Cataclysm

[Shrike]

 When the #4 guild on my server started up in trade chat, I knew shit was going bad and that was nearly 3 months ago now.

Yeah, I noticed about two months ago (just before I left WW) that our #1 alliance guild was starting to recruit in /trade. Kind of surprised me, and the GL couched it in terms for farming guild xp for the mount--which made me think of the lvl25 guilds kicking members in mass once they hit 25. Still, it makes more sense when your pool of potential recruits begins to dry up in the second and third tier guilds as those quit raiding.

[Paelos]

I agree. The noise goes down when things are good. You don't hear people recruiting when they can fill their ranks. I know this from my own RL experience over 3-some-odd years.

[caladein]

 When the #4 guild on my server started up in trade chat, I knew shit was going bad and that was nearly 3 months ago now.

Yeah, I noticed about two months ago (just before I left WW) that our #1 alliance guild was starting to recruit in /trade. Kind of surprised me, and the GL couched it in terms for farming guild xp for the mount--which made me think of the lvl25 guilds kicking members in mass once they hit 25. Still, it makes more sense when your pool of potential recruits begins to dry up in the second and third tier guilds as those quit raiding.

The guild that got Realm First Guild Level 25 on our server recruited in an extra raid team's worth of players that last week (and redid their raid schedule, which is what did it more than anything).  Haven't bothered to check if those people are still there.

There's also the new dynamics between raid sizes.  There's probably a few guild leaders still flirting with the idea of bumping back into 25s from their 1.5-2 10s teams.  Also, 10s teams that are just hitting Heroics are either going to have a perfectly constructed roster vis-a-vis alts or are going to need to cannibalize their bench from another team in-guild or are going to have to recruit a few players.

On Enhancement Shaman: their main problem is Elemental Shaman. They're both firmly middle-of-the-pack on damage and while Enhancement is comically survivable, Elemental brings rarer raid buffs.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Not just a river in Egypt 

[caladein]

I'm the one that linked the WarcraftRealms graphs in this thread like two months ago!  It's pretty clear there's less people playing.  I'm just pointing out that there are other factors involved in guild recruitment that are particular to this expansion than just player activity.

[Paelos]

Top 25 man guild on my server has about 200 characters in the 300 they keep that haven't logged on since the first month of expansion. My guess is that they are recruiting due to that.

[Rokal]

Yeah, if I disagree with all the negativity and am actually having fun with the game, the only possible explanation is that I must work for Blizzard 

Blizzard hit record sub numbers right before Cata launched because people were excited for Cata. Lots of people that quit over the years decided to come back, and putting out all of those class changes a month of two before Cata launched (and having a pretty lame world event) with an early launch of new 1-60 content probably was enough for many people to say "I'll resub, check out the world event, check out the class changes, say goodbye to the old world, and check out the new 1-60 experience before Cata comes out". Then Cata came out and it was still just more WoW.

I'm not sure I'm reading the graph you linked right, is it showing those hours for lvl 18-22 players? Only players that are playing 18-22 hours a week? It's still not great data since it relies on people voluntarily running a census mod, and is only showing data for specific gametime hours and players that play specific amounts of time (or level ranges, I guess). The chart you linked would suggest that players bought Cata and didn't bother logging in the next day. If people were playing less because of difficulty (especially casual players that don't play a ton), we would see a huge population spike in December followed by a sharp decline in late Dec/early January when players gradually got to level 85 and started running heroics. Your graph shows the opposite of this (sharp decline in early Dec, huge spike in Jan) and doesn't really make sense either way you look at it.

In some ways, namely time sinks, Cataclysm is more casual than WoW has ever been. Professions were easy to level up, you reached the level cap quick and didn't really have any group quests barring your progress, rep grinds were pretty fast, and 'farming' for materials to do raids has been pretty much removed from the game. I'm logging in way less than I did in Dec/Jan, but that's because, aside from 8 hours of raiding a week, I don't have any reason to log in. I'm not dissatisfied with the game, but I also don't need to log in to finish 10 more faction reputations or to farm for hours just to be able to raid (as was the case in Vanilla and TBC).

Long story short: It's still just anecdotal (and extremely questionable) data. Playtime always drops off after the rush of an expansion dies down, and lower playtime does not necessarily correlate to canceled subscriptions. We won't know if Cata caused more people to quit than TBC or Wrath did until Blizzard releases numbers that say one way or another.

[sinij]

[Merusk]

The app only tracks Prime Time hours for player activity, because that's the most valuable in that regard.  18-22 is 18:00 Hours to 22:00 Hours Per server.  (6pm to 11pm, server time, not GMT So a PST server is 9pm to 2am EST, which is assuming that, hey, not a lot of EST players play a PST server anyway.)  

The Chart doesn't indicate anything whereby you could even assume "the next day they stopped playing."  Each x-axis hash mark is 1week of play time, so at best you could say "the next week."   Data points will also be one week behind as they are not projected, but actual which get marked at the end of a recorded period. (The last week of December is the first week of January's point.  So if 1 person is on this week, but 11 were on the week before, 11 would be recorded at the start of the week and one at the next week.) Since Cata was released Dec7, the 2nd hash is where you would see the uptick happen, which is where it's at.

It's not worth ripping you apart any more than Mal anymore as you're just grasping at straws at this point.

[Rokal]

The app only tracks Prime Time hours for player activity, because that's the most valuable in that regard.  18-22 is 18:00 Hours to 22:00 Hours Per server.  (6pm to 11pm, server time, not GMT So a PST server is 9pm to 2am EST, which is assuming that, hey, not a lot of EST players play a PST server anyway.)  

Gotcha

The Chart doesn't indicate anything whereby you could even assume "the next day they stopped playing."  Each x-axis hash mark is 1week of play time, so at best you could say "the next week."   Data points will also be one week behind as they are not projected, but actual which get marked at the end of a recorded period. (The last week of December is the first week of January's point.  So if 1 person is on this week, but 11 were on the week before, 11 would be recorded at the start of the week and one at the next week.) Since Cata was released Dec7, the 2nd hash is where you would see the uptick happen, which is where it's at.

The graph shows a huge decline in playtime for the 3-4 weeks before Cata launched. After Cata launched, there is a very minor uptick in playtime. This would have been when people took time of work to marathon levels, or just played a whole hell of a lot if they didn't go that far. I remember my guild roster was flooded with players at all hours of the day right after Cata launched (while they leveled through the new stuff), and that isn't really reflected in this chart. You don't really see a steep decline in playtime till late in January, well after most people had already hit the level cap and tried running Heroics. For that matter, the decline isn't very steep, it's a pretty gradual decline that doesn't suggest people hit a brick wall.

The truth is usually somewhere in the middle. I'm sure some people quit because of the difficulty of the expansion. I also don't believe that there is a mass exodus from the game like forums would have you (perpetually) believe. I also think that a lot of the people that *did* quit and that probably ticked the "this shit is too hard" box on the exit survery probably still would have quit even if the status quo from Wrath had been maintained and heroics were faceroll.

[caladein]

Caveats with using WarcraftRealms Weekly Activity graphs:

- Ignore or invert the month of December.  Submissions were off or limited to 1-80 for about a month after Cata came out so from anecdotal experience I'd plug in a much higher peak at that point.  (Yes, this does mean that things should look worse than they do because January isn't the true peak.)

- WR is susceptible to servers simply not getting enough submissions.  That's not really a huge problem unless something specific made players who run Census+ (like me) less likely to play than the population as a whole.  For example, Alliance on my server isn't in any worse shape in getting submissions than it was before.  Again, anecdotes, but I don't think this is a factor we have to worry about.

- We don't have enough of a historical backlog to really gauge what the correlation between primetime player activity and the subscriber base are.  It's almost certainly significant but things like how one lags behind the other on the whole are problematic.

- The above becomes a much larger problem when attempting to subscribe a certain cause to the effect on primetime player activity.  How much of it is baked into any expansion's launch, how much is due to Rift, and how much of it is due to X game change?

[Paelos]

While that's all well and good, but Rokal's defense against the expansion causing a slide with numbers/stats/progression is anecdotal evidence of himself, while dismissing our viewpoint as anecdotal and burnout.

By the way Rokal, which character are you even playing in the expansion? It's obvious you shelved that Dwarf healing priest in this xpac. Wonder why?

[Rokal]

I agree that my 'evidence' was also anecdotal (and therefore not worth much), I said as much a few posts back. None the less, my experiences in-game and through players I know in real life do not match the story of a 'mass exodus' that some are claiming, and I am enjoying Cata. I'm not saying that the difficulty changes did not cause Blizzard to lose 50% of their subscribers, we really don't know how many quit and ultimately why, but some players quitting after an expansion comes out is pretty normal and it's good to remember that instead of buying into all the doom-saying on internet forums.

I mentioned a couple times a while back that I was playing a rogue for Cataclysm. Frankly, I skipped most of Wrath, so the last time I really played my priest was at the end of TBC. Just like I eventually got tired of WoW and needed a break, I eventually got tired of playing priest. I always enjoyed playing rogues, but the dps rotation used to be pretty mind numbing and they were a dime a dozen. With Cata my guild didn't have many rogues playing, and they finally made some big changes to the specs that make them feel a lot more active to play. In my guild the most common class roles are tanks and healers, and I believe that isn't the situation for most guilds.

I was really pumped about playing a worgen druid too (not a Night Elf fan), but when I got that character to 85 I found that the minimized toolset for each role (cat/bear in particular) compared to less hybrid-y classes was pretty disappointing.

Switching it up and playing a different class for Cata was something that really refreshed the game for me, and I'll probably do it again for the next expansion if I'm still playing by then.

[Azazel]

Honestly, if they put in a version like you describe where, for example, you go in to fight Deathwing with the help of uber NPCs who trivialize your role in the fight but still allow you to SEE the content, I think a lot of people would like that. Maybe a level below normal, but above "wait til next expansion and solo it on your DK alt". Hell, it doesn't even have to drop loot.

I would come back to play that. I hate other people and most of my guild, but I'd like to see/experience the older content that I never got to see, even just once or a couple of times, Wrathgate raid-on-undercity style. Bonus points if I can do it with my wife/small group. Fuck loot.

[Azazel]

Back to the Sinestra thing. Is it bad if only .11% of your playerbase does this encounter? Yes, yes it very well fucking is bad. Oh right it's the PINNACLE of wow, it should be rare! Rare, sure.....but .11% rare? come the fuck on that is what, 20 guilds out of 11million(probably less now) people?

See, I don't think it should be rare. Why? Should the majority of the playerbase buy the expansion never expecting to kill the guy on the box? I know I don't buy SP games with that in mind.

[Rokal]

It'd certainly be better than the "click on this statue in Dalaran and watch Arthas die" cinematic they did for Wrath. I think it'd great if, instead of a cinematic like that, you got a short interactive version of the fight where NPCs do all of the work but you still get to participate. You could have the NPCs be your expected WoW heroes like Tyrande and Malfurion (whoever normally appears in the fight), and they are assisted by "heroes of the alliance/horde" npcs that look like player characters. Just release that after the content has been out for a while and guilds have really been given enough time to defeat the boss normally if they wanted to. I agree that it probably shouldn't give any loot, since it's purpose is just to let people experience the conclusion of the main story.

That said, a few weeks ago a couple people from my guild (including myself) went back and did some of the Wrath fights we had not gotten to experience (or were missing achievements for), and they were still pretty fun at 85. 2-3 people should be able to finish any Vanilla/TBC fight I can think of off the top of my head, and 4-5 people should be able to finish any of the Wrath raid stuff. If you didn't get to do that stuff before, you can definitely grab a few friends and try it out now if you want.

[Samprimary]

On Enhancement Shaman: their main problem is Elemental Shaman. They're both firmly middle-of-the-pack on damage and while Enhancement is comically survivable, Elemental brings rarer raid buffs.

:(

Well, I actually think our issue is being made sort of passable in favor of things like More Boomkin. Still, by being really really good at what I do, I'm keeping my place in the raid.

[SurfD]

It'd certainly be better than the "click on this statue in Dalaran and watch Arthas die" cinematic they did for Wrath.

That always got a chuckle out of me.
- Tyrion: Thank you for your great sacrifice Bolvar, you have saved us from an out of controll horde of now leaderless rampaging undead.
- Bolvar: Indeed old friend.  Yet sadly, no one must know what we have done here this day.
- Tyrion: I know, right.  Say, I have a BRILLIANT idea, lets take the shattered fragments of Frostmourne, and create an INTERACTIVE MAGICAL MEMORIAL in the HEART OF DALARAN, that any passing person can examine to see what really happened.
- Bolvar: <facepalm>

[apocrypha]

Well, I actually think our issue is being made sort of passable in favor of things like More Boomkin. Still, by being really really good at what I do, I'm keeping my place in the raid.

One of our guild shammys has got Bloodlust bound with a macro that spams the raid channel with "BLOODLUST! RAAR! Bob is justifying his raid spot!!11".

Also, on the old content stuff, there's quite a lot of interest these days in doing exactly that. A few friends of mine did an ICC25 hc pug lastnight, got a whole bunch of achievs and had a right laugh. We've got BWD tonight but I might see if anyone fancies a couple of hours messing around in Ulduar first for a giggle.

This where all you Cataclysm haters can feel free to interject with some snarky comment about how if the current tier was tuned right people wouldn't be forced into doing old content just to see the story and have fun 

[caladein]

See, I don't think it should be rare. Why? Should the majority of the playerbase buy the expansion never expecting to kill the guy on the box? I know I don't buy SP games with that in mind.

Deathwing's on the box.  Also, since he's expected to be the last boss, he should be subject to more deliberate nerfs than normal bosses this tier (which can be overgeared by the next raid's stuff).

To go by (normal) Nefarian's Wowtrack numbers right now there's 3 365 guilds with 25m kills, 10 033 with 10m kills (85% and 22% of guilds with any kill of that size, respectively).  Or, a conservative rough estimate of 200 000 players.

[Tannhauser]

Well, I actually think our issue is being made sort of passable in favor of things like More Boomkin. Still, by being really really good at what I do, I'm keeping my place in the raid.

One of our guild shammys has got Bloodlust bound with a macro that spams the raid channel with "BLOODLUST! RAAR! Bob is justifying his raid spot!!11".

Also, on the old content stuff, there's quite a lot of interest these days in doing exactly that. A few friends of mine did an ICC25 hc pug lastnight, got a whole bunch of achievs and had a right laugh. We've got BWD tonight but I might see if anyone fancies a couple of hours messing around in Ulduar first for a giggle.

This where all you Cataclysm haters can feel free to interject with some snarky comment about how if the current tier was tuned right people wouldn't be forced into doing old content just to see the story and have fun 

May I ask the interest in old raids then?  You sound like an American tourist in France who eats at McDonalds, you know, for the irony. 
There's your snarky comment. Book it.  Done.

[apocrypha]

The interest lies in a number of areas.

A lot of people actually haven't done the old raids, or have only done parts of them. I've never done more than the first 4 or 5 bosses in Ulduar and never downed the LK. Now that the content is obsolete reward-wise (apart from achievement mounts for instance) then pugs and impromptu attempts at it aren't likely to collapse into loot arguments and drama.

Secondly the shared 10/25 lockouts are leaving people who may have raided 4 times a week previously with a couple of nights free maybe. Some people are partaking in current tier pugs but sometimes people want something much more laid back.

It also provides some variety and down-time. Progression content is, and always has been at this stage in an expansion cycle, relatively demanding. You can argue (ad infinitum if this thread is anything to go by) about whether it's more demanding now than in the past, but whatever, the point still stands. Previous-tier content isn't as demanding and is much more forgiving of hurpdurpery and much more open to random pugging.

Enjoying doing old stuff doesn't automatically mean there's something wrong, or unenjoyable about current stuff. It's not binary. They're different. Personally I don't think I'd like to raid current tier content 4 nights a week. That's the route to burnout in my book. But 1 or 2 nights a week doing something silly, relaxing, more casual? Yeah that adds nicely to the mix.

[sinij]

, you got a short interactive version of the fight where NPCs do all of the work but you still get to participate. You could have the NPCs be your expected WoW heroes like Tyrande and Malfurion (whoever normally appears in the fight), and they are assisted by "heroes of the alliance/horde" npcs that look like player characters. Just release that after the content has been out for a while and guilds have really been given enough time to defeat the boss normally if they wanted to.

Actually, release it right away with new content. Currently raiders (except maybe 10 world-first guilds) are expected to learn fights by watching recorded videos. I find this extremely stupid design. Why not allow players to "preview" fights, they have done similar "ride" with Battle for the Undercity in Wrath, why not do it for every raid?

[Malakili]

, you got a short interactive version of the fight where NPCs do all of the work but you still get to participate. You could have the NPCs be your expected WoW heroes like Tyrande and Malfurion (whoever normally appears in the fight), and they are assisted by "heroes of the alliance/horde" npcs that look like player characters. Just release that after the content has been out for a while and guilds have really been given enough time to defeat the boss normally if they wanted to.

Actually, release it right away with new content. Currently raiders (except maybe 10 world-first guilds) are expected to learn fights by watching recorded videos. I find this extremely stupid design. Why not allow players to "preview" fights, they have done similar "ride" with Battle for the Undercity in Wrath, why not do it for every raid?

Its actually really funny you should say this because I was just thinking if people were so concerned with seeing content and didn't care about challenge at all they could just go watch videos of the fights

[Rendakor]

When it comes to WoW I'm a hands-on learner, and can rarely get a good handle on a fight just by watching a video. An interactive tutorial is exactly what I had been thinking of; using the Lich King as an example, you'd just be helping Garrosh and all the tier-armor vendors (who are supposedly pinnacles of their class) kill Arthas. As long as you don't get flung off the edge by an ice orb/valkyrie they win the fight even without you, and you get the last minute res from King Daddy and then get to watch the movie.

[Sheepherder]

Its actually really funny you should say this because I was just thinking if people were so concerned with seeing content and didn't care about challenge at all they could just go watch videos of the fights

Conversely, I don't see why you need to raid when you could just punch your dick.

[Paelos]

Its actually really funny you should say this because I was just thinking if people were so concerned with seeing content and didn't care about challenge at all they could just go watch videos of the fights

Totally, I mean why eat dinner when there's the Food Network? Amirite? 

[apocrypha]

When it comes to WoW I'm a hands-on learner, and can rarely get a good handle on a fight just by watching a video. An interactive tutorial is exactly what I had been thinking of

We have interactive tutorials already. They're called wipe attempts. 

[Sjofn]

I sort of wish there was a way to practice a specific phase without having to do the entire encounter. Of course, there were ways to practice one of the phases I am thinking of (fuckin' Malygos) and no one did, so it would probably be a gigantic waste of effort on Blizzard's part. Still! Sometimes I wish I could just skip to the Problem Phase.

[Rokal]

They made it a little bit flexible for Nef, which was nice. You control when to push him to phase 2 (though prolonging P1 by leaving Ony alive for as long as possible really makes P3 much easier). When my guild realized P2 and P3 was where we were sucking, we rushed P1 a few times so we could just practice P2/3. It worked out really well. I hope they have more flexible fights like that in the future, rather than Arthas or Kael'thas with their 1-3 minute scripted scenes leading into an easy-yet-long phase 1 when you really just wanted to work on something much later in the fight.

[SurfD]

They made it a little bit flexible for Nef, which was nice. You control when to push him to phase 2 (though prolonging P1 by leaving Ony alive for as long as possible really makes P3 much easier). When my guild realized P2 and P3 was where we were sucking, we rushed P1 a few times so we could just practice P2/3. It worked out really well. I hope they have more flexible fights like that in the future, rather than Arthas or Kael'thas with their 1-3 minute scripted scenes leading into an easy-yet-long phase 1 when you really just wanted to work on something much later in the fight.

Eh, I wouldnt really say that Neff has a lot of leeway.  Sure, you can push phase 2 as fast as you want, but there is really no advantage of doing so, since phase one is probably the easiest phase in the encounter.  Not to mention that there is a hard limit on how long you can leave ony alive while burning Neff (I think you are pretty much forced to kill Ony after the second Electrocute in P1, because a 3rd one would trigger the "ony explodes and wipes the raid" Onyxia soft enrage mechanic.

[Rokal]

The only advantage in pushing P2 early is time. We were having a lot of problems getting people onto the pillars, and then a lot of problems managing the adds in P3. By rushing P1, we got extra time in our raid night to work on the stuff we really needed to work on. If we had to do Phase 1 normally every single time, it would have cut into the amount of time we got to spend practicing P2 and 3.

Once we could consistently get Nef to 40% in Phase 3, we just did phase 1 normally and got our first kill.

[Xanthippe]

Rokal definitely suffers from SWG dev syndrome.

"Everything is working as intended and if you see something wrong the problem is with you!"

I think Ghostcrawler does too.

[Paelos]

Ghostcrawler just put up another Dev Watercooler thingy. He talked about crits for 10 paragraphs.

I don't know what to say to that.

[SurfD]

Ghostcrawler just put up another Dev Watercooler thingy. He talked about crits for 10 paragraphs.

I don't know what to say to that.

I think his next Watercooler Blog should be a rambling and whimsical 30 paragraph discussion about the fact that he simply isnt going to bother trying any more, because regardles of what he talks about in his blog, appearently no one will ever be happy with it.