Originally posted by Razeron

Wonder how many more NA/EU subs they'll hemorrage after smearing Chinese crap all over the game?

 

Might as well just implement npcs that spam auction gold sales in game, server side.

No complaints about the Scottish crap Dwarves brought in?  Or the Jamaican crap that the Trolls brought with them?  As for the gold spam remark you may have a  point.  I bet not only WOW will be plaged with gold sellers but every MMO on the market. *eye roll*

Anything that hastens closing this terrible chapter in MMO history can only be a good thing.

Originally posted by popinjay

 

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Originally posted by czekoskwigel

 

Let's assume for a minute that they some of the naysayers are right, that WoW is clearly now catering to a younger audience...

Could this be a good thing for the genre? 

If they push out the more serious and mature players, where will they go? 

Will the infusion of new blood into existing MMO's breath new life into them?  Does it increase the potential pool of customers for future MMO's?
 

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There's always room for new players and the younger, the better. If they are young and it's their first game, they could very well have a loyalty factor that could last for years. WoW had a loyalty factor from veteran players who played other games for years before so it shows it can be done.

 

 

 

Where will the "serious" players go? I hope they go to consoles because games aren't serious and I'm tired of a certain crowd who continually press devs and companies to make games for their little fiefdoms. Games are supposed to be fun, not serious business with required mods, required addons, required gear, required mandatory meetings, etc.

 

 

On the one hand you said "younger" players, then on the other you said "mature" players so I assume you mean "old". Age doesn't matter as far as games.. old people like good games just like young people do.

 

You realize there is a major difference between serious "content" and serious like "omg it's Tuesday where IS PopinJAY we need his healz" correct?  I am 36 and have no interest in the direction WoW took with goblins and now Pandas...Fool me once shame on you (goblins), fool me twice shame on me (Pandas).  This will be the first expansion I have failed to purchase. 

to the OP..wth dude? you bring up a subject and are like, "this isn't the place to do whatever about this here" and are like, ok i want to talk about his more but don't talk about it or whatever..wth?

wow is no longer adding subs..period!! (not counting adding countries) doesn't matter if they bring in panda's or dumb down their now easy game or talent trees, which should now just go away because it's all cookie because they made it that way.. All Blizzard is doing is trying to hang onto subs as best they can, and it's not a bad thing for business, it's just how it is. Actually until Netflix i've never seen a company move in a direction to totally burn themselves more. Short term, they are doing great and if you ask me they are just buying time for whatever new mmo they have coming and even killing WOW for the hardcore players so that they will all move over to whatever new MMO they have coming out in the next couple of years. I mean Blizzard isn't dumb..actually it's pretty cool watching how the fan boys are trying to hold on and the others are just like, really? do you hear what your saying? lol

anyway, i hope blizzard does come out with something new because even this is getting old.

peace

lascer

Originally posted by uohaloran

I think very little will change.

/agreed

Originally posted by czekoskwigel

 If they push out the more serious and mature players, where will they go? 

Well if you look at the history of mmo the original exodus was from SWG to WoW when SWG killed itself by redesigning the entire profession system, and SWG players was the more mature of the brunch, so history has shown us that whichever polished game that has the best timing (springs up at the moment of the death of the last big thing) wins, regardless of player maturity.

Originally posted by czekoskwigel

As usual, many people are wearing their WoW Doomsday sandwhich boards as a result of Blizzards recent expansion announcement.

Let's assume for a minute that they some of the naysayers are right, that WoW is clearly now catering to a younger audience with the Panda's and Pokemon and the dumbed down talent system (This is NOT the place to argue this, so go elsewhere please).

Could this be a good thing for the genre?  If they push out the more serious and mature players, where will they go?  Will the infusion of new blood into existing MMO's breath new life into them?  Does it increase the potential pool of customers for future MMO's?

Pokemon is targeted at 20 somethings that grew up watching it as a kid.  It would be like if they added Ninja Turtles for us 30ish folks.

Regardless, they aren't pushing anyone out.  SWTOR and GW2 are.  And whether or not those people move on permantly depends on how good those games, not how many Pandas and Pokemon WoW ends up having.

If too many leave, here will come Item shops and more lvl's of free to play.

If you look at numbers alone and a few other factors of  any mmo's then its a normal path.

WoW 7 years old topped around 12.7 million players on Wotlk (active accounts)

Cataclysm reduced to number with 1 million or so give or take.

MoP will reduce this number even more, not only are players fed up with Cataclysm but MoP takes a wrong turn for many people.

SWtor will likely eat subs from WoW

GW2 will do the same and i dont know many people that play 2 mmo's due to their limited time they have free.

2012 will be a very tuff year for Blizzard, iam not a hater of wow, i resubbed 2 weeks ago to check out how its going.

And i must say nothing changed as its still do your daily stuff / dungeon / raid / arena / BG (world of instacraft)

Toll Barad is deserted as you cannot enter when you are attacking due to Horde not queuing...

My prediction is that at the end of 2012 wow lost around 40% of their playerbase due to - Old age syndrome - Rift - SWtor - GW2 - and MoP itself wich will turn players off.

Even if its 30% or 20% Blizzard should fire Ghostcrawler who is ruining WoW since he became lead desinger.

Time will tell and i might be wrong offcourse, but WoW is losing more subs then they gain wich is normal for an mmo 7 years old, and a craptastic lead desinger who is running out of idea's to keep the game fresh and interesting.

Originally posted by czekoskwigel

As usual, many people are wearing their WoW Doomsday sandwhich boards as a result of Blizzards recent expansion announcement.

Let's assume for a minute that they some of the naysayers are right, that WoW is clearly now catering to a younger audience with the Panda's and Pokemon and the dumbed down talent system (This is NOT the place to argue this, so go elsewhere please).

Could this be a good thing for the genre?  If they push out the more serious and mature players, where will they go?  Will the infusion of new blood into existing MMO's breath new life into them?  Does it increase the potential pool of customers for future MMO's?

If we assume as true what you are saying then the rest of mmos will start catering to a younger audience too and I dont think this is good for tne genre. But I dont think thats gonna happen, WoW will continue the way it is for a long time still.

Originally posted by Mothanos

If you look at numbers alone and a few other factors of  any mmo's then its a normal path.

 

WoW 7 years old topped around 12.7 million players on Wotlk (active accounts)

Cataclysm reduced to number with 1 million or so give or take.

MoP will reduce this number even more, not only are players fed up with Cataclysm but MoP takes a wrong turn for many people.

 

SWtor will likely eat subs from WoW

GW2 will do the same and i dont know many people that play 2 mmo's due to their limited time they have free.

 

2012 will be a very tuff year for Blizzard, iam not a hater of wow, i resubbed 2 weeks ago to check out how its going.

And i must say nothing changed as its still do your daily stuff / dungeon / raid / arena / BG (world of instacraft)

Toll Barad is deserted as you cannot enter when you are attacking due to Horde not queuing...

 

My prediction is that at the end of 2012 wow lost around 40% of their playerbase due to - Old age syndrome - Rift - SWtor - GW2 - and MoP itself wich will turn players off.

Even if its 30% or 20% Blizzard should fire Ghostcrawler who is ruining WoW since he became lead desinger.

 

Time will tell and i might be wrong offcourse, but WoW is losing more subs then they gain wich is normal for an mmo 7 years old, and a craptastic lead desinger who is running out of idea's to keep the game fresh and interesting.

 

 

Although your conclusions make sense, your arguments do not.

For instance, MoP isn't going to drive more people away just because it isn't your cup of tea, Tol Barad not firing up due to Horde not queueing is a server/battlegroup issue, not something worldwide. Ghostcrawler is not God within Blizzard. He still answers to other people. Etcetera.

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Originally posted by Alalala

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Originally posted by kostoslav

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Originally posted by Alalala

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Originally posted by uohaloran

I think very little will change.

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Except that, everyday, you will need to ask yourself what shaped your life to spend your leisure time with this guy.
 

 
 

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I m 26 years old and I have already seen 4 wars. So in my case, I would pick panda over "mature blood & gore" any day.

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First and most important, thank you for serving our country.  Sincerely.

 

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On topic: I would pick Pandas. I would purchase this mask from the cash shop:

Then parade around while trying to infuriate as many hardcore WoW players as I can. Because this is an absolutely silly reason to quit WoW over.

I quit WoW because it bored me, given the run around by poor customer support and didn't feel I was getting my money's worth any more. Not because I disliked one game play feature.

You can't get angry at some one 'BECAUSE THEY ARE BREAKING DA LORE' when they write the damn thing.

I will be playing WoW for a long time to come, I'll also roll a panda monk, I don't need an excuse, I enjoy the game.

5.0 here i come!

And no I'm not a new gamer, and no my first game wasn't WoW, believe it or not. Shocking right?! :O

Some of you people are really sad, saying that every gamer who play WoW must be a nutjob, just because you already played it for 6 years and are burned out, doesn't mean everyone else is too.

Okay? Okay!

Pandas rock, kung fu or no kung fu.

TBH I don't see it happening, if so many games can fail to grasp the WOW player, I don't see more of the same driving them off.

Originally posted by Sanova

Originally posted by rt33

"The upcoming WoW Exodus: Good or bad?"

Exodus? Are you serious?

All I've noticed so far is people re-subbing due to all the headline attention wow has received lately. I showed my wife some MoP and she's considering playing, says it looks much more interesting now than before?

I don't know how Blizz does it? Won't be long an they'll be breaking all new sub records.

"Women and Children" will find Mop alot more appealing then grown men, thats not a bad thing but seeing how MMO's in general are like 90% male dominated this might of been a bad move on Blizzards part if they wanted to stay on top.

they might gain a million casual mom's with there preteens children using Panadas as bait but will lose millions of real long term MMO players.

My predictions are that WoW will lose about 3 million subs within the next year due to Swtor and other games combined that are coming out soon.

IMO WoW should of went all out with the Emerald Dream and went hard on the "bad ass factor" instead of the "cute & cuddly"

You mean "grown teenage males"? Because, "real" men of year 2011, do not have this extreme fear of things that have been connected to cuteness.  It would make sense that a male teenager who is trying to form an identity and trying to move on to adulthood is overly afraid of anything that may connect him to children; however, grown men should not have that fear. They should be confident enough to see past their prejudices and to do some actual testing before forming an opinion. 

Have been bored for teh past few months. Basically since 1 month after cataclysm released. Player base has gone worse, instances are just full of complainers and alot of arguments happen were 1 or 2 then leave the group, you left hanging around to find replacements and as soon as you do they either leave right away or someone else bails.

Raids are crap, even in a guild as they now always take the same people week in week out so you dont get to do them, and yet you are not allowed to pug for a raid till after the weekend (meaning monday and tuesday is the only time one can pug) and by then everyones locked.

Then all the people you once knew have been leaving, i myself have had 2 gamecards, and hardly log in anymore, 7 lvl 85's 6 of which have done all quests and achievements to do with cataclysm except instance and raid ones. Only my main has those and no cataclysm raid completed yet either. Server has nose dived to no players (balnazzar EU) gone from full-high-medium-low and now has been plagged new players only. I am alliance and even with that we are still the minority faction of at least 6-1 against horde players who thesedays just go round in hunting packs lookign for alliance out there.

As of right now, with the news that the next expantion will have panda's and monk class (alias king fu panda like the cartoon film) and also a pokemon type companion pet thing, they may as well start working on carebears and possible cat people (thundercats) as well as drop their PG rating of 12+ to 3+

I really dont think i will be continuing with this game much longer myself. Looks like i will have to head to Skyrim/Diablo3 and any other single player game as thusfar there is no online based decent game out there at all worth the monthly subscription. Have tried several F2P game (perfect world, forsaken world, rift, lotro and others). Yes thier are some that have gone from P2P to F2P but these are failed games that are trying to survive that little bit longer and rake in some revenue to cover its costs. Others have always been F2P but these mostly tend to be asian games. I would like to stick with teh P2P ones as one knows there is no other costs involved, F2P has hidden costs and can well exceed the £9 a mth cost from the P2P ones.

Pity blizard has gone this route, vanilla warcraft was fun, went downhill slightly with TBC dropped alot with WoTLK to the point of actually thinking they could not tone the game down anymore. Cata was ok but the playerbase was soo used to wotlk now that marking teh game up was too late. Now they toned it down and the panda expansion really has put me off.

Originally posted by czekoskwigel

As usual, many people are wearing their WoW Doomsday sandwhich boards as a result of Blizzards recent expansion announcement.

Let's assume for a minute that they some of the naysayers are right, that WoW is clearly now catering to a younger audience with the Panda's and Pokemon and the dumbed down talent system (This is NOT the place to argue this, so go elsewhere please).

Could this be a good thing for the genre?  If they push out the more serious and mature players, where will they go?  Will the infusion of new blood into existing MMO's breath new life into them?  Does it increase the potential pool of customers for future MMO's?

If it go down like that I think it is a good thing.

It is not good for a genre to be ruled so much and long by a single game, it hurts the creativity of the entire genre.

A few large games with all a few million players is better than a single game with 12 million. It forces the games to compete and make themselves better all the time, monopoly is never good.

Of course if a single game just would take over the torch it would neither be good or bad, just the same.

I don't see the Wow players bleeding into other existing MMOs as you say though, it is more likely that they jump to the new releasing games instead. If the Wow players were willing to get into Rifts they would already be there now.

Originally posted by Praetalus

Originally posted by rt33

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

Originally posted by czekoskwigel

As usual, many people are wearing their WoW Doomsday sandwhich boards as a result of Blizzards recent expansion announcement.

Let's assume for a minute that they some of the naysayers are right, that WoW is clearly now catering to a younger audience with the Panda's and Pokemon and the dumbed down talent system (This is NOT the place to argue this, so go elsewhere please).

Could this be a good thing for the genre?  If they push out the more serious and mature players, where will they go?  Will the infusion of new blood into existing MMO's breath new life into them?  Does it increase the potential pool of customers for future MMO's?

Doomsayers will be doomsayers. Pay no heed to them, they've been predicting WoW's demise and withering away withing months since 2007 with the surety of Nostradamus on crack.

 

Although all the player activity monitoring tools do indicate a significant and consistent decrease in player population, but let's see what the Activision Blizzard conference meeting this month has to say about the sub and revenue figures, those will be actual figures.

 

As for the rest, let's just see how things will go in the upcoming 6 months, WoW has always had a way of defying predictions.

 

Originally posted by rt33

Originally posted by CujoSWAoA

Why do you guys like to use the word "exodus" so much?  Its like you can't wait for any feather to fall for the chance to whip that word out.

It's the word they use pre-expansion, post expansion they scream how awesome it is and how they knew it would be.

 

Like with CATA you mean?

Right...

I've never taken the "it has to be because of cata" reason. I'm sure it played a roll which certainly didn't help, i'm more on board with a combo deal "Burned Out" (wow finally reached a burnout stage for many peeps), "F2P" checking if the grass is greener and for free to boot. This is Blizzard i wouldn't be surprised if they announce all million are back and toss another couple million on the record later on. Sure i bounced in and out of wow though out the years but I've only started to steadily play wow this last year or so, it's a good mmo. Back in the day i simply would never give it a real shot or time of day in between EQ, SWG, EQ2, a little addiction with AO, AC in there somewhere along with trying several other mmo's. I understand why it's so popular now that I've played it for more than a month.

Thanks for being brave enough to say you play. It's apparently the cool thing to do now to hate on it...lol. Not just just saying these boards, so don't flame me, but in general. I absolutely love the game, however, I'm a casual gamer, not hardcore, so with WoW, everything is going my way. 

No problem, i'll admit i used to be pretty hardcore (when i had more free time) family, kids sports, coaching kids hockey team, work (of course), sucks up most of my time and find wow to be a perfect fix for my little mmo cravings.

Originally posted by david361107

to the OP..wth dude? you bring up a subject and are like, "this isn't the place to do whatever about this here" and are like, ok i want to talk about his more but don't talk about it or whatever..wth?

 

wow is no longer adding subs..period!! (not counting adding countries) doesn't matter if they bring in panda's or dumb down their now easy game or talent trees, which should now just go away because it's all cookie because they made it that way.. All Blizzard is doing is trying to hang onto subs as best they can, and it's not a bad thing for business, it's just how it is. Actually until Netflix i've never seen a company move in a direction to totally burn themselves more. Short term, they are doing great and if you ask me they are just buying time for whatever new mmo they have coming and even killing WOW for the hardcore players so that they will all move over to whatever new MMO they have coming out in the next couple of years. I mean Blizzard isn't dumb..actually it's pretty cool watching how the fan boys are trying to hold on and the others are just like, really? do you hear what your saying? lol

anyway, i hope blizzard does come out with something new because even this is getting old.

 

peace

lascer

Let's start here shall we? Doing they are doing great in the "short term" - Are they? The games been number one for 7 years. 7 Years. 7. That's not short term for an MMO - it's actually quite long-term when you consider all the games that came out post wow that are now f2p and have completely fallen apart. The company is not burning themselves just because a group of players are bitching about an expansion they don't like. As a parent, I can tell you that Blizzard will handle this just like any parent deals with a child throwing a tantrum. You ignore them until they get over it. (Just like the nerd rage I heard from people bitching about the Draenei Race in BC who were "quiting" lol)

Next, you guys are talking numbers on WoW and not taking into account the numbers from other games. Even if wow had 5 million subs, it's still more then number 2. Get that? Still more by at least 50% then the number 2 game.

Let's just all knock this stuff off. It's not going anywhere. It's not. Period. This MoP expansion is just the next chapter, you really think they'll end it here? Even IF it doesn't do well... and it will.. They have at least 2 more expansions planed to hit a cap of 100. So go ahead and talk your smack and act like it's going away. It won't. Like it or not, it will remain.

..... Now that I think about it... You know why it will remain number one? Number one reason - IT CAN PLAY ON ANY COMPUTER SINCE 1985. You don't have to upgrade shit to play it and kids can play on their parents shitty computers, or grandparents shitty computers. It plays on laptops flawlessly, it plays on school computers. It plays on internet cafe computers. This is not an accident folks... hell, I've rencently rigged an old Mrs. Pacman machine to play it as well as a electric football table with a wired on screen.

There's no accident that Blizz only does incremental updates to the engine and not an overhaul. It's good business. Eq2 was a much better game then WoW in 2004.. you know why it flopped and never passed 400K subs? It ran like utter shit on even the newest PC's. The game still runs like pig ass now and it's been 7 years. I'm telling you and will with my last breath - this game will remain number 1. TOR will come and go just like the other 20 wow killers that hit the market. 

Ok.. I can't think of anything else to say right now.. 

Originally posted by InFaVilla

Originally posted by Sanova

Originally posted by rt33

"The upcoming WoW Exodus: Good or bad?"

Exodus? Are you serious?

All I've noticed so far is people re-subbing due to all the headline attention wow has received lately. I showed my wife some MoP and she's considering playing, says it looks much more interesting now than before?

I don't know how Blizz does it? Won't be long an they'll be breaking all new sub records.

"Women and Children" will find Mop alot more appealing then grown men, thats not a bad thing but seeing how MMO's in general are like 90% male dominated this might of been a bad move on Blizzards part if they wanted to stay on top.

they might gain a million casual mom's with there preteens children using Panadas as bait but will lose millions of real long term MMO players.

My predictions are that WoW will lose about 3 million subs within the next year due to Swtor and other games combined that are coming out soon.

IMO WoW should of went all out with the Emerald Dream and went hard on the "bad ass factor" instead of the "cute & cuddly"

 

You mean "grown teenage males"? Because, "real" men of year 2011, do not have this extreme fear of things that have been connected to cuteness.  It would make sense that a male teenager who is trying to form an identity and trying to move on to adulthood is overly afraid of anything that may connect him to children; however, grown men should not have that fear. They should be confident enough to see past their prejudices and to do some actual testing before forming an opinion. 

Good point, but I was meaning Women and tweens(under 13), you do make a soild point on the fact that most teens would shy away from this game due to the fact that they want to form there adult identity.