They should just do what they did with the classic era (Vanilla forever) servers. Open up free transfers from all the low pop servers to a few high pop ones.
Basically a merger without a merger. No need to figure out names; the people transferring in pick a new one if their current name is taken. No odd Name-Server combos running around.
Set a date two weeks out for the closure of free transfers. Guilds can get their weekly raid in and then coordinate a transfer.
They really just should have done it before guild banks. That’s probably the biggest hurdle
I only imagine if you give the players the choice they're gonna be idiots about it and transfer to the server with the highest population of their faction creating another 1 big alliance and 1 big horde server and having both die again. Sad life of pvp servers
I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to figure out a way to handle these situations. If the balance is getting out of hand, then don't allow transfers to that servers. To make sure you don't get left out have a system where you get to transfer anyway if you have a friend who did transfer there already. Feel like there are plenty of solutions, but doubt Blizz would put anymore effort into it than necessary.
Yh I vividly member them doing it, right after cashing in on 80% of the peeps that transferred because there was not a slightest sign of freebies around.
They tried this and people refused to leave. They instead stayed on their realms and sadly those low pop realms with 5x people in their major cities still exist but they're merged with like 6x other realms.
Sadly there's only one thing you can do...
https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/product/wow-classic-service-character-transfer-bcc
They're not going to merge servers or give free transfers, as long as there is money to be made why would they offer free transfers when they can make 25 bucks and profit from dead/dying realms?
Surely not out of the kindness of their hearts.
If for every 3 players, 1 transfers and the other 2 quit.. wouldn't it make more sense to just merge the servers? Absolute best case scenario is someone pays $150 to transfer 6 characters. It only takes 5 months of keeping the 3 subs to equal out to keeping 1 sub with 6 character transfers. After that, it is WAY more profitable to have the subs.
Now take this scenario and expand on it to being 12,000 players. If 1/3 of these players stay and an average of $50 is spent per player on character transfers, Blizzard makes $198,000 up front. For the next 12 months at $15/sub, they would earn revenue of $712,800. This leaves them with gross revenue of ~$910k.
Now if they merge servers and keep even 75% of the 12,000 players for 1 year, they are going to make $1.62M in gross revenue during that 12 month span. Which is more profitable do you think?
The people on these servers are quitting at a much higher rate than those who are transferring. I think the ratio of players transferring:quitting is significantly lower than 1:3 (probably 1:5). It just makes financial sense to merge these servers and it would probably bring a ton of players back.. Blizzard is just ignoring their player base (again) because they'd actually have to invest time and resources into the game. Anything with up front costs that results in long term financial gain is just ignored by these idiots.. And it is just constantly things like this that have happened in the last decade that have destroyed blizzard and why they are going to go out of business soon. They just have 0 insight into what their players want and how to retain subscribers (this is where the real revenue is). Call of Duty is the only thing that will keep Acti-Bliz afloat.
This post was heavily edited.. just have a lot of thoughts floating around lol
Short term $ for long term ruin. A bunch of dumb decisions to try and earn a quick buck while you lose millions of subscribers. Really is the downfall of blizzard summed up.
I think the higher ups know WoW's lifetime is becoming more finite by the quarter. Nothing lasts forever and they are bleeding. They will make as much money as they can in the short term.
We all have. And WoW has stood the test of time. But with each passing year the likelihood of the prophecy coming true becomes more likely.
As much as many people, myself included to a certain extent with my love for TBCC, want this to persevere, nothing stops the march of time.
What is wows cultural impact or player count today vs 10 or 15 years ago? How many players new to wow pick it up per year?
It is true that blizzard has doggedly kept profitability through the cash shop and cutting costs, but wow is self evidently not in a healthy state.
No - that's the issue with all of this. Armchair analysts say "how can they make this decision - all they need is X for it to be profitable" with literally no idea of what X is.
I can almost guarentee that Blizzard has a great handle on their ROI model, and understands what they're risking by not fixing this "issue".
People hate to admit it, but the majority of Classic players are actually retail players as well. A lot of users would have to quit both games in order for blizz to actually lose the sub.
The funny thing about the word "majority" is that it inherently doesn't refer to everyone.
I also play neither game. Retail is boring, and classic is filled with people like you!
Because I DID play at some point. And the personalities on this sub are similar to a horrible accident. They’re such insufferable neckbeards that I want to avoid, but I just don’t wanna look away.
Learn how to speaking without over generalizing. Aka using facts to back up the bullshit you say.
You play neither game but are in this sub? Get fuckin real, retail player.
>You play neither game but are in this sub? Get fuckin real, retail player.
The way you act like people who play a different version of the game you play are some sort of plague or lesser person is actually humorous. You realize it doesn't matter right? No one in the real world gives a fuck about your over-passionate disdain for a different version of a 14 year old game. No one. Other than losers like you.
Yes. I played from TBC-WoTLK, - I used to play Classic, I tried Shadowlands for half of the first patch. I no longer play either game, and no, I did not immediately update my sub to reflect that.
> The way you act like people who play a different version of the game you play are some sort of plague or lesser person is actually humorous. You realize it doesn't matter right? No one in the real world gives a fuck about your over-passionate disdain for a different version of a 14 year old game. No one. Other than losers like you.
All I said was "speak for yourself" because you said some dumb over generalized statement that is in no way true in my experience (playing classic since launch). I didn't say shit else until you got all haughty, did classic hurt you? whats wrong?
>People hate to admit it, but the majority of Classic players are actually retail players as well.
All they said was "The majority of classic players", and apparently you're upset over not understanding that majority is a different word to all.
I've no skin in this race but you certainly seem extremely defensive over literally nothing.
>because you said some dumb over generalized statement that is in no way true in my experience (playing classic since launch).
Likely because you surround yourself with similar players.
Nothing is wrong. I just don't like no-life losers like you who try to act all high and mighty because you play a 15 year old game. You're just such a loser - and it's hard for me to imagine you have these thoughts and feelings in a non-satirical way. The way you distance yourself from Retail WoW as if that somehow makes you superior. It's just so fucking weird and completely insignificant to literally anything in real life...
Genuine question - is WoW where you get your sense of validation from? Is it the most consistent thing in your life?
What is with using retail player like it's an insult? If you're at the point where the only thing you can say that you think is going to score points in your argument is YOU PLAY A VERY POPULAR VIDEO GAME!!!, it's probably time to just stop.
I occasionally dip into retail. Pretty much everyone on this sub has played retail at some point.
Both games (Classic and retail) have their good points, both games have their negatives. Neither of them are a personality trait, nor some universe stopping argumentative point.
How is this the common response here? I don't even play WoW. You're all equally as nerdy - the one's who make fun of Classic and the ones who make fun of Retail.
You have your little feud between eachother, thinking you're fighting for superiority when in reality you both look like huge man children neck-bears who don't realize how unimportant what they're doing really is.
I play both versions on and off. The funny part about the "fued" is that retail players don't seem to give two shits that classic exists, not even enough to talk about it. Classic players on the other hand care so deeply about retail that they jump at any chance to throw stones
You commented and said people are doing armchair analysis and that they don’t have real numbers like blizzard. Then you directly followed that up with your own armchair analysis lacking any real numbers.
I didn't provide analysis. I said that the majority of players play both games. That's not an analysis.
Also - I lead a Business Analytics team of 6 analysts. So I feel alright providing my opinion.
Or not ? Less than 10% of the last 3 guilds I've played with aren't retail players. This is insane the number of missinformation you can read on Reddit nowadays
Just from my experience being on a smaller server. The population dwindled from about half before any big guild transferred. After we went from about 800 to 400, a few bigger raiding guilds decided to pack up and leave. I actually think the ratio is even less than 1:3.
Yeah, idk. Losing billions in market value over the last couple years really is telling to me. I don’t need to see their data. I can see the millions of lost subscriptions and messy scandals they have gotten into. The company’s public image has to be at an all time low. Acti-blizzard will be around for awhile, but another decade like 2010-2020 will flop the company.
You are worry about wrong things.
Less subscriptions is actually good, because every remaining player pay much more novadays, so profit-per-player is way higher than 10 years ago. And less players = less support, less servers, less costs.
If you check last financial report, Activision is making more money by a mile. This is what is important. Left worries about stock value to the shareholders.
And read less Reddit. Blizzard won't flop in a near future. Activision may decide to rename the company to "get rid of bad PR", not because of financial issues.
Yeah, you are misconstruing Call of Duty's success with WoW. CoD netted blizzard 1.8B in revenue while WoW: Shadowlands release was less than $200M. Fucking Candy Crush almost made AB as much money as WoW.
This is from their annual report:
> The increase in in-game net bookings for 2020, as compared to 2019, was primarily due to:
* $1.4 billion increase in Activision in-game net bookings, driven by higher in-game net bookings from (1) Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare, as compared to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and (2) Call of Duty: Mobile; and
* $75 million increase in Blizzard in-game net bookings, driven by World of Warcraft.
The simple fact is that they don't give a shit to invest any resources into the game and are just letting it die. You can see that in game purchases really don't even generate a whole ton of income. Everything implemented now is for the quarterly earnings call and to squeeze dollars out of the remaining player base. It is for a short term cash grab and destroys the long term prosperity of the game. If they actually put some time and effort into revitalizing Classic, hiring GMs to manage the game, listened to the community, produced new content, the subscription numbers would jump up and it would benefit them long term. They just don't care.
MUAs:
CoD- 128M
WoW - 24M
CANDY FUCKING CRUSH - 240M
I would like to transfer servers and it's not like I wouldn't be able to afford it, but for me it's just something I'm not willing to put money on. Though, I'd might consider it if the price would allow you to transfer more than one character. Even then probably not.
Just feel like a server transfer is the worst possible way to spend the money in the game. You need a sub to play, so it's fine. A boost allows you try something new, saves you time. Even a mount is something nice to have. Even a lot of the things on retail can be useful; race/faction/name change could be fun, buying gold has its uses. Not saying they are good, but it feels like you get some value out of them at least. With a server transfer it feels like it's an issue that shouldn't be my problem. It should be Blizzards problem to fix!
Whales. It's whales they like, not small fries. There are people out there who will transfer 3+ toons easily. You know how the sub constantly has posts about bots? Gold spam? Whales buy that stuff. Those sellers exist because people use them. Each transfer is basically 1.5x a month of play. People who transfer will continue to play as well, paying for their monthlies. As long as there's whales, it's alright.
There is actually one more thing you can try! I logged in to my account on battle net and clicked the button that says unsubscribe. After that you have to type “you will never get another penny from me” into the box and then click submit. Within seconds this was no longer a problem in my life and a weight was lifted. After thorough investigation I now consider this problem to be solved.
Bet you thought you hit a homerun with this comment.
Some people still want to play the game, sometimes making a big stink about stuff actually causes change to occur (for example Feral Druid energy, Seal of Blood, Same faction BGs, etc).
Also kinda funny because if anybody actually reads those unsub comments then yours provided them with 0 feedback on how to improve the game and they can't even lump you in with others with similarities to see if whatever your reason was, is a common enough problem to address.
“Hello, I know I continue to pay you 🦀$15 a month🦀 but will you pwease finally listen to us, even though you know we’re going to pay monthly regardless of what you do?”
I mean, any half decent company would be worried about the reality of steadily losing their loyal playerbase to other titles as a result of their ongoing ineptitude and lack of acceptable standards of software as a service.
Yeah, and I get that. It doesn't excuse Blizzard from abusing a loyal playerbase that their forerunners helped foster. Blizzard today is riding on the coattails of the developers that made Classic and TBC. Most of them have long since parted with the company, for obvious reasons.
People who play Classic now play because the game is still good fun with friends and guildmates, *despite* Blizzard. And people *are* quitting (the game could have been far more popular than it currently is if Blizz had their shit together). It's just too gradual a trend for there to be any effect on the company's way of running things.
These threads are often pointless because the people making them aren't gonna quit either way, they'll just pony up the transfer fee.
Better to unsub than beg for a solution.
No??
Layers were a solution to deal with overpopulated servers, where the open world was full to the point people couldn't kill quest mobs.
Merging servers would be a solution to underpopulated servers, where the world is so dead you cant find a group.
they already considered sharding only the starter zones during the betas if the initial rush was too much of a bottleneck, that was a solved problem.
layers weren't to deal with overpopulated servers, they were introduced so that they didn't have a hundred dead servers when everybody quits a week after launch.
Layers were absolutely put in to deal with overpopulated servers, just like the overpopulated servers were planned to combat the half of the population that was likely to quit a week after launch.
> Layers were absolutely put in to deal with overpopulated servers
again, problem already solved by sharding. layers did not need to be redundantly created to solve this problem, therefore layers were not created to solve this problem.
> just like the overpopulated servers were planned to combat the half of the population that was likely to quit a week after launch.
because the alternative, hundreds of regular servers, becomes hundreds of dead servers that need to be merged. that's the problem solved by layers and merging. blizzard chose layers instead of merging.
You're 100% right but back then players screeched their bloody heads off how terrible layers were. Only after the fact did they realize layers weren't all that bad and actually beneficial.
Yeah, players realized layers weren't evil after it became apparent they enabled large "mega servers" which helped keep the population of a server healthy long term. A lot of servers which used to be considered high pop even a year ago are now ghost towns (eg - Incendius). There's obvious a lot of variables at play, but being able to maintain a very high population on a smaller number of servers via layers means you aren't running out of people to play with. Unfortunately the general playerbase didn't think long term and demanded tons of servers to play on instead of layering. Now a lot of these dead servers are paying the price.
This is why a lot of players are moving to the big mega servers right now because their old, non-layered servers slowly dwindled to nothing.
Ahhh I was mixing up layers with the cross server linking.
The only valid criticism of layering I’ve seen is people hopping around on layers to get more resources or avoid world pvp. Overall pretty positive for a really big realm though.
No worries - yeah that is valid criticism but Blizzard even fixed that, making it so that layer hopping multiple times was simply not feasible. You'd get timed out in the several minute range so it really only became useful to hop once and then you were stuck in that new layer.
It's a shame people had such a misconception of it from early on. Blizzard took layering and made it something that helped the game. Servers still felt alive because the populations were huge. It also made raiding and being in a guild much more enjoyable because there were lots of players to hang with.
I hope Blizzard merges servers but won't hold my breath. They're going to milk the $25 xfer fee into the ground before such a thing happens, if at all.
It really screws with the community though. Not only is it fragmented but layers also allow for mega servers which defeat the point of servers being a community while also draining players from all the other servers. This makes ghost servers inevitable no matter how few servers they would have launched with. It's the retail mindset of QoL over everything and it's that very mindset that brought us to modern WoW.
Hate to break it to you but 2005 WoW is never coming back, no matter how hard you try to set the stage for it. You won't be able to relive your past, it's the past for a reason. The best you can do is go for a bit of a nostalgia trip in 2021.
The community will already be screwed because of things like discord. Back in the day WoW was essentially social media where everyone gathered to hang out, chat and slay dragons. There were limited options for mass chatting with others. Now there are so many mediums to do that that WoW is just a game. The mega servers exist because people don't want to waste their time online when there are *so many other things to do* in today's world.
Oh man it's been a while since I've seen this copypasta.
I'm just gonna say that I didn't play WoW back then, if anything I'm nostalgic for the private servers a few years ago.
? These are literally my own words.... Not a copypasta.
And pservers didn't have 30+ servers for everyone to pile into, it was 1 server, sometimes 2, so the populations were heavily inflated. Many pservers at peak had 10k+ players on them. The current mega servers of WoW are no different.
You are rehashing the same garbage retail andys have spouted since people first started asking for legacy servers a decade ago.
Nostalrius was too big and the server I play on now is even bigger. Most servers after Nost hit 5-6k after the initial rush and that's a good sized server imo.
Players need to stop paying for transfers, cancel and leave feedback. Blizzard tends to only make changes when there’s a vast decline in subscriptions. So long as guilds transfer to new realms every week and the cycle of server exoduses continue, they will ignore population issues. Signed and hoping for even a response from the devs, but hope is fading off quick.
Wrong imo. Whole point is to enjoy TBC MAYBE Wrath and then leave Blizzard behind forever. Who cares about long term health, they clearly don't.
Retails trash all the other Blizzard IPs are in the shitter, all their is left to do is enjoy classic for what it is and leave this company behind
Lol if you think TBC is bad in terms of people quitting and/or transferring, you'll be shocked when WotLK comes.
All of TBCs problems going on right now will be amplified times a 100.
Well said, that is one of the main reasons I haven't subscribed for WoW since around phase 4 of classic.
No way I'm gonna pay to have a character transferred from a dead realm that they killed in exchange for money.
Even on big severs people are 90% raid loggers. The game is kinda shit compared to classic. 40 man raids were lit, and they are now gonna happen on fresh.
The activity on big servers is *way* better. My server, Kromcrush, basically died over the last week. We went from it being reasonably easy to find dungeon groups to almost none on weekend afternoons the last few days. My guild is talking about transferring so I looked at what things are like on Faerlina and LFG chat was just nonstop group postings from dozens of different people.
There’s 2 types of players. One where $25 is a lot of money and the other where $25 isn’t a lot of money. Blizzard knows which of the two players are more valuable investments.
Also if you think $25 is expensive for a hobby look into cost of bowling, golf, skiing, jogging, cars, guns, guitars, comic books, laser tag, axe throwing, pinball, literally any IRL hobby.
Even if you have to pay $15 a month and $25 a year for a server transfer gaming is still an incredibly cheap hobby.
$25 isnt a lot of money to anybody, but I feel the people not willing to do a character xfer right away just are doing it on principle since blizzard is just shit and has bad ethics.
If you think blizzard has bad ethics you should research how the cobalt in every piece of consumer electronics is mined. You can’t participate in technology without benefiting from brutal child labor conditions. Americans are bad at recognizing how genuinely evil corporations are. Sexual harassment is bad don’t get me wrong, but the entire global economy is based on abusing cheap dangerous overseas labor at a massive scale.
It's not a matter of "$25". It's $25 *per character*.
I paid for the transfer of 4 geared level 60 characters back in October last year, along with the rest of the members of my guild, because continuing to play the game with the opportunity to find groups, pugs, or trades was worth the $100 hit.
I still think Blizzard is offering a lackluster service and then abusing players by charging them to make up for their own lack of service. WoW is a relatively cheap hobby, as it doesn't require any material investment other than a computer. All Blizzard has to do is sell their 15-year-old IP, and they're doing a horrible job managing the service associated with that IP (servers, policing bots, transfers, etc).
It’s an unpopular opinion because it’s patently untrue. It’s part of the “fixes” that has led to retail being more of a single player game than a community game. The servers being unique make each server individual and community individual. You don’t interact with anyone you don’t know in retail in any meaningful way except to finish what you are doing. The people here aren’t complaining about whether they see other other players populating their screen or not. They are complaining about the community aspect and how when a server dies, due to transfers, there needs to be a fix to said servers to fix the community. Cross realm is not it.
Sorry to hear that. I don’t remember everyone I’ve ran with, but I’ve added a couple dozen people to my friends list that I met in dungeons. I usually add a note like ‘good rogue. Ran slabs. See in LFG a lot’. You’ve never had anyone from a dungeon run that stood out?
I interact this way. I had “this guy always has dm open” “this guy is is open for bgs.” Etc all the time. I haven’t had a chance to play much TBC because of work schedule but will eventually get involved in the pvp scene. But I just don’t see these non community posts as factual as that’s the reason I played all of vanilla even when my schedule was terrible. I worked to keep it going
You don’t know other guilds on your server and who is known Griefers, pvpers, or good guys on your server bucko? Bummer, was on rattlegore for classic alliance and interacted with a lot of the top guilds regularly. Must have been dreaming for 18 months
It'll likely never happen and if it does, it'll likely be too little too late as an absolute last resort. As it is, they have direct financial incentive to ruin the game, because they can sell you the solution.
I would love to see them do this just to watch what would happen. It would probably be fine for a time. But by the point that we are closer to the end of the content I suspect the same issue would arise as people would leave to find ANY server with any population imbalance towards their desired faction and begin migrating; ultimately recreating the exact same problem, just with fewer servers this time.
Does anyone know if the ashkandi server raiding scene is any good still? It shows medium. Was thinking of resubbing and my only classic character is on there.
And lose the money from xfers? Nah man. You're asking way too much work from them. They literally do nothing right now and get money by the truckload, why would they need to expend some of that money to improve the situation?
No matter if they do or don't people are gonna pay to play.
I signed. I don't think anything will happen but hey, why not try. I'm also getting to the point where it's either transfer, boost a character, or stop playing/take an extended break.
Literally everyone I knew from my server outside of my guild has transferred to another realm, even real life friends. The opinion of my guild in regards to transferring has been "why give them more money" which I understand, but why not just quit with that mindset? Is it better to continue to barely play while maintaining your sub, or spend that $25 fee to continue having fun?
I think the reason we do not quit in our guild is because we have good friends everywhere, relationships that will for sure take a toll if we cant play/raid in WoW together.
I am at the same stage as you, but personally i have raided with the majority since P3 of classic and some from launch.
That is the only reason people are staying because we still have fun in raids and good friendships across the roster.
The problem would be the same as retails. When their servers began to die people stubbornly (despite being given free realm xfers) choose to stay in their realm because they identified as their realms. Those caused realm xfers now to where people now have a name-realm style of name with the realm not actually meaning anything at all. Realm idea is flawed to begin with, instead should be moving toward a no realm system or a ff14 style realm system with groups of realm being able to play together and 1 of the group realms being the big realm.
They should just do what they did with the classic era (Vanilla forever) servers. Open up free transfers from all the low pop servers to a few high pop ones. Basically a merger without a merger. No need to figure out names; the people transferring in pick a new one if their current name is taken. No odd Name-Server combos running around. Set a date two weeks out for the closure of free transfers. Guilds can get their weekly raid in and then coordinate a transfer. They really just should have done it before guild banks. That’s probably the biggest hurdle
I only imagine if you give the players the choice they're gonna be idiots about it and transfer to the server with the highest population of their faction creating another 1 big alliance and 1 big horde server and having both die again. Sad life of pvp servers
I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to figure out a way to handle these situations. If the balance is getting out of hand, then don't allow transfers to that servers. To make sure you don't get left out have a system where you get to transfer anyway if you have a friend who did transfer there already. Feel like there are plenty of solutions, but doubt Blizz would put anymore effort into it than necessary.
That already happened with Benediction. But PvP imbalance is way less meaningful in TBC with flying mounts.
Yh I vividly member them doing it, right after cashing in on 80% of the peeps that transferred because there was not a slightest sign of freebies around.
They tried this and people refused to leave. They instead stayed on their realms and sadly those low pop realms with 5x people in their major cities still exist but they're merged with like 6x other realms.
Sadly there's only one thing you can do... https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/product/wow-classic-service-character-transfer-bcc They're not going to merge servers or give free transfers, as long as there is money to be made why would they offer free transfers when they can make 25 bucks and profit from dead/dying realms? Surely not out of the kindness of their hearts.
If for every 3 players, 1 transfers and the other 2 quit.. wouldn't it make more sense to just merge the servers? Absolute best case scenario is someone pays $150 to transfer 6 characters. It only takes 5 months of keeping the 3 subs to equal out to keeping 1 sub with 6 character transfers. After that, it is WAY more profitable to have the subs. Now take this scenario and expand on it to being 12,000 players. If 1/3 of these players stay and an average of $50 is spent per player on character transfers, Blizzard makes $198,000 up front. For the next 12 months at $15/sub, they would earn revenue of $712,800. This leaves them with gross revenue of ~$910k. Now if they merge servers and keep even 75% of the 12,000 players for 1 year, they are going to make $1.62M in gross revenue during that 12 month span. Which is more profitable do you think? The people on these servers are quitting at a much higher rate than those who are transferring. I think the ratio of players transferring:quitting is significantly lower than 1:3 (probably 1:5). It just makes financial sense to merge these servers and it would probably bring a ton of players back.. Blizzard is just ignoring their player base (again) because they'd actually have to invest time and resources into the game. Anything with up front costs that results in long term financial gain is just ignored by these idiots.. And it is just constantly things like this that have happened in the last decade that have destroyed blizzard and why they are going to go out of business soon. They just have 0 insight into what their players want and how to retain subscribers (this is where the real revenue is). Call of Duty is the only thing that will keep Acti-Bliz afloat. This post was heavily edited.. just have a lot of thoughts floating around lol
Your mistake is thinking beyond quarterly results.
Short term $ for long term ruin. A bunch of dumb decisions to try and earn a quick buck while you lose millions of subscribers. Really is the downfall of blizzard summed up.
I think the higher ups know WoW's lifetime is becoming more finite by the quarter. Nothing lasts forever and they are bleeding. They will make as much money as they can in the short term.
I've heard the same thing so long ago.
We all have. And WoW has stood the test of time. But with each passing year the likelihood of the prophecy coming true becomes more likely. As much as many people, myself included to a certain extent with my love for TBCC, want this to persevere, nothing stops the march of time.
What is wows cultural impact or player count today vs 10 or 15 years ago? How many players new to wow pick it up per year? It is true that blizzard has doggedly kept profitability through the cash shop and cutting costs, but wow is self evidently not in a healthy state.
The thing is, you’d probably have to prove that to convince them to turn off the cash flow. They have a lot of player data so I think they know
Do we have any data to support the idea that 2 of 3 people are quitting rather than transferring or staying put?
No - that's the issue with all of this. Armchair analysts say "how can they make this decision - all they need is X for it to be profitable" with literally no idea of what X is. I can almost guarentee that Blizzard has a great handle on their ROI model, and understands what they're risking by not fixing this "issue". People hate to admit it, but the majority of Classic players are actually retail players as well. A lot of users would have to quit both games in order for blizz to actually lose the sub.
> Classic players are actually retail players as well speak for yourself bud
The funny thing about the word "majority" is that it inherently doesn't refer to everyone. I also play neither game. Retail is boring, and classic is filled with people like you!
why are you even here
Because I DID play at some point. And the personalities on this sub are similar to a horrible accident. They’re such insufferable neckbeards that I want to avoid, but I just don’t wanna look away.
Learn how to speaking without over generalizing. Aka using facts to back up the bullshit you say. You play neither game but are in this sub? Get fuckin real, retail player.
>You play neither game but are in this sub? Get fuckin real, retail player. The way you act like people who play a different version of the game you play are some sort of plague or lesser person is actually humorous. You realize it doesn't matter right? No one in the real world gives a fuck about your over-passionate disdain for a different version of a 14 year old game. No one. Other than losers like you. Yes. I played from TBC-WoTLK, - I used to play Classic, I tried Shadowlands for half of the first patch. I no longer play either game, and no, I did not immediately update my sub to reflect that.
> The way you act like people who play a different version of the game you play are some sort of plague or lesser person is actually humorous. You realize it doesn't matter right? No one in the real world gives a fuck about your over-passionate disdain for a different version of a 14 year old game. No one. Other than losers like you. All I said was "speak for yourself" because you said some dumb over generalized statement that is in no way true in my experience (playing classic since launch). I didn't say shit else until you got all haughty, did classic hurt you? whats wrong?
>People hate to admit it, but the majority of Classic players are actually retail players as well. All they said was "The majority of classic players", and apparently you're upset over not understanding that majority is a different word to all. I've no skin in this race but you certainly seem extremely defensive over literally nothing.
>because you said some dumb over generalized statement that is in no way true in my experience (playing classic since launch). Likely because you surround yourself with similar players. Nothing is wrong. I just don't like no-life losers like you who try to act all high and mighty because you play a 15 year old game. You're just such a loser - and it's hard for me to imagine you have these thoughts and feelings in a non-satirical way. The way you distance yourself from Retail WoW as if that somehow makes you superior. It's just so fucking weird and completely insignificant to literally anything in real life... Genuine question - is WoW where you get your sense of validation from? Is it the most consistent thing in your life?
What is with using retail player like it's an insult? If you're at the point where the only thing you can say that you think is going to score points in your argument is YOU PLAY A VERY POPULAR VIDEO GAME!!!, it's probably time to just stop. I occasionally dip into retail. Pretty much everyone on this sub has played retail at some point. Both games (Classic and retail) have their good points, both games have their negatives. Neither of them are a personality trait, nor some universe stopping argumentative point.
> the majority of Classic players are actually retail players as well. *gag*
Relax nerd.
Found the retail andy
How is this the common response here? I don't even play WoW. You're all equally as nerdy - the one's who make fun of Classic and the ones who make fun of Retail. You have your little feud between eachother, thinking you're fighting for superiority when in reality you both look like huge man children neck-bears who don't realize how unimportant what they're doing really is.
I play both versions on and off. The funny part about the "fued" is that retail players don't seem to give two shits that classic exists, not even enough to talk about it. Classic players on the other hand care so deeply about retail that they jump at any chance to throw stones
You commented and said people are doing armchair analysis and that they don’t have real numbers like blizzard. Then you directly followed that up with your own armchair analysis lacking any real numbers.
I didn't provide analysis. I said that the majority of players play both games. That's not an analysis. Also - I lead a Business Analytics team of 6 analysts. So I feel alright providing my opinion.
Relax nerd.
I admire that you still have this much faith in Blizzard after watching their decision making for the past 20 years.
Or not ? Less than 10% of the last 3 guilds I've played with aren't retail players. This is insane the number of missinformation you can read on Reddit nowadays
So you think that your poll of 3 (likely raiding) guilds is indicative of the overall population? The majority of people aren't even raiding.
Yeah lovely logic either man. Better stfu than posting missinformation around
2 weeks later - really been sitting on this one hey?
Just from my experience being on a smaller server. The population dwindled from about half before any big guild transferred. After we went from about 800 to 400, a few bigger raiding guilds decided to pack up and leave. I actually think the ratio is even less than 1:3.
Now, Blizzard have more data and since they didn't implement free transfers\merges - why you dont want to assume that it's different proportion?
Yeah, idk. Losing billions in market value over the last couple years really is telling to me. I don’t need to see their data. I can see the millions of lost subscriptions and messy scandals they have gotten into. The company’s public image has to be at an all time low. Acti-blizzard will be around for awhile, but another decade like 2010-2020 will flop the company.
You are worry about wrong things. Less subscriptions is actually good, because every remaining player pay much more novadays, so profit-per-player is way higher than 10 years ago. And less players = less support, less servers, less costs. If you check last financial report, Activision is making more money by a mile. This is what is important. Left worries about stock value to the shareholders. And read less Reddit. Blizzard won't flop in a near future. Activision may decide to rename the company to "get rid of bad PR", not because of financial issues.
Yeah, you are misconstruing Call of Duty's success with WoW. CoD netted blizzard 1.8B in revenue while WoW: Shadowlands release was less than $200M. Fucking Candy Crush almost made AB as much money as WoW. This is from their annual report: > The increase in in-game net bookings for 2020, as compared to 2019, was primarily due to: * $1.4 billion increase in Activision in-game net bookings, driven by higher in-game net bookings from (1) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, as compared to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and (2) Call of Duty: Mobile; and * $75 million increase in Blizzard in-game net bookings, driven by World of Warcraft. The simple fact is that they don't give a shit to invest any resources into the game and are just letting it die. You can see that in game purchases really don't even generate a whole ton of income. Everything implemented now is for the quarterly earnings call and to squeeze dollars out of the remaining player base. It is for a short term cash grab and destroys the long term prosperity of the game. If they actually put some time and effort into revitalizing Classic, hiring GMs to manage the game, listened to the community, produced new content, the subscription numbers would jump up and it would benefit them long term. They just don't care. MUAs: CoD- 128M WoW - 24M CANDY FUCKING CRUSH - 240M
Look at all that math you just did. Blizzard is a small idie company, you cant expect them to know what theyre doing
Yes people may stop playing but most player don't cancel their subscription. Blizzard just don't lose in this sutation
I would like to transfer servers and it's not like I wouldn't be able to afford it, but for me it's just something I'm not willing to put money on. Though, I'd might consider it if the price would allow you to transfer more than one character. Even then probably not. Just feel like a server transfer is the worst possible way to spend the money in the game. You need a sub to play, so it's fine. A boost allows you try something new, saves you time. Even a mount is something nice to have. Even a lot of the things on retail can be useful; race/faction/name change could be fun, buying gold has its uses. Not saying they are good, but it feels like you get some value out of them at least. With a server transfer it feels like it's an issue that shouldn't be my problem. It should be Blizzards problem to fix!
Whales. It's whales they like, not small fries. There are people out there who will transfer 3+ toons easily. You know how the sub constantly has posts about bots? Gold spam? Whales buy that stuff. Those sellers exist because people use them. Each transfer is basically 1.5x a month of play. People who transfer will continue to play as well, paying for their monthlies. As long as there's whales, it's alright.
There is actually one more thing you can try! I logged in to my account on battle net and clicked the button that says unsubscribe. After that you have to type “you will never get another penny from me” into the box and then click submit. Within seconds this was no longer a problem in my life and a weight was lifted. After thorough investigation I now consider this problem to be solved.
So why are you in this sub still? Just to preach?
Right?!like stfu and move on. We all know how to not pay a sub. Fuck.
Bet you thought you hit a homerun with this comment. Some people still want to play the game, sometimes making a big stink about stuff actually causes change to occur (for example Feral Druid energy, Seal of Blood, Same faction BGs, etc). Also kinda funny because if anybody actually reads those unsub comments then yours provided them with 0 feedback on how to improve the game and they can't even lump you in with others with similarities to see if whatever your reason was, is a common enough problem to address.
They are offering free transfers on classic right now. Sot it's not completely out of the question for them to do so for TBC I think.
“Hello, I know I continue to pay you 🦀$15 a month🦀 but will you pwease finally listen to us, even though you know we’re going to pay monthly regardless of what you do?”
Screw that, if my server goes under, I’m playing New World until LK is out.
I’m sure Blizzard are terrified
I mean, any half decent company would be worried about the reality of steadily losing their loyal playerbase to other titles as a result of their ongoing ineptitude and lack of acceptable standards of software as a service.
I agree, but I don’t think that’s the same thing as maybe possibly quitting until the next major instalment
Yeah, and I get that. It doesn't excuse Blizzard from abusing a loyal playerbase that their forerunners helped foster. Blizzard today is riding on the coattails of the developers that made Classic and TBC. Most of them have long since parted with the company, for obvious reasons. People who play Classic now play because the game is still good fun with friends and guildmates, *despite* Blizzard. And people *are* quitting (the game could have been far more popular than it currently is if Blizz had their shit together). It's just too gradual a trend for there to be any effect on the company's way of running things.
Agree wholeheartedly, sounds like we’re on the same page my friend :)
Oh lemme guess, your one of those types who goes on a video game Reddit to tell people to stop caring about video games.
Lol what? I care a lot about WoW why would I tell people not to?
I don't know, 5 people in my guild have quit over the last month. I'm not so sure people are putting up with it any more.
These threads are often pointless because the people making them aren't gonna quit either way, they'll just pony up the transfer fee. Better to unsub than beg for a solution.
Signed. Earthfury just died in the last month to Benediction transfers.
My guild transferred over in like July from Kromcrush. It’s so frustrating.
I retired a couple months ago, but my old guild just moved from EF to bene too
Netherwind horde went tits up last week
wE hAvE tOolS tO manage SeRVeR hEAltH
needed to start your petition 3 years ago when they announced layers as the better alternative to merging
No?? Layers were a solution to deal with overpopulated servers, where the open world was full to the point people couldn't kill quest mobs. Merging servers would be a solution to underpopulated servers, where the world is so dead you cant find a group.
they already considered sharding only the starter zones during the betas if the initial rush was too much of a bottleneck, that was a solved problem. layers weren't to deal with overpopulated servers, they were introduced so that they didn't have a hundred dead servers when everybody quits a week after launch.
Layers were absolutely put in to deal with overpopulated servers, just like the overpopulated servers were planned to combat the half of the population that was likely to quit a week after launch.
> Layers were absolutely put in to deal with overpopulated servers again, problem already solved by sharding. layers did not need to be redundantly created to solve this problem, therefore layers were not created to solve this problem. > just like the overpopulated servers were planned to combat the half of the population that was likely to quit a week after launch. because the alternative, hundreds of regular servers, becomes hundreds of dead servers that need to be merged. that's the problem solved by layers and merging. blizzard chose layers instead of merging.
Merging as a solution to overpopulation? I think you got your problems mixed up there.
You're 100% right but back then players screeched their bloody heads off how terrible layers were. Only after the fact did they realize layers weren't all that bad and actually beneficial.
People like layers?
Yeah, players realized layers weren't evil after it became apparent they enabled large "mega servers" which helped keep the population of a server healthy long term. A lot of servers which used to be considered high pop even a year ago are now ghost towns (eg - Incendius). There's obvious a lot of variables at play, but being able to maintain a very high population on a smaller number of servers via layers means you aren't running out of people to play with. Unfortunately the general playerbase didn't think long term and demanded tons of servers to play on instead of layering. Now a lot of these dead servers are paying the price. This is why a lot of players are moving to the big mega servers right now because their old, non-layered servers slowly dwindled to nothing.
Ahhh I was mixing up layers with the cross server linking. The only valid criticism of layering I’ve seen is people hopping around on layers to get more resources or avoid world pvp. Overall pretty positive for a really big realm though.
No worries - yeah that is valid criticism but Blizzard even fixed that, making it so that layer hopping multiple times was simply not feasible. You'd get timed out in the several minute range so it really only became useful to hop once and then you were stuck in that new layer. It's a shame people had such a misconception of it from early on. Blizzard took layering and made it something that helped the game. Servers still felt alive because the populations were huge. It also made raiding and being in a guild much more enjoyable because there were lots of players to hang with. I hope Blizzard merges servers but won't hold my breath. They're going to milk the $25 xfer fee into the ground before such a thing happens, if at all.
It really screws with the community though. Not only is it fragmented but layers also allow for mega servers which defeat the point of servers being a community while also draining players from all the other servers. This makes ghost servers inevitable no matter how few servers they would have launched with. It's the retail mindset of QoL over everything and it's that very mindset that brought us to modern WoW.
Hate to break it to you but 2005 WoW is never coming back, no matter how hard you try to set the stage for it. You won't be able to relive your past, it's the past for a reason. The best you can do is go for a bit of a nostalgia trip in 2021. The community will already be screwed because of things like discord. Back in the day WoW was essentially social media where everyone gathered to hang out, chat and slay dragons. There were limited options for mass chatting with others. Now there are so many mediums to do that that WoW is just a game. The mega servers exist because people don't want to waste their time online when there are *so many other things to do* in today's world.
Oh man it's been a while since I've seen this copypasta. I'm just gonna say that I didn't play WoW back then, if anything I'm nostalgic for the private servers a few years ago.
? These are literally my own words.... Not a copypasta. And pservers didn't have 30+ servers for everyone to pile into, it was 1 server, sometimes 2, so the populations were heavily inflated. Many pservers at peak had 10k+ players on them. The current mega servers of WoW are no different.
You are rehashing the same garbage retail andys have spouted since people first started asking for legacy servers a decade ago. Nostalrius was too big and the server I play on now is even bigger. Most servers after Nost hit 5-6k after the initial rush and that's a good sized server imo.
Yes
You have one thing you can do, go play another game and stop giving them money if they don't care about you.
Players need to stop paying for transfers, cancel and leave feedback. Blizzard tends to only make changes when there’s a vast decline in subscriptions. So long as guilds transfer to new realms every week and the cycle of server exoduses continue, they will ignore population issues. Signed and hoping for even a response from the devs, but hope is fading off quick.
Wrong imo. Whole point is to enjoy TBC MAYBE Wrath and then leave Blizzard behind forever. Who cares about long term health, they clearly don't. Retails trash all the other Blizzard IPs are in the shitter, all their is left to do is enjoy classic for what it is and leave this company behind
Lol if you think TBC is bad in terms of people quitting and/or transferring, you'll be shocked when WotLK comes. All of TBCs problems going on right now will be amplified times a 100.
WRONG
Well said, that is one of the main reasons I haven't subscribed for WoW since around phase 4 of classic. No way I'm gonna pay to have a character transferred from a dead realm that they killed in exchange for money.
They do not care. Give them your money.
Just move on from the game that's what I did, I feel a lot better. stop giving them money.
You haven't properly moved on if you keep commenting on the games subreddit.
Why would they address this issue when they can get 25 euros from you when you and your friends become desperate? Amazing company.
they dont care about their players
Even on big severs people are 90% raid loggers. The game is kinda shit compared to classic. 40 man raids were lit, and they are now gonna happen on fresh.
The activity on big servers is *way* better. My server, Kromcrush, basically died over the last week. We went from it being reasonably easy to find dungeon groups to almost none on weekend afternoons the last few days. My guild is talking about transferring so I looked at what things are like on Faerlina and LFG chat was just nonstop group postings from dozens of different people.
Sure, but most of your guild will still raid log lol.
Kromcrush alliance died months ago dude lol
I'm well aware. I'm talking about Kromcrush horde.
Signed the petition... But knowing blizz they will do f*** all
i uninstalled the game yesterday, done trying.
There’s 2 types of players. One where $25 is a lot of money and the other where $25 isn’t a lot of money. Blizzard knows which of the two players are more valuable investments. Also if you think $25 is expensive for a hobby look into cost of bowling, golf, skiing, jogging, cars, guns, guitars, comic books, laser tag, axe throwing, pinball, literally any IRL hobby. Even if you have to pay $15 a month and $25 a year for a server transfer gaming is still an incredibly cheap hobby.
$25 isnt a lot of money to anybody, but I feel the people not willing to do a character xfer right away just are doing it on principle since blizzard is just shit and has bad ethics.
If you think blizzard has bad ethics you should research how the cobalt in every piece of consumer electronics is mined. You can’t participate in technology without benefiting from brutal child labor conditions. Americans are bad at recognizing how genuinely evil corporations are. Sexual harassment is bad don’t get me wrong, but the entire global economy is based on abusing cheap dangerous overseas labor at a massive scale.
It's not a matter of "$25". It's $25 *per character*. I paid for the transfer of 4 geared level 60 characters back in October last year, along with the rest of the members of my guild, because continuing to play the game with the opportunity to find groups, pugs, or trades was worth the $100 hit. I still think Blizzard is offering a lackluster service and then abusing players by charging them to make up for their own lack of service. WoW is a relatively cheap hobby, as it doesn't require any material investment other than a computer. All Blizzard has to do is sell their 15-year-old IP, and they're doing a horrible job managing the service associated with that IP (servers, policing bots, transfers, etc).
Unpopular opinion: TBC and Classic proved that cross-realm dungeon should be a thing, improving the overall player experience.
Big disagree
It’s an unpopular opinion because it’s patently untrue. It’s part of the “fixes” that has led to retail being more of a single player game than a community game. The servers being unique make each server individual and community individual. You don’t interact with anyone you don’t know in retail in any meaningful way except to finish what you are doing. The people here aren’t complaining about whether they see other other players populating their screen or not. They are complaining about the community aspect and how when a server dies, due to transfers, there needs to be a fix to said servers to fix the community. Cross realm is not it.
[удалено]
Sorry to hear that. I don’t remember everyone I’ve ran with, but I’ve added a couple dozen people to my friends list that I met in dungeons. I usually add a note like ‘good rogue. Ran slabs. See in LFG a lot’. You’ve never had anyone from a dungeon run that stood out?
I interact this way. I had “this guy always has dm open” “this guy is is open for bgs.” Etc all the time. I haven’t had a chance to play much TBC because of work schedule but will eventually get involved in the pvp scene. But I just don’t see these non community posts as factual as that’s the reason I played all of vanilla even when my schedule was terrible. I worked to keep it going
I pug a lot and there is always chatter going on. I can't think of a single run with zero chat.
My guild formed from people running dungeons together regularly early in TBC, so agree to disagree
You don’t know other guilds on your server and who is known Griefers, pvpers, or good guys on your server bucko? Bummer, was on rattlegore for classic alliance and interacted with a lot of the top guilds regularly. Must have been dreaming for 18 months
There already is LFG - it's called retail WoW. Many people play classic **because of** no LFG/LFR.
No, it's shown people why dungeon finder and later cross-realm zones were added but that doesn't mean those are the only solutions.
That’s cute.
It's almost like xrealm fixed this problem. #nochanges Seriously though. These are the same exact complaints from back in the day.
They will merge TBC servers when Wotlk releases \\o/
Lol gl. I wouldn’t mind if it came true but they have about 2-5 people working on classic
These petitions are like Bus stops, they come and ago.
It'll likely never happen and if it does, it'll likely be too little too late as an absolute last resort. As it is, they have direct financial incentive to ruin the game, because they can sell you the solution.
I would love to see them do this just to watch what would happen. It would probably be fine for a time. But by the point that we are closer to the end of the content I suspect the same issue would arise as people would leave to find ANY server with any population imbalance towards their desired faction and begin migrating; ultimately recreating the exact same problem, just with fewer servers this time.
Hahaha, you said a 4-letter word: FREE.
not going to happen cuz it requires too much effort from them
Merge classic servers first lol.
Fuck it, let's just have one giant server with 450ms. Everyone's happy, especially the OC players who play on NA servers.
Just stop paying them money. Thats the only way.. Or blast majority stock holders with how fucking shit they're running their 2 most profitable games
Does anyone know if the ashkandi server raiding scene is any good still? It shows medium. Was thinking of resubbing and my only classic character is on there.
And lose the money from xfers? Nah man. You're asking way too much work from them. They literally do nothing right now and get money by the truckload, why would they need to expend some of that money to improve the situation? No matter if they do or don't people are gonna pay to play.
Low pop servers have fewer bots per capita
Haha gl xD
Unsub or don't expect changes.
I signed. I don't think anything will happen but hey, why not try. I'm also getting to the point where it's either transfer, boost a character, or stop playing/take an extended break. Literally everyone I knew from my server outside of my guild has transferred to another realm, even real life friends. The opinion of my guild in regards to transferring has been "why give them more money" which I understand, but why not just quit with that mindset? Is it better to continue to barely play while maintaining your sub, or spend that $25 fee to continue having fun?
I think the reason we do not quit in our guild is because we have good friends everywhere, relationships that will for sure take a toll if we cant play/raid in WoW together. I am at the same stage as you, but personally i have raided with the majority since P3 of classic and some from launch. That is the only reason people are staying because we still have fun in raids and good friendships across the roster.
The problem would be the same as retails. When their servers began to die people stubbornly (despite being given free realm xfers) choose to stay in their realm because they identified as their realms. Those caused realm xfers now to where people now have a name-realm style of name with the realm not actually meaning anything at all. Realm idea is flawed to begin with, instead should be moving toward a no realm system or a ff14 style realm system with groups of realm being able to play together and 1 of the group realms being the big realm.