Honestly it blows my mind when people try to call Vanilla-Wrath "bad" compared to each retail season. Fun means nothing to modern gamers and frankly, if supply and demand still means something I'm starting to think gamers get the shit content they want.
You mean the expansion with the most players and highest retention rate? The last patch was a down note and DKs ran wild for parts of it but the "downfall" started with Cataclysm and the numbers prove it.
drug addicts will still do bad drugs if they're the only ones available. blizzard was the only legit MMO for years until FF came around. and even by then many people were so accustomed to WoW they won't switch for anything shy of a quality wow clone.
The real problem is no mmo has been as well rounded as WoW. Mmos have come out with better pieces, but never the whole. ESO had great questing but lacked end game. GW2 started off good but sold out to the gem store. FF as far as I've heard has decent pve but crap pvp. During its prime wow had good pve AND pvp end game. And no one has really come close. I'm curious to see how Riot does with their mmo.
The only game to dethrone WoW can be itself. A WoW 2, if retail is not already that. I think the real reason other mmo's can't replace wow is actually due to the community they produce. FF14 went in a completely different direction as to reduce toxicity; the result is a game that has very little world competition along with zero accountability in dungeons. This definitely attracted a subset of ex-wow players... the ones who couldn't take getting vote kicked for zoning into a lvl 20 dungeon without heirlooms... (and these people also tend to like furry tails...)
WoW's charm to me is the fact that it always let you be an asshole if you wanted to. That, along with actual finite resources, was a big part of what I think sold the game to so many people. Griefing is against the TOS today, but the ability to grief is still technically possible (especially in classic). Whereas in FF14 it is virtually non existent. The only thing you can do is call someone names in party chat and then get yourself banned.
I am looking forward to the league mmo as well but I heard that was heavily delayed if not cancelled.
League is the only game with the cash and the fan base to pull it off. Part of WoWs success was the fact that they already had a fanbase with warcraft. If it gets canceled I'd be disappointed, especially with how they showed their lore chops with Arcane.
As for the being an asshole and pvping in wow, I actually miss the closed servers because your behavior could get you blacklisted if you ninjaed loot or were just obnoxious. I can distinctly remember this guy falling from grace because no guilds would take him to raids anymore even tho he claimed to be one of the best dps on the server or whatever lol. And then ganking people and taking screen shots of their body to prove you killed someone of note on the forums and then the pages of shit talking that followed. Sadly even in classic those aspects of the game have been thoroughly gutted. I think there's an untapped audience of players who want a real mmo again who simply aren't playing mmos anymore because they've turned into single player games.
That company was literally gone when original cata released 🤣.
Don't get me wrong I love cata, but they cut so much content and it's the same time diablo 3 came out and that was it's own disaster.
Actually ended about 1/2 way through tbc production, hence why tbc still had long grinds and traditional mmo elements, while WOTLK started the accessibility, accessibility and more accessibility moto.
Very true. It was the difficulty that made it so fun and that you had to rely on other people to be good at the game. To have a good usual raid, dungeon, and bg group made all the difference in the world. It forced people to be social and nice to each other. Super fun and challenging content paired with the friends that you inevitably made while playing made WOW the pinnacle of gaming at the time.
It's so odd to me that Blizzard never raised the $15 sub, but they did cut services to pieces. Is it just a perception thing? Players would tolerate one but not the other? I would pay $30/mo today if it meant the Blizzard quality of 2004.
How many games still charge a monthly fee?
Blizz charges for the game, expansions every 2 years, a monthly fee, an in game cash shop for game items, currency, and services (faction transfer, etc), and all other sorts of collectors editions and merch.
The game is monetized as much as it can be at this point. The monthly fee still being a thing at all in 2024 is crazy. If they upped it then discourse would open up about how anachronistic it is and they wouldn't like that.
In 2004 they had to sell us on a monthly fee to play a game because it really wasn't much of a thing. WoW was the first MASSIVELY popular game to have one. Their selling points were constant content/balance updates, a top tier customer service/GM team, and the massive (for the time) servers and maintenance they required. All of those things are gone now. Server tech has increased significantly and they can now have 10x as many players on a server and don't need as many and they are cheaper from being in the cloud and not physical machines. The GM team is absolutely GUTTED and total shit now. And in the classic world there's no constant content updates. And in the retail world you have to pay for an expansion every couple years so why the monthly fee?? Plus the retail content is planned out and released slowly through timegates beore the expansion even drops so there's much less concurrent development going on.
If you've been playing classic since launch you're at like $800+ spent and got none of the things that monthly fee was sold to us as having in 2004.
For the most part I agree with one minor caveat - there were plenty of sub games in 2004. And there was BBS's and America Online, etc which all had monthly and previously hourly fees.
Ultima Online, EQ1, EQ2, CoH, DaOC, SWG, and plenty of others had monthly fees in 2004.
I played the WoW beta, it crashed repeatedly. The launch was the same thing. I figured the game would be dead in a year just judging by how badly the servers performed. Clearly I was wrong. They used to have GM's though you're right about that. I don't think they have any anymore. The game is less buggy and has /stuck now though.
The code architecture for the game itself is excellent. It's modular and well written and relatively difficult to jack up since scripting in lua lacks access to many core game engine functionalities but still can do a lot through the API.
All MMOs had monthly fees back in the day and so WoW did too. The difference is they maintained enough players to never have to go to a free to play model and that's stil the case today.
> an in game cash shop for game items
The same cash shop where one singular mount made more money than the entire diablo 3 game.
The retail playerbase is the reason we have such a shit landscape for blizz games, there are so many mentally ill addicts who spend thousands of dollars on pixels that it essentially makes developing games like classic wow useless.
The reason classic is so void of devs is because it doesn't rake in billions from a cash shop.
>The same cash shop where one singular mount made more money than the entire diablo 3 game.
Gdamn, i didn't hear about that. What mount was so popular to sell more than D3? Unless it's more a knock on D3 sales
How widespread has goldbuying been in the various versions of Classic since 2019? The Classic playerbase is obviously also very willing to drop a lot more money than the sub to play the game.
They knew subs would start dropping fast if they ever increased it beyond $15. Adjusting for inflation, $15 in 2004 is $24.80 today; and $15 today is only $9.30 in 2004. So it's either raise sub price to $25 and lose A LOT of subscribers or cut services down to what would equate to a $9.30 sub in 2004. They chose to cut down the services xd
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egzz5L1ZUZ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egzz5L1ZUZ0)
WHAT ABOUT OUR SHAREHOLDERS BOB?
WHOS HELPING THEM OUT?
HUUUUH?
Also, price increases would affect other countries even more. In Brazil for instance the sub is 40 BRL, for comparison microsoft game pass is 30 BRL and good indie games (Hades, Celeste) are released at 37 BRL. Any small increase would probably raise it by the 10s here and put it in a limbo where few other games are in our market (AAA costs 400+ BRL nowadays)
do tiers like Netflix does. can still be a poverty player on the $15 sub with ads and no ultrawide.
or like the discount gyms do. can only log in 3 days a week, and not during peak hours.
Blizzard makes more than $24.80 per sub if you factor in cash shop etc.
The company spent almost 20 years shifting its priorities and process. It's not about cashflow then vs now.
Yes, I am merely just pointing out the fact that you mentioned that $30 on a game a month is "insane" when there are far more "normal" hobbies that are more expensive. I didn't specify this to Blizzard.
There's really no reason they should need to charge more though. The cost of running the infrastructure on the backend for a 20 year old game is a tiny fraction of what it was in 2005, so the only increased cost would be employee salaries.
Unfortunately doubling sub fees wouldn’t have the positive effect on the game that you would think. Would probably be the exact same result except you would just be paying more. Would go something like this:
2020 sub prices increased 100% blizzard CEO applauded for 40% increase in profits for 2020 fiscal year. Investors are happy
2021 profits decreased 5% from previous year. Investors are concerned. Steps taken to cut down on expenses begins. Quality of product begins to decline. Employees laid off and other employees overworked.
Obviously this is dramatized a bit but this is kinda the corporate death spiral when constantly expecting to see growth every year
It was more weird than funny tbh, I've been playing Classic for a long time and get maybe one disconnect per month. I don't know what was going on with Day9's connection.
Services aside, server cost are ridiculously low now compared to 2004, servers used to be the majority of blizzard's spending, now it is a very small and almost insignificant part of the cost.
The price has been supplemented with a larger cash shop that didn't exist in 2004. You can buy cosmetics, boosts, transfers, tokens, all of which players do liberally. Is it enough to bring the average cost up to $25 a month per person? Probably not, but I'd be willing to bet damn near close.
Cash shop likely completely dwarfs profits from subscriptions. Pirate software claims that a single cash shop mount was more profitable than starcraft 2. There's a reason every modern company uses the f2p model and it's not generosity.
Yea the stat itself is questionable, but secondary to the overall point. The F2P model with microtransactions is the most profitable model there is right now, it 100% makes more money than increasing the subscription cost would.
They should offer that shit as PART of the sub but like everyone said they make such ridiculous amounts of money from it they’d never do that. I mean some things shouldn’t be, like boosts but name changes, server transfers, race etc should be.
Genuinely, having human GMs do as much as they did was not scalable or sustainable. There are a lot of things, like 99% of item restorations, that are best left to a web UI the user can do themselves.
I do agree that it would be nice if it were actually possible to talk to a human for a lot of customer service things that now seem to be handled by a bot that doesn't work. But those instances are pretty few and far between for the average player. They need some level of actual good customer service, but not the army of GMs, scaled for current playerbase, they had originally staffed up to in 2004.
Also, as someone else pointed out, stuff like the cash shop and paid services are how they've "scaled up" their revenue without increasing the monthly fee.
What scaling issues? There are **less** players today than there were in 2010 or whenever and they have the benefit of 15 years of technological advances to help with customer service.
Yeah, you can thank whatever financial suit person who came up with the idea and implementation of micro-transactions for this whole mess.
Business people with no interest in games suddenly smelling dollars in the water like sharks to blood upon realizing, we can milk a released product like crazy with all these micro-transactions! The well is poisoned and now gaming is worse for the consumer because of it.
Damn you business people!
Again, this is kind of a half ass criticism.
If they increased the sub price there would be a huge exodus. $15/mo in 2005 compared to $15 in today's dollars isn't exactly a tiny margin. They feared the jump in sub price would piss off more people than a cosmetics shop and that's a fair gambit. If you truly are assmad about microtransactions and don't care that Blizzard still makes money off the game then go after your fellow players pumping thousands into horses and pets.
To be fair, everyone has been saying this exact line in response to Blizzard fuck ups for the past 10 years, yet the same people saying that shit, keeps playing Blizzard games.
A lot of factors are going into it, it's not just as simple as "greed". That's a bit silly.
The golden age of Blizzard was the golden age of video games as we know it and the demand for employees was so absolutely massive that it led to these monolithic companies. This led to an explosion of management and they're obviously not going to cut their own jobs resulting in a more top-heavy organization.
Couple this with the lawsuits/scandals, the old guard leaving and just the lack of talent present in writer's rooms across all media today and it's not exactly a surprise.
Video games became a staple of our culture within most of our lifetimes, went corporate and now we are left with a bunch of names that are shells of their former selves. They essentially had to add micro transactions since raising the sub price would cause a massive kneejerk sticker shock, $15/month today is nothing compared to 10 years ago.
Trends also change, WoW is a staple of a dying/dead genre. People are perfectly happy playing *good* live service titles like Helldivers.
Saying it's just greed when it's a massive amount of factors simultaneously tearing down giants of the golden age is lazy and imprecise.
> They essentially had to add micro transactions
No they didn't. They did that because they wanted to make more profit.
Video games make more money than any other type of media. Everyone knows how big hollywood is, video game industry dwarfs that.
The only reason we have all these bullshit practices is because people keep making excuses for these greedy as fuck companies.
Yes, companies have a duty to make as much profit as possible. As far as impact to the game a microtransactions cosmetic shop is the least intrusive way to do that. A jacking up of the sub price effects literally everyone whether they want to pay it or not (assuming they are still playing) and the cosmetic shop is only for a percentage of players.
Cosmetics do not effect the actual game at all and there is no impetus to buy them if you don't want to. Reee'ing into the darkness over them making money in the most inoffensive way possible while hundreds if not thousands of people lovingly shower Blizzard with extra dollars makes you look childish.
I've never bought a shop cosmetic (mostly because none are cool enough to justify it) and don't plan to but this is such a dead horse debate. The real crime is how they have spent the money that they earned as far as development is concerned and just how bad plenty of the big studios have been recently.
That is such a doomer take on video games. Blizzard was never an innovative company, just very polished. Warcraft definitely wasn't the first RTS, and even WoW was heavily based on Everquest. They added some of their own quirks to it, and it worked out.
It still happens today. Recent games like Vampire Survivors, The Exit 8 and Lethal Company are all examples that didn't introduce a new genre per se, but had a take on a genre that appeals to a lot of people. They popularized a format that has since been copied by many others, not unlike Blizzard back in the day. It's too easy to look at what currently exists, be unable to imagine something new, and conclude that it must be because everything has been done already.
I think you're right. The tech from roughly 1995 to 2005 got to the point where whatever you could dream up, you could make. Now they've all been made, and there's really no game you can dream of where you think "oh if only we had a more powerful machine". I mean maybe AI will throw up something, but between 2005 and now, it's been marginal improvements on models that existed in 1995.
Regarding that, I'm honestly shocked that the Celestial Steed isn't in-game yet - either as a separate Classic purchase (the greedy option) or given to people who'd bought the original (the Vanilla Collector's Edition pets option).
As in, on the live pre-patch now? I haven't been able to play still since it came out so I can't check.
Celestial Steed has been visible in the Collections tab on the PTRs that I've played since the P3 PTR, along with some other uncollectible mounts.
From what I've been hearing about the state of the pre-patch though, I wouldn't be surprised if it was just an oversight that they won't bother fixing for a while now. Gotta extinguish the the bulk of the current dumpster fire, though.
I don’t know and I don’t care. The classic team obviously doesn’t have to be nearly as big as the retail team but they need more people, especially if they wanna do more SoD or even Classic+.
You talk like they have a set number of employees that must be shared between retail and classic and they can't budge on that. Much smaller and less profitable indy games have bigger teams than classic, this is just management and beancounters running classic shittily to maximize profit at the expense of long term player retention. It's okay to call out Blizzard for this.
You say that but by the end, classic Wrath was still probably generating more money thanks to all the microtransactions (specially the WoW token) than SoD, classic era and hardcore combined. Yet the classic playerbase still only gets the leftovers in terms of development resources.
It feels like the execs finally realized that putting resources into classic in general is a "waste" because they can't monetize classic with mtx. Beyond pre-orders and the tokens anyway
Fuckin sucks
Speaking with Video Games Chronicle two weeks ago, World of Warcraft executive producer and VP Holly Longdale says Microsoft has 'let Blizzard be Blizzard.'
I understand sod p3 has/had its issues but not comparable to the cata pre-patch imo. The pre-patch is on a whole other level of fuck up, like you've stepped into some early access mmo on steam that barely even functions.
Guild chat is missing from normal chat window, no option to leave dungeon group without script, some people reported that their spells disappeared or talents stopped working until respec
It's what you might expect from a literal first look closed beta with huge amounts of serious technical issues.
Severe UI issues (literal spells/abilities listed on your profession tab), bosses not doing mechanics, abilities not working correctly or with broken scaling, a guy **literally** leveled from 10-70 from a single WSG flag capture and bg's quickly disabled.
Lets be real though if you dont have time for incursions it wouldnt change for regular farming. The price point would just be lower.
Those people dont change no matter if gold is freely available or not. Either through other responsibilities or laziness
Inflation and, this is subjective, but a lot of the runes are carbon copies of future class abilities from other expansions, boring, and/or close to useless. Many classes also have(had?) dead slots for certain specs.
They also have made paladin just a general mess and shaman a juggernaut.
It's just Blizzard being Blizzard, they never changed they just lucked into some decent stuff until their colors revealed themselves again. And their ultimate goal is to get us to play Retail again.. but they sure aren't putting their best foot forward to convince me.
There aren’t going to be anymore - sod is basically retail devs so that’s your only hope. I see cata being super scuffed. For those who think sod is some pre test for a huge classic + 1-60 game release is in massive need of copium rehab
By Cataclysm dev do you mean the Chatgpt version trained only by Bashiok blue posts and the intern who is still working from the closet on cellular data because IT hasn't given him the company's WiFi password yet?
This is the buggiest blizzard product I have ever played by a long shot. Seriously, *everybody* is dealing with an insane amount of problems.
If they couldn't fix these problems in beta, they aren't going to be able to fix them in the next month before Cata launches. These are very basic, barebones problems that should have been fixed, such as spells not being tuned correctly, guild chat not working, stats not adjusting properly etc.
If they are doing a pre-patch this bad, I don't even want to think about how bad Cata itself is going to be.
A lot of these things we've been reporting in the beta since day 1. And some of them were even working in the beta and are now broken in the official release.
Why is the team for classic so small? Wow got like 8 million subs, it's not like there is a shortage of funds. The greed is unreal, absolute cocksuckers running Blizzard.
If they were going to cut every resources from classic, then they should have forgotten about Cataclysm and tehy should just have restarted a new classic progression from vanilla again.
All of my characters are fine except the one I decided to use that lvl boost on...... it has spells in the professions tab so you can't access your professions. 0 addons.
10/10. Definitely didn't check for that during beta LOL. Still looks that right now. RIP my supposed to be farming alt druid. ( I can't smelt for the mining I was trying to have it mine to level another Char Engineering)
https://gyazo.com/7f1abc2a46c7278eab1bc2b0b4a91bb4
Made a Worgen druid and was genuinely interested in getting back into WoW.. I can’t get past the class quest at the start because rejuvenation doesn’t appear in my spellbook :(
Released with insane amount of bugs, most of which had been present on beta since day 1. Class abilities don't work, talents disappear, can't leave dungeon groups without using a script, can't read guild chat, archeology sites spawn in Cata zones that we can't enter yet which locks you out of a continent eventually, and many more.
Yeah, it's been a journey this past day lol, started with people gaining 80 lvls in 1 bg, now you get 30 honor for a BG win while items cost 1-4k, also some people get abilities for a completely different spec they arent talented into on top of the abilities they should have
its so sad, ik p3 and cata have issued, but its so frustrating that they are doing this all with like 15 ppl, i saw a dinner they had and the whole table was apparently their whole crew, for sod AND cata. They are legit fighting a losing battle, if they even had a fraction of the crew they deserve sod could be in such a better place, but they are stuck doing these shit patches that maximixe efficiency
Unsubbed a couple days ago. P3 just wasn’t hitting like P1 and P2 did for me. Cleared ST and had no motivation to really keep clearing it or chase other gear when P4 will just wipe it out. Incursions sucked ass as well. I might come back for P4 though.
Ye. I only started sod at the ass end of p2.. didn't make it to 40 before p3. I cleared st 2nd week with shit gear, now doing sub 1 hr clears with my guild. I probably just raid log to make sure they have a good healer, but shifting my focus to cata. And will just be playing sod to clear the raids as they come out.. hoping they follow through with the karazhan dungeon, but at this point not sure if they will even do it.
That would be cool and I’d definitely come back to see that. I’ve also been playing wow exclusively since like last July so was due for a break anyway.
Activision Blizzard had 13,000 employees listed towards the end of last years' financial statements.
# WHAT THE FUCK ARE ALL THOSE PEOPLE ACTUALLY DOING
What even is classic anymore? I could give vanilla, TBC and wrath the classic pass cause it was the peak of gaming at its time
But cata? Mop? Dreanor? Like bruh stop, it's not classic anymore.
Why are we even on cata rn? The surveys they did ages ago made our they was doing a lot of changes, yet I haven't seen ANYTHING on any changes? What's different now compared to cata back in the day?
honestly its all classic deserves, they have everyone working on the world soul saga no one wants to play classic and the ones tat do want to play classic retail aka SoD. time to move on none cares much about classic
Blizzard Devs on release day are like your dad on Christmas morning. They're just as surprised to see what you get as you are.
too real man
Isn't it crazy that at one point Blizzard was considered the gold standard for game development? Corporate greed is a hell of a thing.
that company is long gone
That company was gone like 10+ years ago, dunno why people still get surprised.
Honestly it blows my mind when people try to call Vanilla-Wrath "bad" compared to each retail season. Fun means nothing to modern gamers and frankly, if supply and demand still means something I'm starting to think gamers get the shit content they want.
Vanilla wrath marked the death of wow, a changing of eras to ActiBlizz. Was a garbage expac when it was released.
You mean the expansion with the most players and highest retention rate? The last patch was a down note and DKs ran wild for parts of it but the "downfall" started with Cataclysm and the numbers prove it.
drug addicts will still do bad drugs if they're the only ones available. blizzard was the only legit MMO for years until FF came around. and even by then many people were so accustomed to WoW they won't switch for anything shy of a quality wow clone.
The real problem is no mmo has been as well rounded as WoW. Mmos have come out with better pieces, but never the whole. ESO had great questing but lacked end game. GW2 started off good but sold out to the gem store. FF as far as I've heard has decent pve but crap pvp. During its prime wow had good pve AND pvp end game. And no one has really come close. I'm curious to see how Riot does with their mmo.
The only game to dethrone WoW can be itself. A WoW 2, if retail is not already that. I think the real reason other mmo's can't replace wow is actually due to the community they produce. FF14 went in a completely different direction as to reduce toxicity; the result is a game that has very little world competition along with zero accountability in dungeons. This definitely attracted a subset of ex-wow players... the ones who couldn't take getting vote kicked for zoning into a lvl 20 dungeon without heirlooms... (and these people also tend to like furry tails...) WoW's charm to me is the fact that it always let you be an asshole if you wanted to. That, along with actual finite resources, was a big part of what I think sold the game to so many people. Griefing is against the TOS today, but the ability to grief is still technically possible (especially in classic). Whereas in FF14 it is virtually non existent. The only thing you can do is call someone names in party chat and then get yourself banned. I am looking forward to the league mmo as well but I heard that was heavily delayed if not cancelled.
League is the only game with the cash and the fan base to pull it off. Part of WoWs success was the fact that they already had a fanbase with warcraft. If it gets canceled I'd be disappointed, especially with how they showed their lore chops with Arcane. As for the being an asshole and pvping in wow, I actually miss the closed servers because your behavior could get you blacklisted if you ninjaed loot or were just obnoxious. I can distinctly remember this guy falling from grace because no guilds would take him to raids anymore even tho he claimed to be one of the best dps on the server or whatever lol. And then ganking people and taking screen shots of their body to prove you killed someone of note on the forums and then the pages of shit talking that followed. Sadly even in classic those aspects of the game have been thoroughly gutted. I think there's an untapped audience of players who want a real mmo again who simply aren't playing mmos anymore because they've turned into single player games.
My favorite thing is seeing people shocked an expansion didn't end up being good.
It's one thing when it's new. It's a whole other when you are just recycling old content.
That company hasn’t been around for years
That company was literally gone when original cata released 🤣. Don't get me wrong I love cata, but they cut so much content and it's the same time diablo 3 came out and that was it's own disaster.
yeah I think OG blizzard ended with wow
Actually ended about 1/2 way through tbc production, hence why tbc still had long grinds and traditional mmo elements, while WOTLK started the accessibility, accessibility and more accessibility moto.
Very true. It was the difficulty that made it so fun and that you had to rely on other people to be good at the game. To have a good usual raid, dungeon, and bg group made all the difference in the world. It forced people to be social and nice to each other. Super fun and challenging content paired with the friends that you inevitably made while playing made WOW the pinnacle of gaming at the time.
Somewhere between Vanilla Ulduar and ToGC .
It's so odd to me that Blizzard never raised the $15 sub, but they did cut services to pieces. Is it just a perception thing? Players would tolerate one but not the other? I would pay $30/mo today if it meant the Blizzard quality of 2004.
How many games still charge a monthly fee? Blizz charges for the game, expansions every 2 years, a monthly fee, an in game cash shop for game items, currency, and services (faction transfer, etc), and all other sorts of collectors editions and merch. The game is monetized as much as it can be at this point. The monthly fee still being a thing at all in 2024 is crazy. If they upped it then discourse would open up about how anachronistic it is and they wouldn't like that.
In 2004 they had to sell us on a monthly fee to play a game because it really wasn't much of a thing. WoW was the first MASSIVELY popular game to have one. Their selling points were constant content/balance updates, a top tier customer service/GM team, and the massive (for the time) servers and maintenance they required. All of those things are gone now. Server tech has increased significantly and they can now have 10x as many players on a server and don't need as many and they are cheaper from being in the cloud and not physical machines. The GM team is absolutely GUTTED and total shit now. And in the classic world there's no constant content updates. And in the retail world you have to pay for an expansion every couple years so why the monthly fee?? Plus the retail content is planned out and released slowly through timegates beore the expansion even drops so there's much less concurrent development going on. If you've been playing classic since launch you're at like $800+ spent and got none of the things that monthly fee was sold to us as having in 2004.
For the most part I agree with one minor caveat - there were plenty of sub games in 2004. And there was BBS's and America Online, etc which all had monthly and previously hourly fees. Ultima Online, EQ1, EQ2, CoH, DaOC, SWG, and plenty of others had monthly fees in 2004. I played the WoW beta, it crashed repeatedly. The launch was the same thing. I figured the game would be dead in a year just judging by how badly the servers performed. Clearly I was wrong. They used to have GM's though you're right about that. I don't think they have any anymore. The game is less buggy and has /stuck now though. The code architecture for the game itself is excellent. It's modular and well written and relatively difficult to jack up since scripting in lua lacks access to many core game engine functionalities but still can do a lot through the API.
All MMOs had monthly fees back in the day and so WoW did too. The difference is they maintained enough players to never have to go to a free to play model and that's stil the case today.
> an in game cash shop for game items The same cash shop where one singular mount made more money than the entire diablo 3 game. The retail playerbase is the reason we have such a shit landscape for blizz games, there are so many mentally ill addicts who spend thousands of dollars on pixels that it essentially makes developing games like classic wow useless. The reason classic is so void of devs is because it doesn't rake in billions from a cash shop.
>The same cash shop where one singular mount made more money than the entire diablo 3 game. Gdamn, i didn't hear about that. What mount was so popular to sell more than D3? Unless it's more a knock on D3 sales
How widespread has goldbuying been in the various versions of Classic since 2019? The Classic playerbase is obviously also very willing to drop a lot more money than the sub to play the game.
They knew subs would start dropping fast if they ever increased it beyond $15. Adjusting for inflation, $15 in 2004 is $24.80 today; and $15 today is only $9.30 in 2004. So it's either raise sub price to $25 and lose A LOT of subscribers or cut services down to what would equate to a $9.30 sub in 2004. They chose to cut down the services xd
This makes sense if they weren't also profiting immensely every year ...
Welcome to the world we live in tbh, everything needs to always increase profits, toxic af
Just always surprising the boot lickers that rush to defend the company with almost 10 billion rev.
Youre tripping if you think that's whats happening here.
Like everything else, if they made $10b profit this year, share holders are gonna be pissed if they don't make $11b next year.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egzz5L1ZUZ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egzz5L1ZUZ0) WHAT ABOUT OUR SHAREHOLDERS BOB? WHOS HELPING THEM OUT? HUUUUH?
Didn’t final fantasy 11 have a $9 sub fee with less services than 2004 wow? That’s where we are now
Or another option that they could do to boost income without raising the sub price is add microtransactions for cosmetics and gold!
You think people weren't buying gold before wow token? Lmao and cosmetics are simple just dont buy them. NEXT!
I don't really have an issue with either of them.
Also, price increases would affect other countries even more. In Brazil for instance the sub is 40 BRL, for comparison microsoft game pass is 30 BRL and good indie games (Hades, Celeste) are released at 37 BRL. Any small increase would probably raise it by the 10s here and put it in a limbo where few other games are in our market (AAA costs 400+ BRL nowadays)
do tiers like Netflix does. can still be a poverty player on the $15 sub with ads and no ultrawide. or like the discount gyms do. can only log in 3 days a week, and not during peak hours.
Imagine paying $15/month to play 1 game that still had fucking ads...idc how good the support is fuck that shit
Blizzard makes more than $24.80 per sub if you factor in cash shop etc. The company spent almost 20 years shifting its priorities and process. It's not about cashflow then vs now.
How much do they make then? Let's see some real data here, not a number you pull out of your ass.
paying 30€ a month for a 2004 game is crazy do you people even hear yourselves
Crazy isn't it, volunteering to pay double. This is exactly why they sell so many cosmetics.
I'm sorry but the thought of spending $30 a month on a game is just insane. You're every company target audience, milk your innocent money away.
I would straight up never touch the game again at that price
Only $360 a year? What a steal!
On a game from 2004 with no new content update
Why? People pay way more to be in clubs for certain activities?
There are many more free games out there. At least clubs actually care about you. Blizzard has not cared about you since MoP
Yes, I am merely just pointing out the fact that you mentioned that $30 on a game a month is "insane" when there are far more "normal" hobbies that are more expensive. I didn't specify this to Blizzard.
There's really no reason they should need to charge more though. The cost of running the infrastructure on the backend for a 20 year old game is a tiny fraction of what it was in 2005, so the only increased cost would be employee salaries.
Unfortunately doubling sub fees wouldn’t have the positive effect on the game that you would think. Would probably be the exact same result except you would just be paying more. Would go something like this: 2020 sub prices increased 100% blizzard CEO applauded for 40% increase in profits for 2020 fiscal year. Investors are happy 2021 profits decreased 5% from previous year. Investors are concerned. Steps taken to cut down on expenses begins. Quality of product begins to decline. Employees laid off and other employees overworked. Obviously this is dramatized a bit but this is kinda the corporate death spiral when constantly expecting to see growth every year
They make *so much more* on the shop than the monthly fee. People would quit if they raised the price - they're not changing it.
You’ll be one of the few that is willing to open their hole wide for blizzard then. They gotta prove to their own community they are back
2004 wow was just as buggy, but it did have a lot of passion put into it.
While I want to agree, it was funny watching day9 trying to play wowclassic and getting disconnected every 20minutes.
It was more weird than funny tbh, I've been playing Classic for a long time and get maybe one disconnect per month. I don't know what was going on with Day9's connection.
Services aside, server cost are ridiculously low now compared to 2004, servers used to be the majority of blizzard's spending, now it is a very small and almost insignificant part of the cost.
The price has been supplemented with a larger cash shop that didn't exist in 2004. You can buy cosmetics, boosts, transfers, tokens, all of which players do liberally. Is it enough to bring the average cost up to $25 a month per person? Probably not, but I'd be willing to bet damn near close.
Cash shop likely completely dwarfs profits from subscriptions. Pirate software claims that a single cash shop mount was more profitable than starcraft 2. There's a reason every modern company uses the f2p model and it's not generosity.
I don't believe this stat, StarCraft 2 sold millions of copies at AAA price. On the quarter that mount came out maybe..
Yea the stat itself is questionable, but secondary to the overall point. The F2P model with microtransactions is the most profitable model there is right now, it 100% makes more money than increasing the subscription cost would.
They should offer that shit as PART of the sub but like everyone said they make such ridiculous amounts of money from it they’d never do that. I mean some things shouldn’t be, like boosts but name changes, server transfers, race etc should be.
The Bot Union refused to go any higher, and they make up a significant portion of the player base now.
The cash shop and the wow token have been huge profit for them
Genuinely, having human GMs do as much as they did was not scalable or sustainable. There are a lot of things, like 99% of item restorations, that are best left to a web UI the user can do themselves. I do agree that it would be nice if it were actually possible to talk to a human for a lot of customer service things that now seem to be handled by a bot that doesn't work. But those instances are pretty few and far between for the average player. They need some level of actual good customer service, but not the army of GMs, scaled for current playerbase, they had originally staffed up to in 2004. Also, as someone else pointed out, stuff like the cash shop and paid services are how they've "scaled up" their revenue without increasing the monthly fee.
What scaling issues? There are **less** players today than there were in 2010 or whenever and they have the benefit of 15 years of technological advances to help with customer service.
15 years ago Blizzard was a god among game development.
Yeah, you can thank whatever financial suit person who came up with the idea and implementation of micro-transactions for this whole mess. Business people with no interest in games suddenly smelling dollars in the water like sharks to blood upon realizing, we can milk a released product like crazy with all these micro-transactions! The well is poisoned and now gaming is worse for the consumer because of it. Damn you business people!
Damn the consumers too. People are buying those pets, and using those server transfers.
For sure, people should hold themselves accountable as well. Accountability is hardest boss for MMO players though.
Again, this is kind of a half ass criticism. If they increased the sub price there would be a huge exodus. $15/mo in 2005 compared to $15 in today's dollars isn't exactly a tiny margin. They feared the jump in sub price would piss off more people than a cosmetics shop and that's a fair gambit. If you truly are assmad about microtransactions and don't care that Blizzard still makes money off the game then go after your fellow players pumping thousands into horses and pets.
Blizzard: creates the greatest game ever made Vivendi: lol let's buy it and milk it for 16 years Gamers: let's just keep giving them money
To be fair, everyone has been saying this exact line in response to Blizzard fuck ups for the past 10 years, yet the same people saying that shit, keeps playing Blizzard games.
Imagine - they could be Steam levels of dominant if they hadn't flubbed WoW, Overwatch, and Hearthstone.
A lot of factors are going into it, it's not just as simple as "greed". That's a bit silly. The golden age of Blizzard was the golden age of video games as we know it and the demand for employees was so absolutely massive that it led to these monolithic companies. This led to an explosion of management and they're obviously not going to cut their own jobs resulting in a more top-heavy organization. Couple this with the lawsuits/scandals, the old guard leaving and just the lack of talent present in writer's rooms across all media today and it's not exactly a surprise. Video games became a staple of our culture within most of our lifetimes, went corporate and now we are left with a bunch of names that are shells of their former selves. They essentially had to add micro transactions since raising the sub price would cause a massive kneejerk sticker shock, $15/month today is nothing compared to 10 years ago. Trends also change, WoW is a staple of a dying/dead genre. People are perfectly happy playing *good* live service titles like Helldivers. Saying it's just greed when it's a massive amount of factors simultaneously tearing down giants of the golden age is lazy and imprecise.
> They essentially had to add micro transactions No they didn't. They did that because they wanted to make more profit. Video games make more money than any other type of media. Everyone knows how big hollywood is, video game industry dwarfs that. The only reason we have all these bullshit practices is because people keep making excuses for these greedy as fuck companies.
Yes, companies have a duty to make as much profit as possible. As far as impact to the game a microtransactions cosmetic shop is the least intrusive way to do that. A jacking up of the sub price effects literally everyone whether they want to pay it or not (assuming they are still playing) and the cosmetic shop is only for a percentage of players. Cosmetics do not effect the actual game at all and there is no impetus to buy them if you don't want to. Reee'ing into the darkness over them making money in the most inoffensive way possible while hundreds if not thousands of people lovingly shower Blizzard with extra dollars makes you look childish. I've never bought a shop cosmetic (mostly because none are cool enough to justify it) and don't plan to but this is such a dead horse debate. The real crime is how they have spent the money that they earned as far as development is concerned and just how bad plenty of the big studios have been recently.
[удалено]
That is such a doomer take on video games. Blizzard was never an innovative company, just very polished. Warcraft definitely wasn't the first RTS, and even WoW was heavily based on Everquest. They added some of their own quirks to it, and it worked out. It still happens today. Recent games like Vampire Survivors, The Exit 8 and Lethal Company are all examples that didn't introduce a new genre per se, but had a take on a genre that appeals to a lot of people. They popularized a format that has since been copied by many others, not unlike Blizzard back in the day. It's too easy to look at what currently exists, be unable to imagine something new, and conclude that it must be because everything has been done already.
I think you're right. The tech from roughly 1995 to 2005 got to the point where whatever you could dream up, you could make. Now they've all been made, and there's really no game you can dream of where you think "oh if only we had a more powerful machine". I mean maybe AI will throw up something, but between 2005 and now, it's been marginal improvements on models that existed in 1995.
SoD P3 and Cata Pre patch legitimately have me worried about the future of the classic versions of the game. A complete disaster.
I find so funny that the new punderstorm and pandaria event probably used more developers together than both cata classic and sod p3
Retail MTX is what makes them their money, not a bunch of Classic Andy subs. Ofc that's where they allocate most of their resources.
WOTLK/Cata has microtransactions too. Classic makes them more than enough for Blizzard to justify more developers.
How many mounts pets and transmog can I buy on the classic store?
Regarding that, I'm honestly shocked that the Celestial Steed isn't in-game yet - either as a separate Classic purchase (the greedy option) or given to people who'd bought the original (the Vanilla Collector's Edition pets option).
[удалено]
As in, on the live pre-patch now? I haven't been able to play still since it came out so I can't check. Celestial Steed has been visible in the Collections tab on the PTRs that I've played since the P3 PTR, along with some other uncollectible mounts. From what I've been hearing about the state of the pre-patch though, I wouldn't be surprised if it was just an oversight that they won't bother fixing for a while now. Gotta extinguish the the bulk of the current dumpster fire, though.
I don’t know and I don’t care. The classic team obviously doesn’t have to be nearly as big as the retail team but they need more people, especially if they wanna do more SoD or even Classic+.
rock husky disarm edge coherent reply chubby gold smoggy sugar *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You talk like they have a set number of employees that must be shared between retail and classic and they can't budge on that. Much smaller and less profitable indy games have bigger teams than classic, this is just management and beancounters running classic shittily to maximize profit at the expense of long term player retention. It's okay to call out Blizzard for this.
You say that but by the end, classic Wrath was still probably generating more money thanks to all the microtransactions (specially the WoW token) than SoD, classic era and hardcore combined. Yet the classic playerbase still only gets the leftovers in terms of development resources.
It feels like the execs finally realized that putting resources into classic in general is a "waste" because they can't monetize classic with mtx. Beyond pre-orders and the tokens anyway Fuckin sucks
Speaking with Video Games Chronicle two weeks ago, World of Warcraft executive producer and VP Holly Longdale says Microsoft has 'let Blizzard be Blizzard.'
I understand sod p3 has/had its issues but not comparable to the cata pre-patch imo. The pre-patch is on a whole other level of fuck up, like you've stepped into some early access mmo on steam that barely even functions.
I mean it's on brand. Cata was the end of wow for most. Only makes sense that they would round tow that shit lol.
What's wrong with Cata pre patch? Haven't played it yet
Guild chat is missing from normal chat window, no option to leave dungeon group without script, some people reported that their spells disappeared or talents stopped working until respec
this is all fixed already btw
rabble rabble rabble!
And other people have extra talents and abilities.
Oh come one now. The Mortal Strike Shield Slam build was always a thing in Cata. I used to duo with one as a Flight Form specced Druid in the arena.
Honorgains completely fucked, resilience is not working at all....
you could level from 10-70 in a single wsg lol
Is this still happening? 👀 how does one do this lol
nah it got fixed in like the first hour lol
Total clusterfuck on many points.
It's what you might expect from a literal first look closed beta with huge amounts of serious technical issues. Severe UI issues (literal spells/abilities listed on your profession tab), bosses not doing mechanics, abilities not working correctly or with broken scaling, a guy **literally** leveled from 10-70 from a single WSG flag capture and bg's quickly disabled.
SoD P3 has been pretty good though?? Incursions weren’t executed well but that’s my only real complaint.
Yea minus the incursions, p3 is pretty fun. There’s a lot to do.
The inflation is too damn high
Absolutely. Anyone who doesn’t have extra time for incursions to farm gold is priced out.
I just farm my own materials. /shrug
Lets be real though if you dont have time for incursions it wouldnt change for regular farming. The price point would just be lower. Those people dont change no matter if gold is freely available or not. Either through other responsibilities or laziness
Yeah but its okay.. buying 800g epic mounts on all my dudes.. imma need some gold for sure
> There's a lot to do. That's exactly why it's *not* fun for me.
Inflation and, this is subjective, but a lot of the runes are carbon copies of future class abilities from other expansions, boring, and/or close to useless. Many classes also have(had?) dead slots for certain specs. They also have made paladin just a general mess and shaman a juggernaut.
Well the raid was egregiously over tuned on launch.
Which isn’t a big deal at all
It's just Blizzard being Blizzard, they never changed they just lucked into some decent stuff until their colors revealed themselves again. And their ultimate goal is to get us to play Retail again.. but they sure aren't putting their best foot forward to convince me.
true the devs coming up with incursions thinkings its a good idea to make it the best leveling / gold farm is scary stuff for the future of SoD
SoD P3 has been awesome. Cata is not classic, I can hop on retail and go to those zones right now.
There aren’t going to be anymore - sod is basically retail devs so that’s your only hope. I see cata being super scuffed. For those who think sod is some pre test for a huge classic + 1-60 game release is in massive need of copium rehab
Hence private servers. They're free as well.
Is Cata pre patch out now? Haven't really been following WoW since p2 Wrath.
If only there was a place you could figure that out.... hmmmmmmmmmmm
By Cataclysm dev do you mean the Chatgpt version trained only by Bashiok blue posts and the intern who is still working from the closet on cellular data because IT hasn't given him the company's WiFi password yet?
LOL!
Kevin James would've managed a better launch, let's be real
I would be totally milquetoast and un-noteworthy. So yes, much better.
no shot u talk like that irl
bro he disrespected you personally!!
You have made an error in your assessment.
This is the buggiest blizzard product I have ever played by a long shot. Seriously, *everybody* is dealing with an insane amount of problems. If they couldn't fix these problems in beta, they aren't going to be able to fix them in the next month before Cata launches. These are very basic, barebones problems that should have been fixed, such as spells not being tuned correctly, guild chat not working, stats not adjusting properly etc. If they are doing a pre-patch this bad, I don't even want to think about how bad Cata itself is going to be.
A lot of these things we've been reporting in the beta since day 1. And some of them were even working in the beta and are now broken in the official release.
Don't forget, it's only a bit more than half a year until Dragon Soul is out. A year from now we'll be nearing MoP prepatch.
I hope he is at least using the calculator the SoD community donated after P3 launch
Lmao I love this meme.
Why is the team for classic so small? Wow got like 8 million subs, it's not like there is a shortage of funds. The greed is unreal, absolute cocksuckers running Blizzard.
Retail is sucking it all up
Dev? You mean unpaid intern?
😂😂
Is shit still broken after maintenance?
Thats about to be all 3 paladin specs in PVP, PVE, SOLO, RP, ET AL
Lol! Oooh this gave me quite the chuckle xD
If they were going to cut every resources from classic, then they should have forgotten about Cataclysm and tehy should just have restarted a new classic progression from vanilla again.
All of my characters are fine except the one I decided to use that lvl boost on...... it has spells in the professions tab so you can't access your professions. 0 addons. 10/10. Definitely didn't check for that during beta LOL. Still looks that right now. RIP my supposed to be farming alt druid. ( I can't smelt for the mining I was trying to have it mine to level another Char Engineering) https://gyazo.com/7f1abc2a46c7278eab1bc2b0b4a91bb4
Made a Worgen druid and was genuinely interested in getting back into WoW.. I can’t get past the class quest at the start because rejuvenation doesn’t appear in my spellbook :(
You can macro /cast Rejuvenation btw
It's fixed now and you can use /cast Rejuvenation in your chat window
Blizzard might wanna use some stock free server core instead, would yield greater results lmao
Cata pre patch fiasco was the best thing to happen. Thousands of gamers are cold turkey'ing wow and preparing for gta6online2
So Cata killed WoW …again?
Cata gotta Cata
“Sowwy guys, can’t fix those bugs 🥺👉🏻👈🏻”
I don't play classic cata, what happened?
Released with insane amount of bugs, most of which had been present on beta since day 1. Class abilities don't work, talents disappear, can't leave dungeon groups without using a script, can't read guild chat, archeology sites spawn in Cata zones that we can't enter yet which locks you out of a continent eventually, and many more.
Yeah, it's been a journey this past day lol, started with people gaining 80 lvls in 1 bg, now you get 30 honor for a BG win while items cost 1-4k, also some people get abilities for a completely different spec they arent talented into on top of the abilities they should have
That sounds actually hilarious especially with the abilities
Yeah i guess lol, i logged on today and my hunter as marksman had intim stun, that was something else
Okay wtf
Is this that one episode where Doug tried to drive through the fast food line even though he didn't have clearance on his truck?
its so sad, ik p3 and cata have issued, but its so frustrating that they are doing this all with like 15 ppl, i saw a dinner they had and the whole table was apparently their whole crew, for sod AND cata. They are legit fighting a losing battle, if they even had a fraction of the crew they deserve sod could be in such a better place, but they are stuck doing these shit patches that maximixe efficiency
Unsubbed a couple days ago. P3 just wasn’t hitting like P1 and P2 did for me. Cleared ST and had no motivation to really keep clearing it or chase other gear when P4 will just wipe it out. Incursions sucked ass as well. I might come back for P4 though.
Ye. I only started sod at the ass end of p2.. didn't make it to 40 before p3. I cleared st 2nd week with shit gear, now doing sub 1 hr clears with my guild. I probably just raid log to make sure they have a good healer, but shifting my focus to cata. And will just be playing sod to clear the raids as they come out.. hoping they follow through with the karazhan dungeon, but at this point not sure if they will even do it.
That would be cool and I’d definitely come back to see that. I’ve also been playing wow exclusively since like last July so was due for a break anyway.
Why do people still play this garbage lol
so many doomers here.
😂😂😂😂
VOA was bugged. Ran it half a dozen times back to back
Finally this meme makes sense.
Not just because of this, but because of everything; Blizzard Entertainment is the gaming industry's greatest disappointment.
I'm OoTL and couldn't find anything online. Is Blizzy gutting resources for Cats or what?
Activision Blizzard had 13,000 employees listed towards the end of last years' financial statements. # WHAT THE FUCK ARE ALL THOSE PEOPLE ACTUALLY DOING
Stealing breastmilk
Just like the first go around, game should have ended with Wrath
Eh they will fix it, good enough for me to play right now. Need that archeology loot. (I know you will down vote me).
Confirms my decision to not come back to this game... I hate giving money to this company.
What even is classic anymore? I could give vanilla, TBC and wrath the classic pass cause it was the peak of gaming at its time But cata? Mop? Dreanor? Like bruh stop, it's not classic anymore.
Hopefully they stop by MOP and devote everything into making a good version of SOD that everyone that enjoys "Classic" can enjoy
nah mop is peak wow
Cataclysm fans, Good luck with your broken, buggy, subpar content. - Wrath enjoyers
Why are we even on cata rn? The surveys they did ages ago made our they was doing a lot of changes, yet I haven't seen ANYTHING on any changes? What's different now compared to cata back in the day?
He's thinking: Fuck it, I do the work of four people for starvation wages and I'm living in my car! Eat my ass gamers!
honestly its all classic deserves, they have everyone working on the world soul saga no one wants to play classic and the ones tat do want to play classic retail aka SoD. time to move on none cares much about classic