(11-08-2011, 11:48 PM)Lissa Wrote: And, down another 800k subscribers to 10.3 Million. You still want to try blaming this on something other than the B team Jester?
"They have lost more subscribers, therefore I am correct about why they lost subscribers." This is not a reasonable argument.
It seems to me to be a combination of factors, many of which have been mentioned already. Primary among them, as has been emphasized before, is boredom. Second, is the rise of alternative games, including Rift and Aion - no, they are not picking up subscribers at 1 to 1, but yes, they are offering alternatives to WoW, and are still both large competitors. Third, is the tuning of heroic instances to be less wafflestompy, perhaps alienating casuals who liked free purples. Fourth, if Blizzard is to be believed, there is a large decline of players in China whose causes I would have a hard time guessing at. Fifth, times are hard economically, the recession continues to bite not just in the US but worldwide. MMO subscriptions run out, and people cut back. Sixth, Blizzard has announced a highly anticipated online fantasy game directly in competition with itself. Seventh, the toughest competitor WoW has ever faced, The Old Republic, is launching very soon, and anyone anticipating a switch could (should) let their WoW account lapse.
None of those things involves a decline in quality from B Team design. One is a tactical miscalculation that actually seems to reflect good design, but leads to the depressing conclusion that people don't actually want good design, but rather, easy stomping.
I do not understand on what basis you dismiss all those potential factors.
Quote:1.7Million lost, 15% of their subscribers, in just 9 months since the launch of a new expansion. You don't lose 15% of your player base like that with no real competition in just 9 months unless you're doing something wrong and alienating people. Face it, the B team has screwed up and now Blizzard is paying for it.
9 months is like the sales lifespan of a normal game. Blizzard lost 500,000 subscribers in that span following the release of WotLK - expansions generate excitement, then that excitement falls off and peoples' subscriptions lapse. This one is rougher than in the past, and may get worse yet. But once again: this game is OLD. I am not playing any other games of that vintage.
WoW is still, even with these losses (not unprecedented, in ratio terms!), over three times as large as its nearest competitor, which you have already dismissed as a complete irrelevance.
From a social science perspective, the key issue here is that we have data, but no plausible counterfactual. How many subscribers would WoW have had absent any given factor X? (Age, competition, economy, design decisions, whatever) The truth is, we have no idea. We can look at the numbers go up sometimes, and say that means good decisions - but who's to say they wouldn't have gone up further, making them bad decisions? We can look at the numbers go down, and say that means bad decisions - but how do we know the numbers wouldn't have declined even more, due to other factors, but were kept higher by the "bad" decisions? This is not a trivial issue. It is tempting to just read whatever your pet explanation is into the data, as if every movement as an obvious, single, cause, creating the change at exactly the observed magnitude. But the odds of that being true are vanishingly small, for something this complex.
-Jester