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MisterZimbu posted:Pretty much the first rule of any microtransaction thing is to come up with a bullshit reason for the customer on why it's actually a *good* thing that you're charging for it that's not "we want more money". Theres a reason why WoW continues to be as profitable now as it was when it had 4x the playerbase and thats because of every $20-$60 microtransaction they've added to the game
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Oct 17, 2016 19:18
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WoW's highest pop was 12.5 million near the end of Wrath; today's is 10 million, as of Legion. The microtransactions definitely make them bank, but it's pretty much icing on a huge cake; not replacing a supposed 3/4ths population drop.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:26
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Cao Ni Ma posted:Theres a reason why WoW continues to be as profitable now as it was when it had 4x the playerbase and thats because of every $20-$60 microtransaction they've added to the game And to be fair, "pay $60 to get a character to level 100 so you can jump right into the expansion with your alt" is a pretty easy sell for some people.
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Oct 18, 2016 19:54
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Harrow posted:And to be fair, "pay $60 to get a character to level 100 so you can jump right into the expansion with your alt" is a pretty easy sell for some people. I bought one. Leveling is fun precisely once.
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Oct 18, 2016 20:11
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Rhymenoserous posted:I bought one. Leveling is fun precisely once. Oh for sure, so did I. One of my problems in WoW has always been that I burn out while leveling through TBC for the sixteenth time and there was no way I was going to do that to play a Monk. (Glad I did, too, Monk owns and has supplanted Druid as my main.)
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Oct 18, 2016 22:51
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WoW is really good with incentives to people coming back, is probably the easiest mmo to play for between years apart and still get easily into endgame
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Oct 19, 2016 06:39
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General Maximus posted:It'd be cool, but at the same time WoW doesn't need it cause both factions there have enough players alone to keep things moving. Yeah, but it sucks to not be able to play with your friends because they want to be a troll and you want to be a dwarf.
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Oct 19, 2016 07:12
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The WoW factions thing always struck me as a weird holdover from ~the lore~ of the RTS series, much like how restricting these largely culturally-generic classes by race is a weird holdover from grognardy D&D. So grognardy that it was well obsolete by the then-current edition of D&D released years before. But WoW's big enough and popular enough that people are gonna cargo cult even weird sacred cows like that.
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Oct 19, 2016 07:35
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AbrahamLincolnLog posted:WoW's highest pop was 12.5 million near the end of Wrath; today's is 10 million, as of Legion. Did they release numbers recently? The last numbers they gave out were during WoD and the drop was so precipitous that they stopped giving numbers afterwards.
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Oct 19, 2016 11:19
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Cao Ni Ma posted:Did they release numbers recently? The last numbers they gave out were during WoD and the drop was so precipitous that they stopped giving numbers afterwards. no it's just guesswork by people who want their crack habit to be trendy
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Oct 19, 2016 11:45
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mike12345 posted:no it's just guesswork by people who want their crack habit to be trendy https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/55tg0e/tom_chilton_in_polish_gaming_magazine_pixel_wow/
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Oct 19, 2016 13:46
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Arzachel posted:https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/55tg0e/tom_chilton_in_polish_gaming_magazine_pixel_wow/ Blizzard later stated that the number was a misinterpretation on the interviewer's behalf, iirc. I doubt they got that close to 10 million with legion. But why does it matter anyway? WoW isn't going anywhere for a long, long time, and if you need sub numbers to justify playing a game, then perhaps you have a problem.
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Oct 19, 2016 14:15
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Arzachel posted:https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/55tg0e/tom_chilton_in_polish_gaming_magazine_pixel_wow/ don't forget to read the part where they went "uhhh actually it's not ten million, dunno where they got that, eh heh heh heh" *tugs collar* quote:Update: Blizzard has issued a statement denying that Tom Chilton provided the 10.1 million subscriber number to the magazine. "This was a misquote, or some kind of misunderstanding on the part of the journalist," a rep said. "Our policy for almost a year now is that we do not talk about subscriber numbers, and Tom did not do that with this publication."
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Oct 19, 2016 14:16
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Crumpet posted:Blizzard later stated that the number was a misinterpretation on the interviewer's behalf, iirc. I doubt they got that close to 10 million with legion. Also isn't a not insignificant amount of those however-many-million people playing on the Asian servers that're treated closer to a free-to-play mmo with a heavily incentivised cash shop? I thought I remember hearing that come up whenever WoW sub numbers gets discussed in some places.
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Oct 19, 2016 18:20
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DeathSandwich posted:Also isn't a not insignificant amount of those however-many-million people playing on the Asian servers that're treated closer to a free-to-play mmo with a heavily incentivised cash shop? If I remember right, South Korea pays for WoW in hours, because of the prevalence of Internet cafés (PC Bangs). Their cash shop definitely has more than the western one, but I don't know what it contains exactly. I'm not sure about China, but it wouldn't surprise me if a similar model was in place. They always included these subs in some way for their previous sub number disclosures, since a few times they've blamed the majority of sub drops on the Asian market; it's hard to say what proportion of subs come from that region though, since they never disclosed the breakdown per-region. Not that any of this matters, since despite what people may say, how many subs the game has, or my own personal opinions on what WoW's become, the game is still going strong (hell, any other developer would kill to be making as much money as WoW still does).
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Oct 19, 2016 19:47
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"Oh no, WoW is only making 8x as much money as its closest competitor, not 10x, dead game"
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Oct 19, 2016 20:09
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MisterZimbu posted:"Oh no, WoW is only making 8x as much money as its closest competitor, not 10x, dead game" Millions of people are playing? Not billions. Feh. Dying genre.
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Oct 19, 2016 20:24
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Xarbala posted:But WoW's big enough and popular enough that people are gonna cargo cult even weird sacred cows like that. It's not really a cargo cult, its a sign of player investment that many games would kill for. Anyone asks anyone if they play WoW, and they will generally ask which faction they play soon after. You can't buy this form of attachment.
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Oct 19, 2016 20:41
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I think thats usually so people can determine if they can actually play together more than any particular rivalry between the two factions. Earlier in WoW's life there was definitely a pretty well developed rivalry for sure though but it seems like Blizzard has been moving away from that. In a few more expansions I wouldnt be surprised at all to see them do away with most barriers between factions.
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Oct 19, 2016 23:59
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Early wow (Classic for sure) we had outright rivals with counterparts on the other side. There were hord names I knew and would hunt down in AV and others that would do the same for me. As a Raid geared toon this was kinda a big deal as BGs back then were all about your heavy hitters and then every one else. I guess you could make it akin to WWI ace pilots. A few Ace's running around who knew how to lead, deal with tails, and all kinds of trash, and LOTS of other pilots who get shot down on there first run with 0 Kills. Now a days x-server stuff destroys that kind of thing.
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Oct 20, 2016 08:14
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PyRosflam posted:Early wow (Classic for sure) we had outright rivals with counterparts on the other side. There were hord names I knew and would hunt down in AV and others that would do the same for me. As a Raid geared toon this was kinda a big deal as BGs back then were all about your heavy hitters and then every one else. A warrior with a fuckoff big 2 hander and a gaggle of priests following like ducklings tossing out heals
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Oct 20, 2016 10:54
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The rage a shaman with a big, slow two hander getting a lucky windfury proc could generate was absolutely astounding.
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Oct 20, 2016 14:44
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PyRosflam posted:Early wow (Classic for sure) we had outright rivals with counterparts on the other side. There were hord names I knew and would hunt down in AV and others that would do the same for me. As a Raid geared toon this was kinda a big deal as BGs back then were all about your heavy hitters and then every one else. Aww I remember those days.  I haven't played since the start of Cataclysm, won't be picking it up again, but back when I was in high school (vanilla WoW) I had so much fun with PVP. The rivalries were fantastic. I understand why they did the cross-server stuff though; my server was getting pretty quiet by the time I quit the game, and I would have much rather had cross-server people to play with than a ghost town.
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Oct 20, 2016 21:13
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Wildstar. How are the servers still on: The game. I suspect it's because some higher up has their career banking on it and is desperate to keep their job/benefits and is trying everything to stop the plug being pulled. If this was some indie product nobody would care but you don't flop AAA budget money that hard and not have repercussions somewhere.
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Oct 22, 2016 08:19
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That or there's nothing else to replace it with. If the servers/game already exist, might as well just let it run until they have something else to use the servers on. Otherwise you have a huge sum of money in servers that you're just letting rot. (Arguably, if they're hosting Wildstar, they still are rotting).
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Oct 22, 2016 08:22
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I imagine the shutdown will go something like "Here are some Lineage 3 keys, see you in the closed beta tomorrow!" Followed by yanking out the network cable while they re-image the Wildstar servers with L3. Or server. Whatever's left.
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Oct 22, 2016 11:02
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They could format them and put city of heroes back up and make more money at the rate Wildstar is going.
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Oct 22, 2016 20:14
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randombattle posted:They could format them and put city of heroes back up and make more money at the rate Wildstar is going. A happier ending.
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Oct 22, 2016 22:51
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Is there even a chance that will happen? Don't toy with me like that.
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Oct 23, 2016 02:57
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StuG Jeebus posted:Is there even a chance that will happen? Nope.
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Oct 23, 2016 03:01
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NCSoft is going to keep Wildstar on life support and extract as much money as they can from the player base in an effort to get at least some of their money back. There is zero chance theyll spend a dime to bring back CoH when they are just hoping to reduce the size of the loss theyre taking on Wildstar.
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Oct 23, 2016 05:21
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We say they'd be better off putting City of Heroes back up so much it might as well be the thread title.
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Oct 23, 2016 05:27
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CoffeeBooze posted:NCSoft is going to keep Wildstar on life support and extract as much money as they can from the player base in an effort to get at least some of their money back. There is zero chance theyll spend a dime to bring back CoH when they are just hoping to reduce the size of the loss theyre taking on Wildstar. You say that but looking at the financials Wildstar is making so little money (it rounds off to a zero) that arguably just having a skeleton team doing maintenance and paying for bandwidth is actually still costing NCSoft more than a complete write off.
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Oct 23, 2016 07:06
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Hey, if Darkfall could get three loving re-releases maybe there's hope for COH. There's no hope. It's clientbase was small and not extremely whalelike, and that was before people got multiple years to get over it going away.
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Oct 23, 2016 07:30
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DancingShade posted:You say that but looking at the financials Wildstar is making so little money (it rounds off to a zero) that arguably just having a skeleton team doing maintenance and paying for bandwidth is actually still costing NCSoft more than a complete write off. Well look at how hard they were pitching wildstar anyway. I think there is definitely some logic behind assuming that they don't want to write it off completely because of how hard they did push it.
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Oct 23, 2016 08:15
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DancingShade posted:You say that but looking at the financials Wildstar is making so little money (it rounds off to a zero) that arguably just having a skeleton team doing maintenance and paying for bandwidth is actually still costing NCSoft more than a complete write off. It's apparently still profitable though, or they'd have killed it already. This is NCSoft, they kill games the moment they have a reason to. Actually, did Wildstar ever get a release in any of the asian markets? I know it flopped horribly in western markets but maybe it's inexplicably doing better elsewhere?
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Oct 23, 2016 09:54
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General Maximus posted:It's apparently still profitable though, or they'd have killed it already. This is NCSoft, they kill games the moment they have a reason to. All I know is NCSoft report their financials globally in Korean Won. Blade & Soul is the gangbusters game in the western market, solidly outperforming GW2 (which is still doing well). In the first quarter of 2016 Wildstar scraped in 1.2 million won (~roughly 1mil USD). Gross not net. Feel free to figure out tax, Wildstar specific operating costs & salaries and deduct that. Lineage continues to be an inexplicable money printing machine. Anyway, ultimately NCSoft doesn't even matter because Daewoo Securities has the real purse strings. https://mmos.com/news/investment-bank-predicts-grim-future-for-wildstar Heck, get a direct copy http://www.kdbdw.com/bbs/download/203797.pdf?attachmentId=203797
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Oct 23, 2016 11:33
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General Maximus posted:It's apparently still profitable though, or they'd have killed it already. This is NCSoft, they kill games the moment they have a reason to. I dont think it is profitable given the revenue it reports and the normal cost of operating servers and keeping a skeleton crew.
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Oct 23, 2016 12:06
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I know it isn't argued seriously, but CoH isn't coming back. Even if NCSoft somehow wanted to - and it's pretty obvious that they sure as hell don't considering they went out of their way to close it in the first place - all the staff if Paragon is either split across other divisions or just gone entirely And you sure as hell can't maintain or update an MMO (especially one made by Cryptic) with complete novices; it'd be months of training to actually get a new staff experienced enough to work with the code, adding a sizable up front cost to something that didn't succeed well enough the first time. It ain't happening.
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Oct 23, 2016 13:11
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There was a planned Chinese version that was in closed beta in February, but Carbine canceled it during the big layoffs wave in March.
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Oct 23, 2016 14:44
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