Cataclysm

[Lantyssa]

In a perfect world, we wouldn't need to have the game taking control of the loot away like this, but it does address the social problems of certain players being idiots when it comes to these aspects.  Of course, in a perfect world, we wouldn't need LFR anyways because the players would be able to coordinate properly among strangers and get by with just 10 and 25 man raids  

Maybe your perfect world.  In mine everyone gets their own loot.  Maybe tradeable afterwards, but initially their own stuff.  I'm not into competition.

[Ironwood]

I actually agree with the 'No Trade'.

Not only does it stop UTTER COMPLETE CUNTS from whispering you even after you've clearly needed something to 'Give it to them', but it also stops guild teams and (I admit it) husband and wife teams from needing when they don't need to so they can trade to the guy who does.

It's a good system.

[Paelos]

Yep, I don't want Trade. That cocks up the whole system.

[Ingmar]

Edits: Because apparently I type too fast for my remote LogMeIn connection to keep up  

Your office blocks f13 but allows LogMeIn? 

[luckton]

Edits: Because apparently I type too fast for my remote LogMeIn connection to keep up  

Your office blocks f13 but allows LogMeIn? 

WebSense is a fickle thing. I'm not complaining 

[Hutch]

WoW loses approximately 1 million subs over a 3 month period.

The press release cites "better-than-expected second quarter results" for Activision-Blizzard.

Also,

As of June 30, 2012, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft remains the #1 subscription-based MMORPG and had approximately 9.1 million subscribers

I know they're counting me as a current sub, since I partook of the Annual Pass.

Overall this is unsurprising news, since the double whammy of summertime + pre-expansion doldrums is upon us. We'll see how many subs they have six months from now.


(this topic spotted simultaneously in several places, including Gamasutra, WoW.com, Massively)

[Paelos]

Once they started doing the Panda beta, they were going to have people unsub. Still, Cataclysm was undeniably a terrible expansion at this point.

[Khaldun]

Much as they've tried to time the xpac to kill perceived competition as usual, I don't think they get it. They don't have to kill the competition any more, the whole damn genre is dying.

[Sheepherder]

I'm trying to decide if it's worth actually queueing for anything or if I'll just be a useless terribad who stands in the fire all the time. I did all the Cata instances at launch, including some on Heroic, I think I remember most of them. Is there any instanced content since then that's worth doing that isn't ball-busting in its gear requirements and shit you have to do just right? I'm doing the Firelands dailies and the ZG questline up to the 5-man that takes you into ZG, and redid some of the zone quests since I switched faction.

Losing three million subs convinced Blizzard they were doing Cataclysms wrong.

[Azazel]

Let's face it. They only managed to staunch the bleeding with the annual pass with D3 as the sweetener. Look how well that played out. 

[koro]

Don't those annual passes run out in October/November or thereabouts? I imagine depending on how MoP does, we could be seeing another 500k-1m down by their first 2013 report.

[Merusk]

Depends on when you bought it since they were selling them up through April.   The initial rush will be October though, yes.

[luckton]

I'm sure they'll have some hot product or incentive for next year to commit for another 365 days.  Maybe not a full game, but something else...or...something...I dunno.

[Rasix]

Titan beta access.*


*TBD 2015-2020 **
 
** Purely made up time frame.

[Azazel]

Mine runs out on something like the 30th of December, but yeah, they start expiring in October. MoP launches a few weeks before, so they're probably counting on the pass to help drive a pile of extra box sales "since I'm subbed already" and then the new expack to keep people around until the end of the year.

Is the next Starcraft box due out anytime soon? If it's around October 2013 that might be the sweetener this time (plus sparkle pony, etc).

[Ingmar]

The word was that beta would start "soon" after 1.5, which hit 3 days ago. Figure 2-3 months for a good long beta; odds are pretty good that HotS releases this year.

[luckton]

The word was that beta would start "soon" after 1.5, which hit 3 days ago. Figure 2-3 months for a good long beta; odds are pretty good that HotS releases this year.

I don't see why it wouldn't be this year.  It's no like they're reinventing the wheel or anything, it's just an expansion. 

[Azazel]

2 releases in the same quarter? That seems a bit unusual for Blizzard.

[Paelos]

2 releases in the same quarter? That seems a bit unusual for Blizzard.

Vivendi trying to unload their 60% of shares scared the fuck out of them. I think they realize the time for "when it's done, peons" needs to be updated to "when it's done, and we're working on it, and here's our schedule, valued customers"

[patience]

If Pachter is to be believed Vivendi trying to do a fire sale isn't going to bother Blizzard. Vivendi's motivations seem to be just using bad math when they made they deal with Activision on how they'll earn money for the share they hold.

As a result this sale is a bigger concern for Activision because if Vivendi gets their way it will be at their greater expense.

[Feverdream]

Interesting article in Forbes by a Hedge fund manager re: WoW/Activision/Vivendi/GW2.

Even though I'll be playing GW2 more and WoW less (perhaps not at all), I can't say I agree with their projection that WoW could lose up to 25% of its subscriber base to GW2.  We'll see, though, and either way the article makes some good points:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/08/02/world-of-warcraft-guild-wars-2-and-vivendi-activisions-achilles-heel/

[Hutch]

Interesting article in Forbes by a Hedge fund manager re: WoW/Activision/Vivendi/GW2.

Even though I'll be playing GW2 more and WoW less (perhaps not at all), I can't say I agree with their projection that WoW could lose up to 25% of its subscriber base to GW2.  We'll see, though, and either way the article makes some good points:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/08/02/world-of-warcraft-guild-wars-2-and-vivendi-activisions-achilles-heel/

Wow. What a fanboy. That article and its comment thread reads like someone took a "GW2 is the WoW Killer we've all been waiting for!" forum posting, and ran it through the Erudite-O-Tron (patent pending).

I laughed and laughed when he said "What if strong competition were to come into the MMORPG space and take market share away from World of Warcraft?"

Of course WoW is going to lose subs to GW2. WoW has lost subs to every game that's come along in the past 8 years. Those people always come back.

In this particular case:
1) MoP is scheduled to go live in September
2) GW2 has no subscription fee, so it's not like they're forcing a financial decision on their players

I don't mean to knock on GW2 (or the Secret World or Rift, for that matter), but Blizzard doesn't lose WoW subscribers for good because of the actions of other game companies. They are still their own worst enemy.


Edit to add: I don't mean to imply that Feverdream is a fanboy. I was referring to the author of the linked article.

[Zetor]

I know for a fact that me and my guildies will be playing both gw2 and mop. The only game which might feel threatened sub-wise is tsw, but it's best played as a SP game over the free month (maybe +1) and possibly a reactivation for another month a year down the line to see all the new content. Ditto with swtor (only 1 person in our group bought more than 1mo of sub, and most of us are huge sw nerds)

[caladein]

Many times more important than being "fanboys" is the last line of the piece: "Note: In the past, Honne [the firm the authors work at] has been short ATVI and may be short in the future"

Which isn't to say they're wrong, but banking on MMO messiahs hasn't worked brilliantly.  But I just don't see it in the short-term considering that GW2 is only launching in the West.  (Yes, you can probably play from *insert other region here* but then you're stuck paying US rates, which isn't going to fly.)

E: Checking the FAQ, it's also being sold in Africa and the Middle East.

[Zetor]

I'd prefer paying US rates for gw2, since they are doing the 1$=1€ thing. Yeah yeah VAT whatever.

And like everyone is saying, gw2 won't "kill" anything any more than skyrim, starcraft2, diablo3, or heck... gw1 (it sold like 7mil units total iirc, but I don't think that equates to 7mil less mmo players)

[luckton]

GameSpy: Massivity: Looking Back on Cataclysm's Impact Crater

tl;dr
- Too much nostalgia-driven content
- Not enough Deathwing cameos in leveling content, both 1-60 and 80-85 like Arthas did in 70-80, to serve as a reminder as to why we're grinding through this contant in the first place (lorelol-wise, anyways)
- Dungeon difficult made too hard from Wrath-style

[Sjofn]

- Not enough Deathwing cameos in leveling content, both 1-60 and 80-85 like Arthas did in 70-80, to serve as a reminder as to why we're grinding through this contant in the first place (lorelol-wise, anyways)

Ugh, ugh, ugh. No. Arthas showed up way too often in WotLK. Deathwing's problem was less he didn't show up enough (I thought he showed up just enough, personally), but that his story is fucking stupid.

[Ingmar]

The only one of those 3 points that is right is #3. People eat the nostalgia shit up. I mean shit, the dude is saying that the old world content nostalgia is bad while SIMULTANEOUSLY waxing nostalgic about TBC and WotLK. (Also who the fuck "cherished" the "otherworldly vistas of Outland"? Other than Nagrand, TBC features pretty much universally the most hated zone art in WoW history.)

[Hutch]

How often did Deathwing show up?

- once at the beginning of the Hyjal chain, to set the tone
- once in the middle of Twi Hi, to fight the Red queen
- Dragon Soul, to get shot in the back by green Jesus wielding the Dragon Lazer
- randomly choosing a zone to burninate, but some still maintain this was a myth ;)

What am I missing? This can't be it. Was he so unmemorable?

[Paelos]

The carefree steamrolls that characterized the supposedly difficult heroic dungeons had been my single greatest dislike of the latter days of Wrath of the Lich King, so I cheered to learn that Cataclysm would have me fight bosses such as Corla in the new Blackrock Caverns dungeon. Fights like Corla weren't impossible by any means, but in learning the perfect coordination demanded by the fight, I rediscovered some of the cooperative magic that made me a dungeon junkie in the first place. Unfortunately, though, I was also disappointed to learn that such "thinking fights" had no place in WoW's new world of random group finders that encouraged dropping whenever something went wrong or players didn't understand a mechanic because it was their first playthrough.

Yeah this guy doesn't get it. At all. He's drawn all the wrong conclusions on pretty much every point.

He's one of those people who want to blame the users for being bad, and that's why he can't have nice things. No dumbass. The reason the dungeon thing failed is because for most people 5 mans were a pre-requisite to raiding. However, not everybody wanted to do dungeons, and not everybody wanted to run through them just to raid. Also, not everyone wants to gear up their friends just so they can field a team, and slog through difficult prerequisites to do it. Putting higher difficulty in stepping stone content was a huge mistake. Either make it non-stepping stone (ie - people can jump immediately into raiding without it), or don't make it difficult.

[Lakov_Sanite]

They even made a human form for him which they almost never used.  Funny thing is, some of the cataclysm quests were really well made but they all kinda left out the main reason you were doing shit.  

MY guess is they didn't want to have a shitload of deathwing focused thing because once the expac was old content, none of it would have made sense.  I think they should have had all the dungeons be very deathwing heavy but all of them seemed to be wholly unrelated, that and they never really explained the whole twilight cultists = deathwing part well enough.

[Ingmar]

How often did Deathwing show up?

- once at the beginning of the Hyjal chain, to set the tone
- once in the middle of Twi Hi, to fight the Red queen
- Dragon Soul, to get shot in the back by green Jesus wielding the Dragon Lazer
- randomly choosing a zone to burninate, but some still maintain this was a myth ;)

What am I missing? This can't be it. Was he so unmemorable?

He shows up in 1-60 content as well; an example would be the quest in Badlands where the 3 characters tell you their memories of what happened on the day he woke up. The getting burninated thing was much more common if you were leveling through the whole level range, too. He didn't seem to hit the zones that 80+ people were in much at all, but I got burninated several times leveling up my hunter.

they never really explained the whole twilight cultists = deathwing part well enough.

The explanation for that was all in the pre-patch event, which was fine if you were around for it, but if you missed that you'd be missing rather too much information.

[Fabricated]

I thought Arthas was handled pretty well in WotLK. The problem was that Blizzard didn't quite beat the players over the head enough with the "He's grooming you as a new henchman, stupid" bat and instead on casual observation he kinda appears like Dr. Claw, screaming "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" after you fuck up his latest plan.

As for Cata and its failure, my shitty opinion is that it can pretty much be laid at the feet of the following:

-People didn't dig the new (rather good IMO) 1-60 experience as much as Blizzard expected and did not spend nearly as much time on it as Blizzard expected.

-After the new, well-itemized, well organized, generally interesting (and voiceacted in some areas) 1-60 experience you're kerplunked right back into "We're still new at this MMO thing" BC questing and "this would be cooler if anyone gave a shit about it anymore" Northrend experience before getting BACK into the interesting stuff.

-Heroics were made grindy, difficult, long, and gave generally shitty rewards while still being required to raid. The raids themselves were tuned far too hard. "Bad" players hit a complete brick wall at heroics, and IMO average quality players while frustrated by the heroics got done with them only to hit a similar brick wall in NORMAL raiding. This was the expansion for grognards and it fucking failed in most ways it could've failed.

The success of LFR/Scenarios/wrath-difficulty heroics/farmville/pokemon will pretty much depend on how long they can continue to distract people from the fact that Blizzard seems completely unwilling if not utterly incapable of cranking out quality content on anything but a glacial timescale. With just the sliding time nerf mechanic Blizzard could've swung Cata's shitty design decisions if they could just produce lots of content.

I dunno if I buy the whole, "Well the game is old!" thing either. The game being old doesn't cost you 25% of your subs in one expansion.

[Paelos]

Fab, I agree with your points and would rank them in this order:

1 - The heroic issues
2 - Blizzard not understanding that huge assets in non-end-game content don't reap returns
3 - Content production slog
4 - General attrition

[Ingmar]

The revamped leveling content was a necessary evil. Their churn is still such that new people are trying the game, and the old crappy starter zones had to be a huge detriment to retaining new players.