Mists of Pandaria discussion

[Lissa]

Your comments show you obviously don't understand. The point is to watch the trends, not the number of subscribers, but the trends of subscribers. Hell, throw in Legacy as another one to look at, it was the "King" until about halfway through Vanilla with over 3 Million subscribers, but it too followed the trend, after 5 to 6 years, it started losing subscribers. The biggest thing to take away is this: the loss rate that WoW is seeing is far higher than the loss rate seen by those other MMOs, those other MMOs didn't loss 8% of their subscriber base in 6 months after their peak. Sheer numbers is not a useful statistic here, percentages and loss rates is a better thing to look at and WoW is simply losing its subscribers faster than previous MMOs that peaked.

My point is, you cannot compare WoW to any other MMO. It is an entirely different beast. You are looking at ants and trying to compare their life cycles to bears. It doesn't work.

Sorry, but you're wrong. Just because WoW has more subscribers does not mean it's not following the general dissolution of other MMOs. Look at all the successful MMOs and you will see the same thing that is going on with WoW. After 5 to 6 years the MMO peaks in popularity then starts to dwindle as subscribers move on (usually because of age). If you also look at those other MMOs for their loss rates, it's relatively slow with the decent getting larger as it moves away from the peak. Where WoW differs from this is that the rate of loss is much larger than see in other MMOs that have been following the same cycle as WoW has lost 8% of its subscribers in just 6 months from its peak. No prior successful MMO has lost that percentage of subscribers that quickly, and that's telling about WoW's direction.