Mists of Pandaria discussion

[Lissa]

An interesting statistic:

Total time played per week by Game

Now, strictly WoW playtime over the last month

now, strictly League of Legends playtime over the last month

Now, the sample size is small, but WoW use to be #1 for the last several years on XFire and within the last month, the WoW numbers have gone down on XFire. Right now there are about 10k more people on XFire playing LoL than WoW (again, small sample size, but this is 34k to 23k). Looking around various other places, there are other signs as well with people getting fed up with WoW.

And here is something that is worth pondering that I found from someone on MMO-Champion:

The worst thing that can happen to World of Warcraft is the permanent loss of their veteran players. New players come and go, that's expected; some never make it past a trial version, others play for a few months.

When a veteran player leaves for good, that means a new or different gaming experience is worth more than their years and years of experience, friendships and accomplishments. How often do you hear about someone who quit WoW for Rift, LotR, or any other game, and they come back because "If I'm gonna play a WoW clone, I may as well play the one I invested so much in"? When those people aren't coming back to WoW from other games, you're losing a commodity worth 2-3x as much as any new player who subs.

Should those vet players grow sick enough of WoW, or Blizz/Act, it will have a devastating affect on the future of the game, one that cannot be offset by new players who have nothing to lose by quitting. If you're not wholly invested in the success of a game or product, you won't talk about it, won't defend it, and won't champion its cause. Blizz loses the best advertising it has when a veteran or burnt out player leaves.

And that is the real problem Blizzard is truly facing. The fact that their veteran players are leaving and not returning after taking a hiatus. The fact that people that have invested so much time into WoW are willing to just throw aside the time they spent and go to something else should worry Blizzard a lot. Casual players can be very fickle, but holding on to your veteran players is what can make or break you cause those vets can pull people in and keep them. If the vets are willing to leave the game and tell people why they left the game, that can have a dramatic effect on future subscriptions. Right now Blizzard is trying to plug the holes in the dam with their fingers, but there's still plenty of water being lost no matter how they try to stop the flow.