Well, that answers the subs question

[Simond]

http://www.blizzard.com/press/070724.shtml

WORLDWIDE

IRVINE, Calif. – July 24, 2007 – Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has reached a new milestone, with a player base now totaling more than 9 million subscribers worldwide. The company is currently working with its partner for World of Warcraft in China, The9, to prepare the game's first expansion, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade™, for launch in mainland China and anticipates an influx of new and returning subscribers in conjunction with that event.

etc etc

[Merusk]

BC hasn't launched in China yet? I figured it had a few months ago.  Still, 9mil prior to that... .   

[Vanifae]

BC hasn't launched in China yet? I figured it had a few months ago.  Still, 9mil prior to that... .   

WoW will be around a long time, even after Blizzard launches their own WoW killer.

[Trippy]

Their subscription growth is slowing (Doom! DOOOOM!!!!). For a while they were adding 0.5 million net subs every two months. Now they are back to their 0.5 million every 4 months growth rate.

[Merusk]

No, no, no.  It's far worse than that, trip!

Didn't you learn anything from the UO Trammel charts?!  It's supposed to reset to "0" at the US release of BC, showing how the expansion killed the game, since so few subs have been added since then.

 :-D

[Chenghiz]

Wow, what happened in July 05? Students getting out of school, maybe?

[Abelian75]

Wow, what happened in July 05? Students getting out of school, maybe?

That's when it launched in China, I believe.

[Trippy]

Yes. 1.5 million bump from the China launch.

[Chimpy]

Wow, what happened in July 05? Students getting out of school, maybe?

The plateau begins when Blizzard stopped selling boxes of the game because they did nto have enough infrastructure in place to meet the demand.

It was also the time where attrition was bad due to a lot of the early adopters quitting out of boredom/frustration with the horrible server stability. There were a couple of cases of multi-day outages and full-rest state gifts from Blizz in that time. The PvP honor system was also brought into the game in june05, which helped retention numbers.

My guess is that their box-sales numbers were pretty steady in that time, but retention was the big issue, summer 05 brought in a lot of new stuff to do with the PvP system, AV and WSG, BWL, and finally ZG at the end of the summer.

EDIT: Oh....I was not reading the question well. But I am sure higher retention had a lot to do with it. I know of a lot of people who bought it early and quit due to the broken/boring stuff left to do at 60.

[Selby]

The plateau begins when Blizzard stopped selling boxes of the game because they did nto have enough infrastructure in place to meet the demand.

It was also the time where attrition was bad due to a lot of the early adopters quitting out of boredom/frustration with the horrible server stability. There were a couple of cases of multi-day outages and full-rest state gifts from Blizz in that time. The PvP honor system was also brought into the game in june05, which helped retention numbers.

It was crazy unstable and frustrating as hell trying to play back in January of 2005.  I had the box for like almost 2 months before even opening it because I knew it was going to suck (the other half went out, stood in line, hunted it down and bought it back in November, then promptly didn't open the box or play).  It finally got stable around that May-June timeframe as I recall.

[Threash]

I must be going senile because i don't recall any of this "crazy unstable" stuff.  I remember having login queues a few times a week and maybe a couple days a month when i couldn't play at all.  The game as always been very stable, at one point it was less than 100%, but it was not nearly as bad as some of you are making it sound.

[Fordel]

Maybe I'm mixing open beta up with the launch, but I remember the servers "crashing" where everything but the chat channels were broken, and you couldn't interact at all with the game world.

That and the ever infamous http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html Queue.

[Trippy]

It was heavily dependent on which server "cluster" you were playing on. Some were very unstable though most of them suffered from DB lag during busy periods.

[ShenMolo]

One interesting thing to note on the US servers is that Blizzard hasn't opened a new server since the BC launch.

Before BC, Blizzard would open a batch of new servers (usually 3-5 servers) every 90 days or so. This allowed a large number of players to relive that "fresh start" feeling, and relieved pressure on overpopulated servers.

There was also frequent free transfer offers that allowed players to get free transfers off of overcrowded servers onto new servers launched specifically for transfers. This no longer happens either.

What seems to be happening now is the depopulation of dozens of servers, and the resulting cries of "merge our servers". These depopulated servers often have very lopsided faction balances, which can make life very hard for the low-pop faction, especially on PVP servers. Auction houses are empty, groups are few and far between, the dominant faction hunts the low pop faction to extinction. The problem is exacerbated by the availability of paid character transfers, as players abandon low-pop servers for higher population servers.

Some of the lowest population servers are those that were added at the launch of BC.

If you watch the General Forums you will routinely see petitions from the denizens of these low population servers for some kind of relief. They often times post screenshots of /who searches during peak hours showing negligible amounts of level 70 players online, or pictures of horde toons gleefully camping the AH & Bank in Stormwind or Ironforge.

Blizzard tries to help these dying servers by using the "recommended server" function pointing new players to them when they start a character, but this service seems buggy at best, as the recommended server is often times a heavily populated server.

From watching this all play out, my gut feeling is that the US player population has reached a plateau, and is probably shrinking. I think the days of new servers and "fresh-starts" are long gone.

There is/was a large population of serial re-rollers (I've done it myself a couple of times) who get bored of the end game grind and drama associated with elite-guild server politics/drama. Now we just transfer our toons around every 90 days (paying $25 for the privilege) rather than stay on servers with crappy end game guilds and drama.

I think Blizzard is trying to avoid the stigma of "server merges" for as long as possible. They have already started merging battlegroups (clusters of servers that are linked together for pvp-instances) to help alleviate the population imbalance in pvp instances and shorten que times for these instances. Without the influx of 1000's of new players, or returning players, the low pop US servers will continue to shrink until mergers will become inevitable.

I guess for the re-rolling crowd, the new frontier could be dead servers. This is happening to a small degree as 'Re-Roll Guilds" are frequently advertising on the Guild Recruitment forums for players who want to re-roll together, often on these dead servers.

For more info on server populations, check out: http://www.warcraftrealms.com/realmstats.php?PHPSESSID=8bd7018287f5977c105248dfb4e0cf6a

EDIT: Added link

[schild]

What?

The highest pop server in that link is the server I picked when we started in WoW as what would probably be the least populated - a launch RP server.

So uh. I was wrong. It's the most populated.

Har.

[Oban]

Also, I seem to remember that all of the launch servers were upgraded to new hardware to support more simultaneous users.

[ShenMolo]

Also, I seem to remember that all of the launch servers were upgraded to new hardware to support more simultaneous users.

I think ALL servers were upgraded to new hardware around the time of the release. You don't hear much if anything about server lag any more, certainly nothing like we heard before BC.

[Chimpy]

It was heavily dependent on which server "cluster" you were playing on. Some were very unstable though most of them suffered from DB lag during busy periods.

Yep. Any realm that came online before the sales freeze was lifted were downright abyssmal in April and May 2005. I played on one of the original batch of realms and it was horrible alot of times.

And as to WoW reaching a subs plateau, no one expected it to not do so this far down the line. Blizzard could literally lose half of it's subs in NA and still be printing money hats.

[Morat20]

[stuff]

So, in short:
Blizzard's still growing, but their servers are depopulating? That doesn't make much sense.

The reason Blizzard's not adding servers much anymore is because each server has a much higher simultaneaous user count (added as prep for TBC). If you have 100 NA servers, and increased the user cap from 3k to 4.5k, you've added the capacity for another 30,000 to 45,000 NA users -- except the 25% rule indicates you've REALLY added the capacity for 120,000 to 170,000 new users. (Peak time runs at 20 to 25% of user base online and playing).

Between the hardware upgrades and the servers added prior to TBC, Blizzard added enough slack capacity for once. Their systems aren't strained. As for merging battlegroups -- that always boils down to the Alliance/Horde imbalance.

[Vanifae]

Lets just put it this way even if Blizzard were to lose 50% of its worldwide subscribers today, it would still be the largest North American MMO.

[Morat20]

Lets just put it this way even if Blizzard were to lose 50% of its worldwide subscribers today, it would still be the largest North American MMO.

Losing 2/3rds would still leave them around 500k+ NA subs.

[Vanifae]

I guess we could use the subscription numbers of EQ at its height compared to now, and that might give some insight into where the numbers might lie in the future... though I would suspect the results would be understandably skewed.

[ShenMolo]

[stuff]

So, in short:
Blizzard's still growing, but their servers are depopulating? That doesn't make much sense.

The reason Blizzard's not adding servers much anymore is because each server has a much higher simultaneaous user count (added as prep for TBC). If you have 100 NA servers, and increased the user cap from 3k to 4.5k, you've added the capacity for another 30,000 to 45,000 NA users -- except the 25% rule indicates you've REALLY added the capacity for 120,000 to 170,000 new users. (Peak time runs at 20 to 25% of user base online and playing).

Between the hardware upgrades and the servers added prior to TBC, Blizzard added enough slack capacity for once. Their systems aren't strained. As for merging battlegroups -- that always boils down to the Alliance/Horde imbalance.

Their worldwide population is growing, they didn't break it out by region that I know of. My general "feel" of the population trend based unscientifically from the forums, server #'s, absence of lowbies, the age of the game etc., is that in North America at least it has leveled off or is slightly declining. I could be completely wrong however. It would be really interesting to see canceled subs vs. activated subs per month for NA.

Your point on the expanded capacity of the servers and the absence of new servers sounds right on the money.

[Abelian75]

Yep. Any realm that came online before the sales freeze was lifted were downright abyssmal in April and May 2005. I played on one of the original batch of realms and it was horrible alot of times.

I was on Malygos, which I'm pretty sure was a launch server, and I never really experienced all this misery people speak of.  There was the downtime which was more than ideal certainly, but I never had any real problems while playing.  Not that I doubt some people did, but I don't think it really hit all servers, even all launch servers.

Edit: I mean, don't get me wrong, I remember the downtime being annoying, definitely.  But it wasn't so bad as to stop me from enjoying myself, and WoW was the first MMO to keep me around for longer than a month or two, and I'd pretty much played every major MMO since UO.  So I guess I'm not so much saying that there weren't problems, just saying that I don't think the problems were so severe that the average player couldn't still have a great deal of fun.

[Threash]

[stuff]

So, in short:
Blizzard's still growing, but their servers are depopulating? That doesn't make much sense.

The reason Blizzard's not adding servers much anymore is because each server has a much higher simultaneaous user count (added as prep for TBC). If you have 100 NA servers, and increased the user cap from 3k to 4.5k, you've added the capacity for another 30,000 to 45,000 NA users -- except the 25% rule indicates you've REALLY added the capacity for 120,000 to 170,000 new users. (Peak time runs at 20 to 25% of user base online and playing).

Between the hardware upgrades and the servers added prior to TBC, Blizzard added enough slack capacity for once. Their systems aren't strained. As for merging battlegroups -- that always boils down to the Alliance/Horde imbalance.

Their worldwide population is growing, they didn't break it out by region that I know of. My general "feel" of the population trend based unscientifically from the forums, server #'s, absence of lowbies, the age of the game etc., is that in North America at least it has leveled off or is slightly declining. I could be completely wrong however. It would be really interesting to see canceled subs vs. activated subs per month for NA.

Your point on the expanded capacity of the servers and the absence of new servers sounds right on the money.

A lot of older players "feel" this way because the people they leveled, raided and pvped with have quit, the fact that they've been replaced with even more people escapes them because they are not the people they are used too.  If 20 people from your friends list never login anymore you are going to assume the population is decreasing even if they've been replaced by 40 people you've never heard from and dont associate with.

[ajax34i]

Well, I don't know about the NA playerbase increasing or decreasing overall, but I did check some of the servers that they opened at the BC release, and unlike previous "new" servers, their population did not rapidly increase to "medium" levels.   On some of them, there's a bell-shaped spread of levels (although the number of players is low enough to notice that you can't seem to get a group together or to sell stuff that should sell), but some still have 90% of their population below level 20, with only one or two brave souls at any 10-level range (61-70 f.ex).  What does that tell you?

On the other hand, on old servers, everyone seems to be 70 and not recruiting.

I don't know.

[Simond]

Warning: Old meme alert. Look at the article about this on the main (US) WoW site...then mouseover the picture.
Nice likeness with the elf, though. 

[caladein]

I think Blizzard is trying to avoid the stigma of "server merges" for as long as possible. They have already started merging battlegroups (clusters of servers that are linked together for pvp-instances) to help alleviate the population imbalance in pvp instances and shorten que times for these instances. Without the influx of 1000's of new players, or returning players, the low pop US servers will continue to shrink until mergers will become inevitable.

The one battlegroup merge wasn't because of population in the way you're letting on. They created two new battlegroups with the BC servers and oddly enough each one ended up leaning towards a different side. The battlegroups were combined to combat BG queues from hell (as both Battlegroups combined were roughly balanced) not population issues as a whole. (WarcraftRealms numbers at time of the merger.)

Also, it's important to remeber that all servers had their capacities increased along with the adding a full new battlegroup. Excess capacity now that the initial spike from BC has died down sure, but no sky-is-falling-oh-God crap, even in NA.

[ajax34i]

Oh yeah, nobody said sky is falling, in fact that upward slope of increasing subs will continue to go upward for the foreseeable future.