''Lol Pandas''...(and the hubris of the commnitty)

[ImpactHound]

I said that if SWTOR included all paying customers in their sub numbers like Blizzard's numbers, then SWTOR's "sub numbers" would likely be triple what they actually are, and you confirmed that it's actually quadruple, thank you.This makes more sense. I thought you were implying the SWTOR numbers would be in the 21 million mark(triple Blizzard's numbers), and that had me baffled.

 

 

This is the thing, if someone has paid to play an hour or less to play WoW in the Asian market in the last month, they are counted as a full subscriber when they do no pay nearly as much as a real subscriber. This is an outlier condition, and not the aggregate. It's fair to assume that the subscriber dollars-per-hour average out in the same way TOR does. Some people pay way beyond the $15 per month in both games on cosmetics; the guy paying $800 or $2000 for cartel coins is covering the cost for dozens of people who are strictly F2P or buy just one or two unlocks a month, so it averages out.

 

/5char

 

 

Just because something happens after something doesn't mean it happened because of the vent. I don't think the "Panda" expansion had as much if anything to do with their loss of numbers, but more to do with several factors.

 

1. People who quit before the Expansion came back before it was released to be ready for it's content. After they finished they left again. Causing the numbers to skew.

 

2. General Burn out with WoW that would have happened no matter what they released.

 

Considering the number are siimlar to the BC-era numbers, I personally think it stabilized back down to the fans of the series. Wrath and Cata had the most volatile jumps and drops that attracted and shoo'd off people who weren't strongly interested in the first place.

Edited November 8, 2013 by ImpactHound

[DarkDisturbed]

/5char

 

 

 

 

Considering the number are siimlar to the BC-era numbers, I personally think it stabilized back down to the fans of the series. Wrath and Cata had the most volatile jumps and drops that attracted and shoo'd off people who weren't strongly interested in the first place.

*wooooo woooo woooo* Blind fanboyism alert. It doesn't just "even out". Welcome to reality, it's an investor trick, nothing more. Edited November 8, 2013 by DarkDisturbed

[BlueyedJedi]

Sounds like this should have been started in a WOW Forum.

[ImpactHound]

*wooooo woooo woooo* Blind fanboyism alert. It doesn't just "even out". Welcome to reality, it's an investor trick, nothing more.

 

I disagree, but since neither company will divulge exact averages for $ per customer I guess we'll never know for sure.

[CosmicKat]

I said that if SWTOR included all paying customers in their sub numbers like Blizzard's numbers, then SWTOR's "sub numbers" would likely be triple what they actually are, and you confirmed that it's actually quadruple, thank you.

 

 

This is the thing, if someone has paid to play an hour or less to play WoW in the Asian market in the last month, they are counted as a full subscriber when they do no pay nearly as much as a real subscriber.

 

Why is it people (rightly) shoot down WoW's claimed paying customer numbers, yet take TOR's claimed numbers as gospel? They (all MMO's) release pure nonsense numbers.

 

Every 500k customers accounts for 0.05% of the population of the West alone. Statistically speaking, if you took any 2000 North Americans and/or Europeans, there would be 1 TOR player among them. In no universe does this equate to "mass market".

Edited November 8, 2013 by CosmicKat

[Darka]

MMOs need to stop focusing on being the next WoW

And be the first of them

 

TOR brought a lot of promise and excitement, but was unable to deliver due to many reasons often speculated about here. The launch was rough, and the way post launch was handled with heads rolling, and everyone jumping jump didnt give it any help either

 

This game will go down along side many MMOS who failed to reach their true potential

 

 

When TOR was announced, a friend of mine said.

I hope we arent meeting together again in ten years time saying, I hope this Star Wars MMO learns from the mistakes of SWG and TOR!

[Shastblu]

As an MMO, WoW just has that longer standing reputation that their fans cannot shake. Just can't quit you, darlin'. That kind of thing. I think there are several games far better than WoW, yet they never even come close to making Blizzard sweat. When you start out 10 laps ahead in a race, it's very difficult to lose.

 

Put simply, WoW is almost too big to fail.

[KennethHoover]

MMOs need to stop focusing on being the next WoW

And be the first of them

 

 

That's a really good point.

[Domatron]

Has anyone addressed the main raging issue here?

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is a commnitty?

[ikinai]

Has anyone addressed the main raging issue here?

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is a commnitty?

 

A communist nitpicker, of course.

[StarMagus]

- TOR, apparenly, has 500k subscibers!!! This is 300k more than EA/BW knows about! Wowzers!

 

If you didn't know this, you haven't been paying attention.

 

 

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Star-Wars-The-Old-Republic-Has-500-000-Subscribers-Sees-Revenue-Increase-351533.shtml

 

So yeah, EA/BW knows about it as they were the people that released the numbers.

[Stradlin]

The 500k came from BW/EA's conference call last April I believe.

 

Just for sake of containing mis information to some degree, could somebody provide a direct quote?

Edited November 8, 2013 by Stradlin

[Stradlin]

If you didn't know this, you haven't been paying attention.

 

 

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Star-Wars-The-Old-Republic-Has-500-000-Subscribers-Sees-Revenue-Increase-351533.shtml

 

So yeah, EA/BW knows about it as they were the people that released the numbers.

 

 

Article is six months old. It is based on report delivered less than two weeks after release of Rise of the Hutt Cartel. To be fair, I would not have guessed TOR has as many as 400-500k subs back then.

What do you think has happened to this number as waves New Expansion! always provides to an MMO have stopped carrying it?

Edited November 8, 2013 by Stradlin

[NSStember]

Nobody smart ever thought SWTOR would be a WoW-killer. It's carved out its own niche focused on story and it's done decently, the early F2P transition notwithstanding.

Honestly, given the sort of people who are big fans of WoW, I'm perfectly happy to let them stay in their little land of chainmail bikinis, giant shoulder pads, and particle effects so sparkly it's impossible to see what's going on.

 

You hit the nail on the head

 

Pandas were never supposed to be a "WoW death", they were just the end of WoW as a decent storyline (which pretty much ended with the Lich King).

[Klarick]

Casual-friendly, theme-park MMOs are not only not out of fashion, they are the present and future of any MMO which hopes to attain mass-market appeal. EVE (and whatever "hardcore" sand box game replaces it) will probably always have a niche, but nothing more. Those days are gone.

 

This may be the only time i have ever agreed with The Muffin. But he does make a good point here. No one more surprised than Myself.

[Mallorik]

No game is ever going to match what WoW did, nor would WoW do it again if it was released today, it was a freak occurrance and the market ( and playerbase) are different now

 

I really don't understand why people say this. is it just an excuse for why the game they like is not a blockbuster?

 

"There will never be another wow" will only continue to be true as long as mmo companies keep making the same mistakes. Someday an mmo company will release an mmo that doesn't try to do what their dev team can't accomplish before its release date, it will have all the major mmo qol features and they will pump out new content and have a popular ip (whether its new or an old one). Then their will be a "new wow" and I have faith that someday someone will accomplish this.

 

Saying that there will never be a game bigger than wow is just shear ignorance, the same ignorance people were spouting for years when Daoc, swg etc were crowned EQ Killers, and when they failed people said there will never be an mmo as big as EQ.

[Jeweledleah]

they may be a game bigger than WoW. but when it happens, its going to be lucky timing and superb promotion, not vastly superior quality of the game. if we're lucky - the game is actually going to be good, an equivalent of Harry potter rather than shades of gray.

 

I still keep thinking back to WoW. every once in a while, when I come back to see what's new, it feels empty. I see people around, but they are not from my server (cross realm). and we're not even talking leveling area, but rather endgame areas. i played on a pretty well populated server (according to metrics), but I couldn't sell much on the auction house, etc. its weird. and now they are adding even more of a cross server functionality to the game. where are the numbers? I think this is where the doubt is coming from. personal experience vs announced metrics.

 

I never have any of these issues in TOR and its supposed to have so much fewer subscribers...

 

whatever actual numbers are, when I go to local bestbuy or walmart or even much smaller spacewise gamestop - I see SWTOR time cards (and in case of wal-mart - cartel coin cards, everyone else has digital versions) hanging in their card section. I'm guessing the game is doing just fine, smaller than WoW numbers or not.

 

P.S. I'm suddenly reminded of the TED talk Amanda Palmer gave, specifically the part about numbers. she had one of the first major successful kickstarter campaigns. people were in awe and kept asking how? it was give or take 20,000 people. the very same number that were the sales of her first album that her then recording company deemed a failure.

 

perspective!

Edited November 8, 2013 by Jeweledleah

[Trollokdamus]

I still keep thinking back to WoW. every once in a while, when I come back to see what's new, it feels empty. I see people around, but they are not from my server (cross realm). and we're not even talking leveling area, but rather endgame areas. i played on a pretty well populated server (according to metrics), but I couldn't sell much on the auction house, etc. its weird. and now they are adding even more of a cross server functionality to the game. where are the numbers? I think this is where the doubt is coming from. personal experience vs announced metrics.

Server population is one of the most major problems WoW has today. Some servers are overpopulated and have insane queues, while others are barren wastelands. Once, i was looking at the number of people on Nordrassil (the server i play on) and it felt much superior to Traya's Academy (my original SWTOR server). Now, however, it's vice versa - Nordrassil's population has reduced by alot and is pathetic compared to ToFN, where i play now.

But. Blizzard are working on a solution. And this solution has nothing to do with Bioware's "Let's just merge all the servers! Who cares if people will lose their character, legacy and guild names!" No, Blizzard want to preserve everything their players have, so they've chosen a much more complicated and expensive path. It's called Connected Realms. You can read more about that in Google.

[Jeweledleah]

Server population is one of the most major problems WoW has today. Some servers are overpopulated and have insane queues, while others are barren wastelands. Once, i was looking at the number of people on Nordrassil (the server i play on) and it felt much superior to Traya's Academy (my original SWTOR server). Now, however, it's vice versa - Nordrassil's population has reduced by alot and is pathetic compared to ToFN, where i play now.

But. Blizzard are working on a solution. And this solution has nothing to do with Bioware's "Let's just merge all the servers! Who cares if people will lose their character, legacy and guild names!" No, Blizzard want to preserve everything their players have, so they've chosen a much more complicated and expensive path. It's called Connected Realms. You can read more about that in Google.

 

I used to play on Tyralion.

 

and honestly? personally? I like individual servers better. I read about connected realms, and ..

I didn't start on Tyralion. when I first started, the random suggestion dumped me on Anvilmar. that server was never particularly good, but it deteriorated mid Wrath to the point where I couldn't stand it anymore and transferred my fave characters. I picked Tyralion because it was in a different battlegroup, then Anvilmar, because I never wanted to run into people from my old server ever again. and now... I'm stuck because they merged battlegroups instead.

 

you could say that merge can result in similar effect and yes, I'll give you that (although, at least with merge you could pick which realm to move to, with connected realms, Blizzard picks for you). but IMO, server merge still offers a little more stability. call me old fashioned but I like how static servers end up building a community. you recognize people, guilds, you build alliances, I find it to be nice. I know that some people using oqueue I think it was called? managed to create approximation of it, but its just not quite the same. not to me.

 

and call it a tinfoil hat theory, but to me it sounds more like BLizzard is trying to save face. server merge is admission of reduced population. connected realms while leaving servers intact looks some much nicer on paper.

Edited November 9, 2013 by Jeweledleah

[ImpactHound]

I used to play on Tyralion.

 

and honestly? personally? I like individual servers better. I read about connected realms, and ..

I didn't start on Tyralion. when I first started, the random suggestion dumped me on Anvilmar. that server was never particularly good, but it deteriorated mid Wrath to the point where I couldn't stand it anymore and transferred my fave characters. I picked Tyralion because it was in a different battlegroup, then Anvilmar, because I never wanted to run into people from my old server ever again. and now... I'm stuck because they merged battlegroups instead.

 

you could say that merge can result in similar effect and yes, I'll give you that (although, at least with merge you could pick which realm to move to, with connected realms, Blizzard picks for you). but IMO, server merge still offers a little more stability. call me old fashioned but I like how static servers end up building a community. you recognize people, guilds, you build alliances, I find it to be nice. I know that some people using oqueue I think it was called? managed to create approximation of it, but its just not quite the same. not to me.

 

and call it a tinfoil hat theory, but to me it sounds more like BLizzard is trying to save face. server merge is admission of reduced population. connected realms while leaving servers intact looks some much nicer on paper.

 

It works both ways, Connected Realms means the servers have room for player surges which are a very real thing as expansions get released and new & old players come in or back.

[TheNahash]

(1)The point being that the ''Pandas'' were widely ridiculed, and yet, at the end of the expansion, WOW still have between three and four times more sub than TOR at it's prime.

 

Pandas were and still are ridiculous. I know they are in the lore, but that doesn't change the fact they are ridiculous. There are a LOT of things in Warcraft's lore, yet they chose to use Pandas.

It was an obvious attempt at appeasing the asian market and the younger audience that hadn't yet discovered WoW and would probably never have the chance to do so because by the time they'd reach puberty, the game would be completely irrelevant.

 

There's very little logic in the rest of your post because it's mainly filled with "my team is better than yours" ideas that PR departments (in gaming, sports or even music) love to perpetuate.

 

By the time SWTOR launched, WoW already had 10mil subscribers.

It's now at 7+

Did it die? No, but it's an old game and it shows. And people are gradually losing interest, regardless of what Blizzard might come up with to get people interested in the game again.

 

WoW had the good fortune and the luxury to launch at a time when MMOs were still a "geek thing" that only a few people cared about. They mainstreamed it and by doing that Blizzard was able to set the rules for the market.

 

No matter what they do, however, they will never reach their peak sub numbers again and that's perfectly fine because it's been almost a decade since its release - that's called the "decline stage" in any products life cycle.

 

Final thought:

If you want to compare WoW's numbers, then compare it to a game that launched close or during WoW's growth and maturity stages, like Lord of the Rings Online, which incidentally, was also supposed to be a WoW killer, also had an extremely popular and universally loved IP (there are no Trekkies vs SW fanboys equivalent) and was capitalizing on a very successful movie trilogy at the time. Also, there were not that many alternatives to WoW back then and the market was still new.

 

Or, you can even take a look at SWG's history - it launched one year before WoW with an extremely popular IP, yet it also "copied" WoW when Sony realized that people wanted what Blizzard was selling.

Edited November 9, 2013 by TheNahash

[Trollokdamus]

although, at least with merge you could pick which realm to move to, with connected realms, Blizzard picks for you.

If i recall right, Bioware, when merging their own servers, didn't give their players an option to choose the destination server as well. This resulted in many negative threads with people complaining about their inability to move all of their characters from various servers to one single destination server.

 

but IMO, server merge still offers a little more stability. call me old fashioned but I like how static servers end up building a community. you recognize people, guilds, you build alliances, I find it to be nice. I know that some people using oqueue I think it was called? managed to create approximation of it, but its just not quite the same. not to me.

Connected Realms are basically small groups of realms, where every group will have an overall healthy population. Let's say you connect weak populated realms A, B and C. All the people from this three realms will form a single community, where you will be able to recognize people, guilds and so on. So i don't see an issue here.

 

and call it a tinfoil hat theory, but to me it sounds more like BLizzard is trying to save face. server merge is admission of reduced population. connected realms while leaving servers intact looks some much nicer on paper.

You have a point there. Part of the reason of Blizzard taking this approach may very well be an attemt to save the face. But tbh i don't really care since all in all this change is the best solution you can come up with for players. I mean you get more people to play with and to form a community, you don't have to move anywhere and lose your names and possibly items/achievements due to transfer errors, you don't have to reform your guilds, and on top of that Blizzard is saving their face by not reducing the overall number of servers. A win-win situation if you ask me.

 

Pandas were and still are ridiculous. I know they are in the lore, but that doesn't change the fact they are ridiculous. There are a LOT of things in Warcraft's lore, yet they chose to use Pandas.

It was an obvious attempt at appeasing the asian market and the younger audience

You know what i find ridiculous? Not pandas, but posts like yours. Like many other people I had my doubts when pandas were announced, but now i admit that all in all they've played nicely.

Also, lol at your "obvious attempt at appeasing the asian market and the younger audience". Not gonna write an article on how and why you are wrong, i'll just say that

a) Asian theme is pretty much popular in the western world.

b) After Cataclysm, WoW was really needing a change of scenery.

c) MoP questing is taregeted at the adult audience. If you don't realize that, you've obviously didn't play it.

Edited November 9, 2013 by Trollokdamus

[Jeweledleah]

If i recall right, Bioware, when merging their own servers, didn't give their players an option to choose the destination server as well. This resulted in many negative threads with people complaining about their inability to move all of their characters from various servers to one single destination server.

 

 

 

as far as i remember - they did. its how I got to transfer my own character from couple of other servers I sorta played on, onto my current and main server. they gave a warning to people to make their choices, and then when the time ran out , transferred whatever was left over. I even have tauntaun pets on my original characters to remeber server merges by.

 

I do agree that they shouldn't have limited a number of character you could transfer, but I'm guessing it was a technical issue at the time.

 

that said, connected realms may as well work as you describe. and to be honest, i kinda think that part of the problem community is not as important, is because you don't really need friends to run all content, thanks to vastly simplified lfr. so fewer and fewer people make the effort and its harder and harder to join an established group, or form a new steady one. the pros is that everyone can see content. the con? it feels like being alone in a crowd to me.

 

P.S. Pandaria actually had a very engaging storyline. I just didn't continue enjoying it on repeats with exception of couple of quest chains that I never skipped (one of the was helping a foreman rescue her husband from a jade quarry - their reunion still makes me giggle in delight ) I'm not even sure why, normally I'm very big on rereading/rewatching the stories.

[Praxeum]

The point being that the ''Lol Pandas''-that were widely derided as ''that will kill WOW'' have not prevented WOW to still have 7.6 millions sub (including asian ones, yes, I know) at the end of the expansion cycle While TOR, whose launch was very soon after the Pandas announcement crashed and burned.

 

So, obviously, Blizzard did something better than Bioware.

 

If they are so much better, why the need to 'borrow' key TOR features that set them apart: companions (and companion missions) and character story -- some of those same improvements Bioware made to the industry. They've been in business to build those numbers for a lot longer. They have 7 now but were probably closer to 12 just a few years ago... sounds like they are bleeding and called in some changes from Bioware's drawing board. According to your numbers (assumed from Blizzcon) sounds like they are bleeding pretty bad (losing 2 mill+ in about 8-9 months) and resorted to changes that were Bioware-like. http://leviathyn.com/games/news/2013/05/08/world-of-warcraft-subscription-numbers-down-to-8-3-million/m

http://www.mmodata.net/

 

I left WoW because it was not the WoW of the glory days, pandas and dumb-down of the game killed it for me.

 

Maybe it is a slow death.

Edited November 9, 2013 by Praxeum

[ImpactHound]

If they are so much better, why the need to 'borrow' key TOR features that set them apart: companions (and companion missions) and character story -- some of those same improvements Bioware made to the industry. They've been in business to build those numbers for a lot longer. They have 7 now but were probably closer to 12 just a few years ago... sounds like they are bleeding and called in some changes from Bioware's drawing board. According to your numbers (assumed from Blizzcon) sounds like they are bleeding pretty bad (losing 2 mill+ in about 8-9 months) and resorted to changes that were Bioware-like. http://leviathyn.com/games/news/2013/05/08/world-of-warcraft-subscription-numbers-down-to-8-3-million/m

http://www.mmodata.net/

 

I left WoW because it was not the WoW of the glory days, pandas and dumb-down of the game killed it for me.

 

Maybe it is a slow death.

 

Star Trek was doing Away Missions first, and the way WoW is implementing it, it's closer to Trek's or (in my opinion) Evil Genius on PC. You don't use the followers as pets in this game.