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Why is WoW declining? What made TBC so much better?
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Post by
Eccentrica
Honestly any discussion of sub numbers is based on flowing sand anyway. They've changed the way subscribers are counted numerous times and they usually blame large changes on the Asian market. For the Q4 2012 they included the number of sales of MoP in the sub numbers because those sales included 30 days of free play.
Post by
1094505
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
JDLKY
> WoW has more subscribers than ever
Subs are down 2.5 million from the peak during Wrath as of the end of Q4 of 2012*. Your facts are wrong. Tsk. *Q1 of 2013 numbers won't be out for a week or two.
Copied from
Joystiq
:
Today's investor call for the fourth quarter of 2012 reported that World of Warcraft's subscription numbers are now at 9.6 million subscribers, down from the reported over 10 million at Mists of Pandaria's launch.
Although subscriber numbers seem to have dropped, they have yet to reach the Cataclysm low of 9.1 million prior to the release of Mists.
I haven't actually read the
press release
myself, but Joystiq refers to it and if they are correct, then it doesn't really look like any mass desertion from the game. It might not be
the
all time high, but it does look like we're doing better than the numbers you're referring to.
edit: copied the wrong link
My 2.5 mill number is the difference between the peak during Wrath (12.1 mill) and Q4 2012 (9.6 mill). Most of the damage to subs was done by Cata. Imo the half mill drop in MoP from Q3 2012 to Q4 2012 is not all that bad, especially if much of it was in China as has been reported. China is always going to be hard to pin down since as I understand it all of that country uses time cards and no one had a sub as we do in the US. That makes comparisons difficult.
Eccentrica mentioned a change in how they count heads. If these numbers just came from a press release I could easily buy that. But these numbers came from the quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. If you do change your method of counting you have to disclose that in your footnotes and I did not see any evidence of that when I read the filing.
Post by
1094505
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Ydrisselle
Honestly any discussion of sub numbers is based on flowing sand anyway. They've changed the way subscribers are counted numerous times and they usually blame large changes on the Asian market. For the Q4 2012 they included the number of sales of MoP in the sub numbers because those sales included 30 days of free play.
Mists didn't give 30 days free play, I'm quite sure about that.
Post by
Eccentrica
Honestly any discussion of sub numbers is based on flowing sand anyway. They've changed the way subscribers are counted numerous times and they usually blame large changes on the Asian market. For the Q4 2012 they included the number of sales of MoP in the sub numbers because those sales included 30 days of free play.
Mists didn't give 30 days free play, I'm quite sure about that.
The retail box gave 30 days. Purchases of the box were counted in the subscriber numbers regardless of whether the buyer subscribed after those 30 days expired or not.
From page 11 of the
Amended Annual Repor
t dated 27 Feb 2013:
"World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft , as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access"
By accounting rules the subscriber number would be an "As at" number (like a balance sheet), not a "For the Year Ended" number (like Revenue). The number of subscribers fluctuates by the minute. If every purchase of a time card or a resub were tallied indiviudually and then presented at year or quarter end, the yearly number of subs would register in the hundreds of millions. All they can do is take a snapshot at a particular time and present that number. They would for obvious reasons take the highest number of subscribers reached during a quarter.
Because of the aforementioned fact that free-monthers are counted amongst subscribers, the quarter containing an expansion release would have a huge spike of "subscribers". Anyone who received a Mists box under the Christmas tree counted as a subscriber.
Post by
Adamsm
Yeah but Eccentrica, you only get the free month for getting the Battle Chest(IE the starter box); none of the other boxes provide one.
Post by
Eccentrica
Yeah but Eccentrica, you only get the free month for getting the Battle Chest(IE the starter box); none of the other boxes provide one.
I'm searching for a reference, but I would've bet the farm that one version of MoP came with a voucher for 30 days free play.
Edit: I can't find a reference so I withdraw my assertion that Mists purchasers counted as subscribers. Battlechest purchasers do count though, as Adamsm has said. Mists purchases would count only as sales. I stand by my earlier comments about subscriber accounting and the shifting nature. When methods of accounting change, companies can and will reissue financial statements restating revenue and such, but wouldn't necessarily issue press releases highlighting altered sub numbers. Also the methods of counting subscribers differ between the NA/Europe market and the Asian market. In short, without complete inside knowledge it's hard to counter Blizzard's declaration of subscription numbers, and for obvious reasons, they would always give the highest possible number.
Post by
Adamsm
Far as I'm aware, it was just the ten day freebie codes in the Mists boxes, be it normal or CE.
Post by
skumbananer
TBC was awesome, and better than the following expansions. But that doesnt make the following expansions bad. They are infact great, they are just not as great as TBC.
Lets compare with food. A perfectly cooked Lasagna is the epitome of culinary delight. That doesnt make a steak taste bad.
Lets also compare with women on the classical scale of 1-10. A 10/10 is more attractive than a 9/10. A 9/10 is still extremely attractive.
Vanilla 7/10, TBC 10/10, WOTLK 9/10, Cata 8/10, MoP 9/10.
Post by
751416
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Ydrisselle
Yeah but Eccentrica, you only get the free month for getting the Battle Chest(IE the starter box); none of the other boxes provide one.
I'm searching for a reference, but I would've bet the farm that one version of MoP came with a voucher for 30 days free play.
Edit: I can't find a reference so I withdraw my assertion that Mists purchasers counted as subscribers. Battlechest purchasers do count though, as Adamsm has said. Mists purchases would count only as sales. I stand by my earlier comments about subscriber accounting and the shifting nature. When methods of accounting change, companies can and will reissue financial statements restating revenue and such, but wouldn't necessarily issue press releases highlighting altered sub numbers. Also the methods of counting subscribers differ between the NA/Europe market and the Asian market. In short, without complete inside knowledge it's hard to counter Blizzard's declaration of subscription numbers, and for obvious reasons, they would always give the highest possible number.
Neither expansion gave a free month, only the vanilla WoW (or the Battle Chest, because it contains vanilla WoW). The subscription numbers always counted the activated Battle Chest within the free month - at least it counted since I was watching sub numbers (and trust me, I was watching it for years, because I was an editor of WoW-Hungary).
Post by
lonewarrior
@OP
People can disseminate each expansions all they want from a game playing point of view.
Mechanically game wise, MoP is great and much more polished then in the days of Vanilla/TBC, and yet those times were better to play in, why?..because we(guilds) were the face of the game.
Those were great days to be playing WoW, but it'd just not like that anymore.
That genre of players came and went and you won't see the likes of them again, except for a few relic like me. :P
Today the game is much more polished and if your a gamer and consuming contents is your thing, then these are your days.
Post by
719966
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
shan750
One may as well ask Why is time passing? What made the past so much better than the present?
Several possible answers exist, here's 3 flavors:
Hindsight.
Nostalgia.
Memory distortion.
/giggles
and so right!
Just another variant of the Rose-tinted Spectacle argument which is nonsense on two levels - one it assumes that the past is always worse than the present and two it assumes that everbodies view of the game is the same.
We have all played games where the original was better than subsequent expansions so the concept is not new.
The problem for those who use this argument is if the game was so bad then why did it grow as massively as it did during Vanilla and TBC? If the game was that bad then why did they subscribe to it?
Lets face it... WoW barely had any competition back then. Everything else was worse.
Post by
719222
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
451227
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
432158
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
zebedal
WoW
may
be declining. I'm not sure (notice I said MAY) because I don't pay attention to numbers. Other people playing doesn't affect whether or not I want to continue playing.
But even if it is declining: come on, the game's old. It still has a !@#$ ton more subscribers than any other game ever.
So WoW's "decline" would be an all-time high point for any other pay to play game.
Remember that.
this^^
Post by
yukonjack
Wow has been declining a lot recently, they have lost a big portion of there subscribers. And it saddens me that it is happening, but i have a throe. The problem is, that the game is easy.
You sound like you might be another sheep from mike preachs' flock, if so may I direct you to this well written blog that sheds a logical perspective on his video quite skillfully.
http://thebigbearbutt.com/2013/06/14/its-not-looking-for-friends/
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