themepark MMO you're pretty much done with all of 'em.

I don't play WoW anymore personally but I still enjoyed my time there and don't fault anyone who is just getting into MMOs who picks it up and disappears for a year or so :P.

Originally posted by pepsi1028

WoW does earn alot of revenu...ALOT! 0_o

Yes, but that is not in itself making Wow a great game. The polish is great of course and the art.

But the community is not that great and the difficulty don't work for me. I guess I would play it if it was the only MMO around but it just wont give me the gaming fix I need. I anin't playing a game until I get max level to get any kind of challenge. Also the graphics is outdated, Blizzard should have worked more to update it like SOE did to EQ2. Wow looked better 5 years ago but now EQ2 looks far better (well, the art can be discussed so I am talking general graphics, not how the models look).

But that is of course my personal opinion and everyone who enjoys the game should play it.

I myself had a lot more fun in GW, it was harder and faced paced. Still too many kids in it also who suddenly have to quit an instance because their mom told them...

Wow do have the most players and some really nice features but if it is the best MMO is just anyones opinion.

 Out of the many reasons I could mention I picked 3.

Firstly Polish, no other game (other than LOtR) comes close. Everything just works. I find it amazing that a game like WoW, built for PvE, can handle 120 vs 120 open world PvP battles with ease, while a game build for PvP such as WAR creeps to a halt when I had more than 60 players on screen (and no, it's not my computer). It just shows how advanced the WoW engine is behind the pretty little graphics.

Secondly Combat. People spend 80% of their time fighting mobs/players, it's the single most important thing in the game. The control that WoW gives you over your character is second to none. It feels like a very well oiled component that works smoothly every time and makes combat fun. It amazes me that so many of the recent MMOs have had a terrible combat feeling, specially the PvP ones. It's something you take for granted in WoW.

Third, Content. For all races you pick (other than gnomes and trolls) you get a completly difference leveling experience up to around lvl20 ish, and then you have a choice of 3+ zones all the way to 60. Once there you can pick and chose where to level in Outlands and Northrend. Once you get to 80, you can do dungeons (12+  normal and Heroic), you can level your professions, you can enter fishing competitions, you can gather all the mini pets or mounts in the game, you have the best raiding content out in any game (again in normal and hardmodes), can can pvp (both battlegrounds, arenas, raiding enemy cities or open world pvp in Wintergrasp), you can go after unike achievements and titles, you can get reputations up to exaulted and so on and so forth. All of which has been polished to a better degree than in any other game.

These are just 3 points, I could go on but the post would get rather big.

 To all you morons who are saying WOW is so easy to play, name a hard one other than maybe Eve?.  You people who say this are really the stupid ones because none i have played are hard to play?. If you mean that WOW isn't a hard grind fest then i agree.

 Truthfully  I think most people who say that are no skill players who want play time to equal more powerful characters so they can kick butt.

 Sorry that they have made it so people who have more spare time than others don't have so much of an advantage.  I almost guarantee that the majority of  "WOW is easy"  talkers are just bad players and mostly point and clickers.

Originally posted by Thebigbopper

 To all you morons who are saying WOW is so easy to play, name a hard one other than maybe Eve?.  You people who say this are really the stupid ones because none i have played are hard to play?. If you mean that WOW isn't a hard grind fest then i agree.

 Truthfully  I think most people who say that are no skill players who want play time to equal more powerful characters so they can kick butt.

 Sorry that they have made it so people who have more spare time than others don't have so much of an advantage.  I almost guarantee that the majority of  "WOW is easy"  talkers are just bad players and mostly point and clickers.

The great myth of WoW. That the game was made easier to accomodate "casuals" with little time available. If thats the case why is Naxx/Ulduar/VoA/Eye and now doubt the new joke "instance" ( use that word advisably since its only 1 room) full on Saturday and Friday nights?

Why is it when you try to zone into an instance on a friday or saturday night you get the message "additional isntances cannot be launched"? Arent all you casuals supposed to be out living your FANTASTIC social lives? 

No. WotLK was dumbed down to accomodate the dumb people who play it. Lets say you're a teacher at a high school teaching the bottom English class. Do you walk in and give out James Joyce novels and Shakespeare plays for them to read? No. Of course you wouldnt. You would give them something to read at their level.

WotLK was changed to reflect the playerbase. Quite a few of the old school people I played with (those around since late Nov 2004) have quit the game. Yet most of them had jobs, some were even married and had kids.

No. Wotlk was changed to appease the ADHD Ritalin kiddies that have taken over the game in the last 18 months.

3 reasons mainly.

1. It's not complicated, a 9 year old could be in a top raiding guild in WOW

2. It's polished, not many hacks or gamebreaking bugs

3. You can play it on a turd

Originally posted by Zorndorf

 

You forget one thing and made several GIANT mistakes.

Look at www.xfire.com and see the top 10 of PC games being played.

Stop banging on about XFire. I never used it nor know anyone who does. Infact, why would any intelligent use that piece of rubbish?

 Because WoW is the best package of gameplay-art-reliability. The worst parts of WoW are still good and polished, only other MMO that comes close to beeing as good at what it does is EVE, it's just a shame they forgot good old useles fun when they made EVE.

i watch my friends play the game and it influences me to also play the game and it was pretty good - i mean what's not to like in wow - exploring a new world is awesome and leveling your character to be strong is popular in rpg games

Originally posted by JiuJitsu

i watch my friends play the game and it influences me to also play the game and it was pretty good - i mean what's not to like in wow - exploring a new world is awesome and leveling your character to be strong is popular in rpg games

it is not great, it is popular. 

Wow introduced mmorpgs to the casual players. Then it transformed casual players to hardcore. Now 90% of people play hardcore and not even in wow.