Vivendi is hugely in debt and intended to pay off that debt with ActiBlizz. For understandable reasons they're willing to pay a bit extra to make sure that they're free from that situation ever rising again. The move had their stock rise 15%, so it's obvious that they're not the only ones who thought it a good idea.
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HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
WoW Down to 7.7 Million Subscribers
Activision Blizzard's press release states that World of Warcraft is down to 7.7 million subscribers. This is a loss of 600,000 subscribers, down from 8.3 million last quarter. A call about the shares purchase will take place on July 26 at 8:30 AM ET, so check back then for any more comments on subscriber numbers.
Activision Blizzard Purchases Shares From Vivendi
Activision Blizzard is purchasing 429 million shares from Vivendi for $5.8 billion. This purchase is financed with $1.2 billion of cash that was on hand and $4.6 billion of debt proceeds, leaving them with a $1.4 billion of net debt at the end of the deal in September 2013.
An investment group that includes Bobby Kotick and Brian Kelly, who put up $100 million together, as well as Tencent and other partners is purchasing 172 million shares for $2.3 billion. This group will own 24.9% of the company and Vivendi will retain ownership of 83 million shares (12%) of the company.
Abandon ship.
Subs will likely continue to decline for the rest of the expansion and will see a resurgence, possibly a significant one, once the next expansion launches if indeed they launch with the new models (and if the models are a significant improvement over what we have today, which I think they will be).
Ultimately though the same cycle will happen, subs will continue to drop and we'll probably stabilize at around 3-4 million subscribers over the next few years. If I had to guess, that is.
I could be wrong, but I doubt people are leaving because of a lack of graphical fidelity.
I don't think I insinuated that that was the case, but if I did, my apologies. No, what I mean to say is that, while the subs are dropping now and will likely continue to do so, sub numbers usually see a pretty big bump when a new expansion is released, and given that the current antiquated player models have been one of the larger gripes of the playerbase for the past few years, seeing them overhauled significantly would very likely bring even more people back, if only for a short time. Still, even with that solid shot in the arm, the numbers will very likely drop again and continue their downward trend until they bottom out at around 3-4 million in another year or two.
And even then, that's at least double what most MMOs of its kind are topping out at, so this ship'll keep on chuggin' for quite a while.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
edited July 2013
Yeah, new character models will be a HUGE draw. Hopefully the new models will also mean a chance to add more customization and maybe fix some nagging issues (like how all armor must be mirrored - especially bad for tabards). I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of tattoo system too
HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
Agreed, though frankly I'd even take that over the helms that don't bother hiding the hair at all so you get that ridiculous clipping issue. So awful. I actually had to go with the horrendous DBZ haircut on my BE male paladin just so his hair wouldn't magically flow out through his helm and chestplate. Urgh.
It'd be nice to have armor graphics for cat, bear, moonkin at a minimum. They can add a glyph to not show armor graphics, but speaking as a bear tank I would like to be able to be an armored bear.
Also, could Blizzard please stop rationing fun on clickies. I like my fire cat staff buff, but the 2 hour cooldown feels pretty punitive.
There are plenty of MMOs out there with higher graphical fidelity than WoW that are basically ghost towns. Shit, WoW has looked like "garbage" (I don't think it is, just stylized, but whatever) for years. Even during WotLK! The issues are deeper than that, and it's not just 'people are bored of the same old same old' (though that is certainly a part of it). Some of Blizzard's design decisions for this expansion are just baffling, and seem almost specifically aimed at driving out 'casuals.' Others were just immense disappointments. Like pet battles. I was really looking forward to pet battles, because I thought that it would be cool to shoot the shit with friends in raids and pokemon it up while we waited for people to come back from AFKs. Then Blizzard decided in development that this is the kind of thing that shouldn't be allowed.
welp!
But, in my opinion, one of the worst decisions was the move to eliminate the per-week limit on Valor rewards from dungeons and instead move it to once per-day reward. The system was perfect as it was. You could play on days you wanted to play without having to worry about hurting your progression. It was flexible and fair. Now if you miss a dungeon for a day, you have to do like 16 daily quests to make up for it. Blizzard has said they did this because they thought that getting people to log on daily would be better, suggesting that after doing this chore, players would go to do something else in-game since they were already logged in. It's a stance that's almost laughably out of touch. Taking away my flexible rewards for dungeons, pressuring me to log on every day and punishing me with dailies when I can't? It honestly sounded like something a bean-counter at Activision pushed, because it's hard for me to believe someone more involved in the game couldn't see that this would have the opposite effect. In fact, speaking personally, it just made me resentful.
Then you have shit like re-emphasizing dailies, re-emphasizing rep grinds (dear God why), making alts significantly harder to maintain (partially rep related and STILL so, even with the rep increase items), etc., and outside of raids, WoW just became a chore. I could honestly go on a diatribe on each of those points but this post is already tl;dr for me.
Not helping matters is the fact that the game has been in a holding pattern for a couple years, now. Blizzard is either unwilling or - more likely, given the realities of corporations - incapable of really shaking things up. Perhaps with Blizz buying shares from Vivendi, this will change.
So no, I don't think better models for the races would really help
Personally, I'd like to see a Warcraft 4, and a WoW2 based off its consequences. Warcraft 3 did a Helluva lot to set up the current world and its villains, which is one of the advantages of single-player games over MMOs: you have more room to maneuver, and you have more time to focus on the story. I mean, ideally, this should have been something that they did after WotLK, with the end of the last of the enemies people really gave a shit about. Warcraft 4 could've centered around Deathwing's rise and fall, leading to a world so devastated that Blizzard could've basically done anything they wanted with it in WoW2. But it was safer to just keep churning out samey expansions with maybe a few changes here and there. They are, unfortunately, a slave to their own success.
I'm in a similar boat, myself. 541 ilvl Brewmaster, 15k crit, 6.1k haste. My threat/damage is bonkers. My co-tank is a 540 Prot Paladin, with 14k (almost 15k) Haste. His threat/damage is also pretty bonkers. My damage is a bit higher than his, though. Threat-wise, it's pretty stupid though. If he's tanking the boss, and I taunt, he'll immediately rip threat back. And vice versa. We pretty much HAVE to go off the boss for a while, no auto-attacks or nothing.
All I can say is, I can't wait for 5.4 when they put in that Taunt change. The whole +200% threat for 3 seconds after taunting or whatever. It'll make tank transitions so much smoother.
I decided that if I'm gonna pull aggro constantly anyways, I might as well push that extra rating into Mastery rather than having to constantly stop attacking. It's inefficient, and it causes your shuffle to drop a lot/fall off when you should be building a buffer while not tanking. And I don't have to worry about any sort of fluke deaths almost. 95% of the time it's the rest of the raid causing the wipe.
I think you'd be surprised how willing people are to jump ship in favor of whatever has the shiny new graphics. I suspect it doesn't matter too much whether those games actually retain players, just whether they get people to unsub from WoW.
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I'm in a similar boat, myself. 541 ilvl Brewmaster, 15k crit, 6.1k haste. My threat/damage is bonkers. My co-tank is a 540 Prot Paladin, with 14k (almost 15k) Haste. His threat/damage is also pretty bonkers. My damage is a bit higher than his, though. Threat-wise, it's pretty stupid though. If he's tanking the boss, and I taunt, he'll immediately rip threat back. And vice versa. We pretty much HAVE to go off the boss for a while, no auto-attacks or nothing.
All I can say is, I can't wait for 5.4 when they put in that Taunt change. The whole +200% threat for 3 seconds after taunting or whatever. It'll make tank transitions so much smoother.
I decided that if I'm gonna pull aggro constantly anyways, I might as well push that extra rating into Mastery rather than having to constantly stop attacking. It's inefficient, and it causes your shuffle to drop a lot/fall off when you should be building a buffer while not tanking. And I don't have to worry about any sort of fluke deaths almost. 95% of the time it's the rest of the raid causing the wipe.
Bolded is partly why I play a tank. With a few exceptions here and there (looking at you, bat kiting on Tortos), when we wipe, it's almost never the Tank's fault. It's great. Really nice not to have that kind of huge responsibility on my shoulders. I can just kick back and do my thing.
And if it is the Tank's fault for a wipe, that's usually something that can be easily rectified. Got blown up by a boss's ability? Remember to use a Cooldown next time.
That's how I feel about ALL fights in WoW, as any class. Most deaths can/should be easily rectified. Previously I raided with my Rogue, and as long as you were situationally aware, you could avoid most deaths.
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HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
There are plenty of MMOs out there with higher graphical fidelity than WoW that are basically ghost towns. Shit, WoW has looked like "garbage" (I don't think it is, just stylized, but whatever) for years. Even during WotLK! The issues are deeper than that, and it's not just 'people are bored of the same old same old' (though that is certainly a part of it). Some of Blizzard's design decisions for this expansion are just baffling, and seem almost specifically aimed at driving out 'casuals.' Others were just immense disappointments. Like pet battles. I was really looking forward to pet battles, because I thought that it would be cool to shoot the shit with friends in raids and pokemon it up while we waited for people to come back from AFKs. Then Blizzard decided in development that this is the kind of thing that shouldn't be allowed.
welp!
But, in my opinion, one of the worst decisions was the move to eliminate the per-week limit on Valor rewards from dungeons and instead move it to once per-day reward. The system was perfect as it was. You could play on days you wanted to play without having to worry about hurting your progression. It was flexible and fair. Now if you miss a dungeon for a day, you have to do like 16 daily quests to make up for it. Blizzard has said they did this because they thought that getting people to log on daily would be better, suggesting that after doing this chore, players would go to do something else in-game since they were already logged in. It's a stance that's almost laughably out of touch. Taking away my flexible rewards for dungeons, pressuring me to log on every day and punishing me with dailies when I can't? It honestly sounded like something a bean-counter at Activision pushed, because it's hard for me to believe someone more involved in the game couldn't see that this would have the opposite effect. In fact, speaking personally, it just made me resentful.
Then you have shit like re-emphasizing dailies, re-emphasizing rep grinds (dear God why), making alts significantly harder to maintain (partially rep related and STILL so, even with the rep increase items), etc., and outside of raids, WoW just became a chore. I could honestly go on a diatribe on each of those points but this post is already tl;dr for me.
Not helping matters is the fact that the game has been in a holding pattern for a couple years, now. Blizzard is either unwilling or - more likely, given the realities of corporations - incapable of really shaking things up. Perhaps with Blizz buying shares from Vivendi, this will change.
So no, I don't think better models for the races would really help
Personally, I'd like to see a Warcraft 4, and a WoW2 based off its consequences. Warcraft 3 did a Helluva lot to set up the current world and its villains, which is one of the advantages of single-player games over MMOs: you have more room to maneuver, and you have more time to focus on the story. I mean, ideally, this should have been something that they did after WotLK, with the end of the last of the enemies people really gave a shit about. Warcraft 4 could've centered around Deathwing's rise and fall, leading to a world so devastated that Blizzard could've basically done anything they wanted with it in WoW2. But it was safer to just keep churning out samey expansions with maybe a few changes here and there. They are, unfortunately, a slave to their own success.
A few things:
First - I absolutely agree with your complaints, in fact I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't, in this forum at least. One of the biggest complaints with MoP is that the overall 'grindiness' feel was cranked up to 11. The devs have acknowledged this to varying extents in different interviews and you can bet that at least some of that will be de-emphasized in the next expansion.
Second - the models, well, we'll have to agree to disagree at least for now. But let's take a look back here around November when Blizzcon hits as we'll more than likely see them then (if they're not leaked/shown beforehand), and I think you may change your mind. Think back to the model update that they gave to Druid forms in...3.2 was it? Something like that. People absolutely went ballistic, largely because they turned this:
into this
We're fine with the player models now because we've been used to them for so long, but if they're able to make that level of change to them (and hopefully more), I think you'd be surprised just how many people come rushing back. Hell, transmog alone got a bunch of people in my guild playing again who swore they'd never come back. Again, many didn't stay, and most who come back for the new models probably won't either. But at least for that first four to six months of the new expansion? I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't see a surge in numbers.
Finally - as for a major shakeup, you're preaching to the choir, but it just isn't going to happen anytime soon. As you said, this game is in many ways hamstrung by its own success; people are too accustomed to things working the way they do and frankly they're far too entrenched now to make any real substantial changes to the gameplay. GC said something along these lines in fact on Twitter some time ago. WoW is and will continue to be hugely profitable for Blizzard/Activision, so they're really in no hurry to chuck everything out the window and start fresh. I'm sure they will someday when the game finally becomes unprofitable, or at least loses enough profitability that such a move would be beneficial. There's every possibility that "Titan", whatever it was, has been scrapped in favor of a WoW 2.
At the end of the day though, the game isn't going anywhere. Die-hards (like some of us here) will probably keep playing until they make enough ass-backward decisions to turn us away or, in the event that they come to their senses and stop trying to placate every forumgoer with a 16-hour daily block of free time and a keyboard, until they shut the servers off. It baffles me, honestly - sometimes I take a break for a few weeks/months and come back to find people still logged in and not even sure why they're playing. -That's- the kind of fanbase we're dealing with here. Some are addicted, some have just been playing so long that taking the months/years to get equally invested in another MMO is not something they have time for anymore. I mean christ, I've seen kids become heads of households since I started playing this game, as have most of us I'm sure. Short of maybe EVE, I can't think of another game that a significant number of people are THAT dedicated to and willing to pay a monthly fee for.
I get the sense that they're already in the midst of laying down the framework for better character models. Just take a look at the new Garrosh model that's coming next patch.
That's an awful lot of work just for one orc model. Which suggests to me that with a little more tweaking, they'll adapt all that for the entire race. There's just, y'know, 9 other races to work on as well.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I think you'd be surprised how willing people are to jump ship in favor of whatever has the shiny new graphics. I suspect it doesn't matter too much whether those games actually retain players, just whether they get people to unsub from WoW.
Sometimes I think that WoW's graphical style is one of the reasons the game remains a success. I tend to try out every new MMO, and at first there's always a phase of "oooh, shiny! I'm never going back to that crappy-looking WoW". Yet it's usually the graphics that start bothering me first, and soon I find myself resubbing to WoW. The reason for this is that it's very rare to see realistic-looking human characters move and respond to physics in a realistic way. I can't stand the combination of "realistic" graphics and clunky, physics-defying character animations. The effect is really jarring; it's like a cycle where you're drawn into an illusion of reality that shatters every time your character takes a step or swings her weapon. Flawed animation is much easier to accept when the characters themselves are completely cartoonish, as in WoW.
Yeah, burned through my 10 day free MoP trial a few weeks back. Not sure if I'll go back if I get to a place with a stable internet connection (partly because I'd have to find new people to raid with). I still have a soft spot for the game, so it's the only reason that I still follow what is happening with it.
Anyways, I suspect updated models would probably give the game a big boost in subs and that could really help up things if they get a few other things worked out.
They are trying the whole event thing, which will probably help since it's fairly easy to get burned out on dailies and 5mans. Didn't try scenarios, so not going to comment on that. They also address the gear issue in PvP.
From 5.4, they are adding flex raiding (filling the social casual raiding niche that Cata murdered), proving grounds (assume idea and about time they added in a place to practice roles without having to deal with pissy LFG heroes that expect perfection) and looks like they are trying to address low pop servers as well.
Maybe with the next expansion. They'll have addressed button bloat, just need to get over the reservations over wordy tooltips. Will find a way to make professions compelling, while dropping the current perks, which actually make some profs the wrong decisions for min/max toons (just give .5% increase to stam and on throughput primary state for each max out profession, also solves some of the button bloat). Drop all the racials that directly impact combat, while adding in ones that help the character in other areas (professions, rep, travel, gold acquisition, fun). Hit a sweet spot for alts, rep grinding and daily quests.
Awhile back I was messing with Rift(might go back... just scared since my video card overheated) and I really liked instant adventures. I think WoW would really benefit from that.
My info may be off because I didn't play much but... basically, you queue up for an IA, and you get teleported into a group somewhere in the world. The group seems to be about any size and roles are irrelevant. You then get a chain of quests you all work towards and get a random item once it's done(think low-level random dungeon finder bag). Your group is also auto-queued into new IAs as you complete them. On top of that, if you are solo out in the world and an IA gets near you, it asks if you want to join.
Pretty fun compared to solo questing. So much more dynamic.
For testing purposes (mostly internal convenience on our end), you can currently queue with a fairly small group, but nothing will actually scale below a 10-player size. When we release 5.4, we're intending to require a minimum of 8 players to queue. The thought there is that you might want to begin clearing the instance or at least zone in and get ready while waiting on a latecomer 9th/10th, and if we set the queue limit strictly to 10, that wouldn't be possible
Bolded part is interesting. So you will actually be able to queue in and go with less than 10. It won't scale below 10, but you can still bring 8 or 9 if that's all you have. Good call, Blizz, hats off to you.
Wait, Flex raids require queueing? Is it like Quest or Heroic Scenario "queueing" where it uses the queue system but not really because it always makes a fresh instance every time?
Wait, Flex raids require queueing? Is it like Quest or Heroic Scenario "queueing" where it uses the queue system but not really because it always makes a fresh instance every time?
This was how I interpreted it would work, yea. Heroic Scenario style.
Wait, Flex raids require queueing? Is it like Quest or Heroic Scenario "queueing" where it uses the queue system but not really because it always makes a fresh instance every time?
and initially it will drop personal loot, lfr style, but their plan is to give in a future patch more choices beyond that (as soon as they can figure out how to scale loot quantity (i.e.how.many items to drop for 10 people? What if 11 are brought? And so on up to 25)
H Durumu down, 10/13. Up next is DA which looks to be a royal pain in the dickhole. Durumu was rather fun except for the life drain during spectrum phase, as well as our GM running the wrong way on maze phase (which he's quite capable at doing on normal but fucked it up so often on heroic :P ).
It'd be nice to have armor graphics for cat, bear, moonkin at a minimum. They can add a glyph to not show armor graphics, but speaking as a bear tank I would like to be able to be an armored bear.
Also, could Blizzard please stop rationing fun on clickies. I like my fire cat staff buff, but the 2 hour cooldown feels pretty punitive.
Not that druids have any free glyph slots...
Really, the "make it a glyph option" stuff that Blizzard is doing is getting a bit out of control. With the 3 glyph limit and a lot of minor glyphs providing actual utility as opposed to purely cosmetic changes, a lot of classes can't reasonably accommodate these various cosmetic glyphs. I feel like Blizzard needs to reconsider (yet again) glyphs -- minor ones, at least -- in the next expansion.
Might be worth zerging it (10m) if you can. It's supposed to be much easier but we haven't done it yet (this week hopefully). It requires either a BM or Paladin tank for it to go smoothly and prefers a demo lock with lei shen trinket for imp spam. You have to kill him in 2m 30s and it's rocky but doable if you are around 535 gear level.
Might be worth zerging it (10m) if you can. It's supposed to be much easier but we haven't done it yet (this week hopefully). It requires either a BM or Paladin tank for it to go smoothly and prefers a demo lock with lei shen trinket for imp spam. You have to kill him in 2m 30s and it's rocky but doable if you are around 535 gear level.
We talked about it, but we figured we'd do it normally since zerging it cuts so closely that even a trinket proc can make or break it.
It's such a clusterfuck at the start. Like we have to get our golems, kill 1-2 of the tank's golems, get ours into the inactives, dodge anima font, don't get fucked over by matter swap, make sure anima ring is done and blaaaargh. It's a crap fight for the first minute. After that I'm sure it's much lovelier, but fuck that shit.
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I don't think I insinuated that that was the case, but if I did, my apologies. No, what I mean to say is that, while the subs are dropping now and will likely continue to do so, sub numbers usually see a pretty big bump when a new expansion is released, and given that the current antiquated player models have been one of the larger gripes of the playerbase for the past few years, seeing them overhauled significantly would very likely bring even more people back, if only for a short time. Still, even with that solid shot in the arm, the numbers will very likely drop again and continue their downward trend until they bottom out at around 3-4 million in another year or two.
And even then, that's at least double what most MMOs of its kind are topping out at, so this ship'll keep on chuggin' for quite a while.
OMG YES. This is the worst thing ever. Some of the hats don't even look bad without hiding the hair, they just do it anyways
If they animate as pretty as the Pandas do, I think it will be
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
edit: Armor on boomkins would be almost as good, though.
Also, could Blizzard please stop rationing fun on clickies. I like my fire cat staff buff, but the 2 hour cooldown feels pretty punitive.
welp!
But, in my opinion, one of the worst decisions was the move to eliminate the per-week limit on Valor rewards from dungeons and instead move it to once per-day reward. The system was perfect as it was. You could play on days you wanted to play without having to worry about hurting your progression. It was flexible and fair. Now if you miss a dungeon for a day, you have to do like 16 daily quests to make up for it. Blizzard has said they did this because they thought that getting people to log on daily would be better, suggesting that after doing this chore, players would go to do something else in-game since they were already logged in. It's a stance that's almost laughably out of touch. Taking away my flexible rewards for dungeons, pressuring me to log on every day and punishing me with dailies when I can't? It honestly sounded like something a bean-counter at Activision pushed, because it's hard for me to believe someone more involved in the game couldn't see that this would have the opposite effect. In fact, speaking personally, it just made me resentful.
Then you have shit like re-emphasizing dailies, re-emphasizing rep grinds (dear God why), making alts significantly harder to maintain (partially rep related and STILL so, even with the rep increase items), etc., and outside of raids, WoW just became a chore. I could honestly go on a diatribe on each of those points but this post is already tl;dr for me.
Not helping matters is the fact that the game has been in a holding pattern for a couple years, now. Blizzard is either unwilling or - more likely, given the realities of corporations - incapable of really shaking things up. Perhaps with Blizz buying shares from Vivendi, this will change.
So no, I don't think better models for the races would really help
Personally, I'd like to see a Warcraft 4, and a WoW2 based off its consequences. Warcraft 3 did a Helluva lot to set up the current world and its villains, which is one of the advantages of single-player games over MMOs: you have more room to maneuver, and you have more time to focus on the story. I mean, ideally, this should have been something that they did after WotLK, with the end of the last of the enemies people really gave a shit about. Warcraft 4 could've centered around Deathwing's rise and fall, leading to a world so devastated that Blizzard could've basically done anything they wanted with it in WoW2. But it was safer to just keep churning out samey expansions with maybe a few changes here and there. They are, unfortunately, a slave to their own success.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
I decided that if I'm gonna pull aggro constantly anyways, I might as well push that extra rating into Mastery rather than having to constantly stop attacking. It's inefficient, and it causes your shuffle to drop a lot/fall off when you should be building a buffer while not tanking. And I don't have to worry about any sort of fluke deaths almost. 95% of the time it's the rest of the raid causing the wipe.
edit: size slider for pauldrons. Although one for characters would be good too.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Bolded is partly why I play a tank. With a few exceptions here and there (looking at you, bat kiting on Tortos), when we wipe, it's almost never the Tank's fault. It's great. Really nice not to have that kind of huge responsibility on my shoulders. I can just kick back and do my thing.
And if it is the Tank's fault for a wipe, that's usually something that can be easily rectified. Got blown up by a boss's ability? Remember to use a Cooldown next time.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
A few things:
First - I absolutely agree with your complaints, in fact I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't, in this forum at least. One of the biggest complaints with MoP is that the overall 'grindiness' feel was cranked up to 11. The devs have acknowledged this to varying extents in different interviews and you can bet that at least some of that will be de-emphasized in the next expansion.
Second - the models, well, we'll have to agree to disagree at least for now. But let's take a look back here around November when Blizzcon hits as we'll more than likely see them then (if they're not leaked/shown beforehand), and I think you may change your mind. Think back to the model update that they gave to Druid forms in...3.2 was it? Something like that. People absolutely went ballistic, largely because they turned this:
into this
We're fine with the player models now because we've been used to them for so long, but if they're able to make that level of change to them (and hopefully more), I think you'd be surprised just how many people come rushing back. Hell, transmog alone got a bunch of people in my guild playing again who swore they'd never come back. Again, many didn't stay, and most who come back for the new models probably won't either. But at least for that first four to six months of the new expansion? I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't see a surge in numbers.
Finally - as for a major shakeup, you're preaching to the choir, but it just isn't going to happen anytime soon. As you said, this game is in many ways hamstrung by its own success; people are too accustomed to things working the way they do and frankly they're far too entrenched now to make any real substantial changes to the gameplay. GC said something along these lines in fact on Twitter some time ago. WoW is and will continue to be hugely profitable for Blizzard/Activision, so they're really in no hurry to chuck everything out the window and start fresh. I'm sure they will someday when the game finally becomes unprofitable, or at least loses enough profitability that such a move would be beneficial. There's every possibility that "Titan", whatever it was, has been scrapped in favor of a WoW 2.
At the end of the day though, the game isn't going anywhere. Die-hards (like some of us here) will probably keep playing until they make enough ass-backward decisions to turn us away or, in the event that they come to their senses and stop trying to placate every forumgoer with a 16-hour daily block of free time and a keyboard, until they shut the servers off. It baffles me, honestly - sometimes I take a break for a few weeks/months and come back to find people still logged in and not even sure why they're playing. -That's- the kind of fanbase we're dealing with here. Some are addicted, some have just been playing so long that taking the months/years to get equally invested in another MMO is not something they have time for anymore. I mean christ, I've seen kids become heads of households since I started playing this game, as have most of us I'm sure. Short of maybe EVE, I can't think of another game that a significant number of people are THAT dedicated to and willing to pay a monthly fee for.
That's an awful lot of work just for one orc model. Which suggests to me that with a little more tweaking, they'll adapt all that for the entire race. There's just, y'know, 9 other races to work on as well.
Sometimes I think that WoW's graphical style is one of the reasons the game remains a success. I tend to try out every new MMO, and at first there's always a phase of "oooh, shiny! I'm never going back to that crappy-looking WoW". Yet it's usually the graphics that start bothering me first, and soon I find myself resubbing to WoW. The reason for this is that it's very rare to see realistic-looking human characters move and respond to physics in a realistic way. I can't stand the combination of "realistic" graphics and clunky, physics-defying character animations. The effect is really jarring; it's like a cycle where you're drawn into an illusion of reality that shatters every time your character takes a step or swings her weapon. Flawed animation is much easier to accept when the characters themselves are completely cartoonish, as in WoW.
I never thought I'd be so bummed out about an upgrade before.
Anyways, I suspect updated models would probably give the game a big boost in subs and that could really help up things if they get a few other things worked out.
They are trying the whole event thing, which will probably help since it's fairly easy to get burned out on dailies and 5mans. Didn't try scenarios, so not going to comment on that. They also address the gear issue in PvP.
From 5.4, they are adding flex raiding (filling the social casual raiding niche that Cata murdered), proving grounds (assume idea and about time they added in a place to practice roles without having to deal with pissy LFG heroes that expect perfection) and looks like they are trying to address low pop servers as well.
Maybe with the next expansion. They'll have addressed button bloat, just need to get over the reservations over wordy tooltips. Will find a way to make professions compelling, while dropping the current perks, which actually make some profs the wrong decisions for min/max toons (just give .5% increase to stam and on throughput primary state for each max out profession, also solves some of the button bloat). Drop all the racials that directly impact combat, while adding in ones that help the character in other areas (professions, rep, travel, gold acquisition, fun). Hit a sweet spot for alts, rep grinding and daily quests.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
My info may be off because I didn't play much but... basically, you queue up for an IA, and you get teleported into a group somewhere in the world. The group seems to be about any size and roles are irrelevant. You then get a chain of quests you all work towards and get a random item once it's done(think low-level random dungeon finder bag). Your group is also auto-queued into new IAs as you complete them. On top of that, if you are solo out in the world and an IA gets near you, it asks if you want to join.
Pretty fun compared to solo questing. So much more dynamic.
Bolded part is interesting. So you will actually be able to queue in and go with less than 10. It won't scale below 10, but you can still bring 8 or 9 if that's all you have. Good call, Blizz, hats off to you.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
This was how I interpreted it would work, yea. Heroic Scenario style.
I think I have issues.
Really, the "make it a glyph option" stuff that Blizzard is doing is getting a bit out of control. With the 3 glyph limit and a lot of minor glyphs providing actual utility as opposed to purely cosmetic changes, a lot of classes can't reasonably accommodate these various cosmetic glyphs. I feel like Blizzard needs to reconsider (yet again) glyphs -- minor ones, at least -- in the next expansion.
We talked about it, but we figured we'd do it normally since zerging it cuts so closely that even a trinket proc can make or break it.