Cataclysm

[Paelos]

Ghostcrawler told me it's fine. You're all just whiners.

[Merusk]

They're used to dips and ebbs in sub numbers when "A new big thing" comes out.  If sub numbers are still low when Rift has been out 3-6 months, you'll probably see a change in tune (if not leadership.).    If sub numbers go back up, it'll be just another fly-by-night dip in the metrics like they've experienced over the last 6 years when other MMOs have come out with lots of hoopla.   At this point it's a waiting game, and I'll wait with my $30 a month in my pocket instead of theirs.

[Yegolev]

Today I was trying to figure out how to get to Razor Hill from Org, and eventually I figured out where the elevator to the flight platform was.  Later on, I wandered across the river and back up to the bridge and I was like "what the shit, everything is so close together in this game, I'm not fucking paying to ride that lion again, I'll just run."

Thanks, Turbine.

[Simond]

They're used to dips and ebbs in sub numbers when "A new big thing" comes out.  If sub numbers are still low when Rift has been out 3-6 months, you'll probably see a change in tune (if not leadership.).    If sub numbers go back up, it'll be just another fly-by-night dip in the metrics like they've experienced over the last 6 years when other MMOs have come out with lots of hoopla.   At this point it's a waiting game, and I'll wait with my $30 a month in my pocket instead of theirs.

On the other hand, current best-guess of subs numbers at the moment (based on player concurrency) is below this time last year. Which should worry the devs, bearing in mind that this time last year was "Four months into ICC, no new content in sight".

[Paelos]

If the devs don't realize or haven't been informed that they are bleeding accounts at this point, then there's no hope for them.

I believe that they projected a large loss of accounts post-Arthas. That was their popular content tie-in to WC3 and they put it off as long as they could. I think that they also projected a loss due to instituting harder requirements in heroics and raids. What I hope they didn't project was people returning after 6 months when they bring in the newer content, because that's not going to happen this time.

All that matters now is if the losses are worse than their expectations. If not, they won't bother changing their development tactics at all, and I don't think I will return to the game even if they try to fix it now.

[Malakili]

How long do you think you've would've kept playing if basically the game was still Wraith + more easy heroics with badge farming and new raids?  I guess my point is - at what point are they just going to lose people because we can only farm floozles for so long no matter what the context?  I guess I don't see a huge gulf between Wrath and Cata in my day to day experience of the game (keeping in mind that I don't really care about purples anymore and didn't in Wrath either). 

I do the dungeons I can reasonably do given my time restraints (and therefore gear restraints), and slowly gear up my main while leveling alts if I'm in the mood (the leveling alts part being FAR superior to Wrath actually, if I'm being honest).  In this case my maxing out on dungeons is a bit earlier in terms of which content I can do, but the amount of upgrades isn't really less, its just the color of the gear, or the heroic label in some cases. 

[caladein]

On the other hand, current best-guess of subs numbers at the moment (based on player concurrency) is below this time last year. Which should worry the devs, bearing in mind that this time last year was "Four months into ICC, no new content in sight".

Well, two months in as the instance wasn't full open until early February.  And Ruby Sanctum was announced a few weeks after that.

[Paelos]

How long do you think you've would've kept playing if basically the game was still Wraith + more easy heroics with badge farming and new raids?  I guess my point is - at what point are they just going to lose people because we can only farm floozles for so long no matter what the context?  I guess I don't see a huge gulf between Wrath and Cata in my day to day experience of the game (keeping in mind that I don't really care about purples anymore and didn't in Wrath either). 

I do the dungeons I can reasonably do given my time restraints (and therefore gear restraints), and slowly gear up my main while leveling alts if I'm in the mood (the leveling alts part being FAR superior to Wrath actually, if I'm being honest).  In this case my maxing out on dungeons is a bit earlier in terms of which content I can do, but the amount of upgrades isn't really less, its just the color of the gear, or the heroic label in some cases. 

Short answer, I don't care how hard things got, but it drove off all my old friends. No friends playing = who gives a shit about the game from me. I'm not about to rebuild an entire social circle again just so I can do another raid that's redone from the raids before. I killed Nefarian and Ragnaros with my original raiding group. Unless they could bring them back to the game or transport me back to 2006, I don't think anything they do is going to affect my decision to play anymore.

[Selby]

Short answer, I don't care how hard things got, but it drove off all my old friends. No friends playing = who gives a shit about the game from me.

Personally, every single expansion of this game has done this to me.  I had a circle of friends in vanilla, another in TBC, 2-3 during WotLK and now a mixture of the 2-3 leftovers of the last expansion are still around.  I guess I am just a bit more willing to put up with the ebb and flow of accounts and players as long as I am having fun.  I've had gamer circles online since the mid 90's and losing members from time to time is something I'm just used to.

[Paelos]

Honestly Selby, I would probably keep playing more if they made the game more forgiving so I didn't hate my fellow man in randoms as a tank. The fact they made the game harder means I have to keep my eye on folks now.

[apocrypha]

I've taken up the healing reins (no pun, I'm a priest not a shammy) again for the first time since Cata launch and I have to say that tanking random heroics is a lot easier than healing them. We're onto 3 bosses down in BWD and that's been much more relaxing than healing random heroics.

I was scratching my head at the "heroics are hard" stuff, but I see it now as healer. I'd rather take the 20 minute queue and DPS them.

[Tannhauser]

Yeah that's it.  I enjoy playing healing classes, but I'll not go back unless they make some sort of change.  Healing now is UNFUN and I'm paying $15 a month not to have fun?  Nein danke.

[Ironwood]

This is it all round though :

1 - The DPS have huge queues and get frustrated at the wait and the 'new' style of play.
2 - The Tanks have to have more control of an instance and slow things down more than they're used to.
3 - The healers have to work a lot harder to keep just the tanks up, so the DPS have to slow and be wary due to this.


It's a recipe for fucking disaster every time.  Sure, in randoms you'll occasionally get a group who understands all this, but they're rare as hens teeth.  So, you want to get your own group on.  The own group you used to have are probably bored mindless of this, however, due to the overriding rule number 4 :

4 - The loot, badges and itemisation is utter shit and NOT WORTH THE EFFORT.


I can't believe an expansion finally made me quit and, to be brutal, I'm not missing it in the slightest.

 

[SurfD]

This is it all round though :

1 - The DPS have huge queues and get frustrated at the wait and the 'new' style of play.
2 - The Tanks have to have more control of an instance and slow things down more than they're used to.
3 - The healers have to work a lot harder to keep just the tanks up, so the DPS have to slow and be wary due to this.


It's a recipe for fucking disaster every time.  Sure, in randoms you'll occasionally get a group who understands all this, but they're rare as hens teeth.  So, you want to get your own group on.  The own group you used to have are probably bored mindless of this, however, due to the overriding rule number 4 :

4 - The loot, badges and itemisation is utter shit and NOT WORTH THE EFFORT.


I can't believe an expansion finally made me quit and, to be brutal, I'm not missing it in the slightest.

  

Really, this is more of a knee jerk reaction then anything.   While what you are saying IS true in some cases, only the first point really applies in any meaningful form.  DPS queues are terrible, everyone agrees with this.

2 and 3 only really apply to people at the very bottom of the gearing curve (Ie, you barely have an average item level high enough to get into a heroic).   Sure, if the dungeon finder happens to throw you together into a group wiith 3 or 4 people who barely manage to qualify to be there, your run will likely be rough.  And this was a serious issue a month and a half ago.  Now a days though, most of the runs I end up in on my boomkin (or any alt) are almost back to Wrath level facerolls.    CC is almost never used (you might cc one mob in a pull, if it is really irritating, instead of 3), tanks just barrel into the group, rotate short timer cooldowns, and plow through the instance.   I havent been in a failed Dungeon Finder Pug in almost a month, and most of the time, if someone DOES leave, it is usually one of those "I personally dont like this dungeon, bye" kind of things.

As for 4.  I am not sure what your arguement is here.   Loot is loot.  For the most part, I have not seen any terriblely itemized gear.  Hell, with very few exceptions, it is possible to find perfectly itemized gear for nearly every slot for almost any given class.  Really, the only gear complaint I have at the moment is that, as far as raids go, they could have used a bit more variety, and tweaked where some stuff dropped.  Stuff like that there is only ONE pair of leather caster wrists in the entire raid tier (of course, that is probably more of a symptom of the fact that there only really needs to BE one pair of leather caster wrists), or the fact that if you are an enhance shaman, your only choice for weapons is either BoE's (that drop off trash in the raid instance with the least trash in the history of raid instances), or drops off the hardest boss in the tier.

As to loot being utter shit and not worth the effort?  That is purely subjective.  If you want to go that route, might as well say that there is no point in ever playing the game at max level, since the hole point of the "end game" is to endlessly cycle through marginally useful tiny gear upgrades over and over again.

[Paelos]

I think the main problem I've had with gear is that I can't tell a huge difference in my character if I have full 346 blues or 5 epics. The epics don't seem to have as much of a meaningful effect on the overall success of the run because they've marginalized its impact on the encounters. If you are a purist, that's a great thing because it demands that a player be decent at their job no matter how much gear they carry.

If you're like me, you realize that if all players were decent that would be perfect, but you are friends with a lot of shitty players who are nice people.

[Shrike]

What I noticed--from the enhance shaman side of things--is that the majority of the 346 loot was actually pretty well itemized for enhance. The majority of 359 epics is not. There are a few exceptions, but mostly it has piss poor stats. However, the extra 13 item levels largely seem to make up for it with reforging. But only just. Also, as usual, the epic weapons for enhance are a complete fucking joke, but I suppose we should be used to this. Back to last-boss-in-a-raid-drops-your-shit mentality.

Personally, I'm so sick of the whole miserable mess that I would quit, but there's nowhere to go for regular long term video game jollies. I've taken to playing my warrior and DK again, but they'll just run into the steaming pile of shit the post-85 game is when they cap. Until then, they're fun. There's some irony for you.

[Sheepherder]

1 - The DPS have huge queues and get frustrated at the wait and the 'new' style of play.
2 - The Tanks have to have more control of an instance and slow things down more than they're used to.
3 - The healers have to work a lot harder to keep just the tanks up, so the DPS have to slow and be wary due to this.

1 - The wait is killer.  The new style of play isn't so bad for DPS, except for CC.  CC should be fire-and-forget and nigh unbreakable, because just randomly CC'ing shit and it coming out okay would solve part of problem #2.  More shit should work like Sap (doesn't drop you in combat).
2 - Tanks have multiple targets to babysit, an AoE rotation, a single target rotation, a cooldown rotation, and (usually) lead.  Blizzard should pick two, maybe three.
3 - Relying on chained slow efficient casts is terrible, maximizing APM is for the Zerg, proactive healing sucks.  It's like paladin healing in Wrath without the big numbers.

[Merusk]

2 and 3 only really apply to people at the very bottom of the gearing curve (Ie, you barely have an average item level high enough to get into a heroic).  

Thing is, the bottom of the curve is usually what's doing PUGs.  Those who have raid-geared or raid-ready mains tend to run in guild groups and those with working heroic-maxed alts aren't running them but once a day for points, if that.   So you're typically left with the bottom of the barrel the later in the day you run.  This was the case with Wrath groups, too, but they were much easier to faceroll or pickup the slack for a failing healer/ tank if you were an ubergeared DPS.

[sinij]

On a fundamental level - good player's ability to carry bad players and bad player's ability to out-gear encounters were both greatly diminished this expansion. As a result bottom (and quite a bit of middle) fell off.

What surprises me is that massive firings at Blizzards and hat-in-hand 'promise, we can change!' is so slow to come.

[Paelos]

On a fundamental level - good player's ability to carry bad players and bad player's ability to out-gear encounters were both greatly diminished this expansion. As a result bottom (and quite a bit of middle) fell off.

What surprises me is that massive firings at Blizzards and hat-in-hand 'promise, we can change!' is so slow to come.

Too early for that. They absolutely will not publically admit that their direction for this game was wrong. They will admit a miscalculation or a prediction that proved unpopular, but they will not admit fault. Also, as I've said before, they predicted a large fall-off. I imagine they are getting pretty much exactly what they expected with this shift in their model. I think they have completely shifted their business focus from adoption to retention.

This shift in a way is sort of confusing. On the one hand they redo an entire set of older content, which leads you to believe they are proactively seeking out newer players or retuning players to give the game a fresh glow. Then, with the other hand, they increase the raiding level, decrease the effectiveness of gear, and put most of their heroic pugs out to pasture. However, they also took 25 mans out back and shot them by having gear cross over to 10 mans as well, but as stated before gear matters less.

All in all, I believe they are torn in-house about this direction. I think there are people that recognize they are killing their bad players, and that they are shooting the golden goose. I also think there are people who think the game isn't a game anymore if it's a bad player slot machine that's facerolled into oblivion. Somewhere in the middle there's a bunch of average players who are getting fucked over by this tug of war.

[WindupAtheist]

Also, as I've said before, they predicted a large fall-off.

Maybe the people over there who know who Arthas was predicted a drop-off in subscribers, but I imagine their bosses will be far less understanding. It'll be interesting to see how things stand six months from now.

[Paelos]

Believe me, if there was ever a time for a set of suits to fuck the epeen nerds in the ass, now is the time. There's profit to be had!

[Ingmar]

I suspect that the pre-Cataclysm profits were so titanically huge that it will be a long time before they need to think about any kind of "massive firings" for financial reasons.

[Paelos]

I suspect that the pre-Cataclysm profits were so titanically huge that it will be a long time before they need to think about any kind of "massive firings" for financial reasons.

Shit, that money's already been taxed and distributed. They rely on cash flow, yo! 

[Ingmar]

Well, it's more that I mean they're probably still making a lot of money, they're probably just downsizing from 'massive tower of money hats' to 'moderate tower of moneyhats' so far.

[Paelos]

Totally agree. I don't think they are hurting. I still don't think anybody likes going from making $10M a month to $5M though. You have any idea what the payments are on those money hats???

[Fordel]

Well, it's more that I mean they're probably still making a lot of money, they're probably just downsizing from 'massive tower of money hats' to 'moderate tower of moneyhats' so far.

What would you know, Hat-less peasant!

[Tannhauser]

Shit, I'd settle for a money headband.  So is there actual data on WoW's subs dropping or is this just wishful thinking for us disgruntled types?

[Merusk]

Shit, I'd settle for a money headband.  So is there actual data on WoW's subs dropping or is this just wishful thinking for us disgruntled types?

Until the next quarterly stock report it's all speculation and wishful thinking.  Even the "concurrent players" metrics someone mentioned are just speculation as they don't count people still paying but not logging in. (Which also covers a few folks in this forum.)

[Paelos]

Shit, I'd settle for a money headband.  So is there actual data on WoW's subs dropping or is this just wishful thinking for us disgruntled types?

Honestly we won't know until May when they release the quarterly reports. My guess is that subscription revenue will be down again. Here's their MMORPG Quarterly breakdown for the first quarter:

2011 - Not released yet
2010 - $306M
2009 - $314M
2008 - $275M

My guess, I would be shocked if the reports weren't below $300M, but not much below. There wasn't enough time in that period to really see much of an effect. By June, if we see a drop down to $250M for the quarter, that's about the huge loss I'd expect. Anything lower than that is awful.

[Sheepherder]

Personally, I'm so sick of the whole miserable mess that I would quit, but there's nowhere to go for regular long term video game jollies. I've taken to playing my warrior and DK again, but they'll just run into the steaming pile of shit the post-85 game is when they cap. Until then, they're fun. There's some irony for you.

Leveling alts is pretty much what I ended up doing with this expansion before my sub lapsed.  So, two irregularities: I give no shits about the endgame whatsoever, and I'm unsubbed, probably for a while, and the last time that happened for any length was when TBC kicked off with a nerfbat that even they thought was heavy-handed to the only class I had to 60 at the time.

[sinij]

If you a new addict, it is never easy to quit. If you are old hand like me, you know that all the dealers are the same and you can switch one crack for another pretty much at will.

Go try some other mmorpg, they are ultimately all the same, unless you are into grandma-corpse-fucking like WUA and decide to play UO or original EQ. In that can you will at least get history lesson.

[Lakov_Sanite]

We alternate between coke, meth and heroin. WUA still does whippets.

[Sheepherder]

2004 doesn't count as "new" anymore, I don't think.  Regardless, I'd rather retreat into single player games rather than a new MMO.

[apocrypha]

How long are your DPS queues in the US? You're all talking like they're 40 mins plus.

They're 15-20 mins here. Early in the morning usually shorter, 8-10 mins or so. Instant as tank, obviously, and healer queues are half as long as DPS ones typically. If this is markedly different from the US then I wonder why? Is it something to do with the way servers are clustered here or what?