Bouldercleave wrote: »

Interesting - it sounds like WoW is finally starting to reach its "end cycle". To be honest, I'm surprised it has taken so long.

In full disclosure - I have played WoW for a total of about 3 hours. I could never get past the graphics. It was always too cartoonish for me.

I'm a bit shocked to hear that they have gone under 1 mil active players. That is a gigantic amount from their prime.

I forget at what point they quit showing sub numbers (it was ages ago) but they have been on the decline for years, it was more about slowing it down then trying to bring in new players.

they refuse to drop the sub model. if they had a similar model to ESO or GW2 they might see an increase. because really the people still playing wow are only ever going to play wow, and will never move to another game.

The game that shall not be named has had a good run I think...still all things ends .....



/philosophy

Bouldercleave wrote: »

they refuse to drop the sub model. if they had a similar model to ESO or GW2 they might see an increase. because really the people still playing wow are only ever going to play wow, and will never move to another game.

I agree with you on Blizz needing to drop the "only by full subscription" model if they want to be competitive in the bigger F2P/B2P market.

But the last sentence is beyond stupid. I play not only ESO and WOW (and pay a sub for both, both current) but also two other MMOS.

I know tons of WoW players who stopped playing WoW and play other MMOs. I know tons of WoW players playing WoW AND other MMOS - including this one.

bluebird wrote: »

Got any actual proof for that? Or a link to the article or 'inside source' or wherever that info comes from? Because it's a long-established fact that ESO like to bloat their statistics. '1mil active players' for ESO might mean that somebody opened the Launcher on Steam and didn't log in, it would still count as an active player. Or if somebody logged in for one day at the start of the event, realized that there is nothing new to do and never logged back they'd be counted as an 'active player'.

Because being an 'active player' doesn't mean anything. It can be free to play people who log in to PvP only to ragequit after 10 minutes of not getting anywhere because of lag. It might be people who log in in their house for 5 seconds, collect the daily reward, then log out. In WoW you actually have subscribers which translate into revenue and thus success directly. Subscriber stats are still not meaningful to find out how many players actually play the game, but that's doubly true for ESO. Besides, they literally launched a new patch last week so it's hard to imagine that they'd be at their lowest right after a major content update.

https://kiwifarms.net/attachments/blizzard-png.819183/

they go into details on all blizzard projects, scroll down to world of Warcraft.

Wing wrote: »

and I guess in house they are pretty upset about it.

*this is all inside sources and leaks with no official statements, obviously*

the went under 1mil right as ESO announced over 1 mil. I guess they also consider ESO to be their main competitor (they do mention FF14 but still consider ESO to be the direct competition)

supposedly they are going to level squish down to 60 and scale world content to this in a similar fashion to ESO. as they keep making their vast quantity of content obsolete every expansion / update. this is a huge downside compared to an MMO like ESO were all of its content is relevant. WoW has more content (as well it should) being the older game, however have actually negated their lifespans benefit of having all this content with a dated model of updates and expansions increasing levels and introducing higher level gear.

(note you see this same problem in games like Destiny 2, where they try to sell new content by making all previous content irrelevant and it ends up hurting their game as a whole)

so in reality ESO has more actionable and relevant content compared to WoW, they see this and plan on trying to fix it by adopting a similar system to ESO.

it took them 15 years but they finally discovered horizontal progression

Clearly you know little about modern WOW .. level-scaling has been around since Legion and was expanded throughout most of the content with BFA.

Also, level scaling DESTROYS the RPG aspect of the game for many, like me, it totally eliminates the sense of 'power progression' when the same mudcrab that killed you in three hits at level 1 does the same at 50/810 .. being able to go everywhere at level 1 removes a lot of insentive to level-up and be able to see the areas where you get one-shotted at level 1.

Your comment about 'horizontal progression' also shows your ignorance of that game, characters themselves haven't progressed AT ALL since they hit level 100 in WOD, all 'progression' in terms of skills/abilities/etc. since then has been from gear which get replaced next expansion, the raising of level from 100 to 120 simply bumped attribute numbers there's not a single new skill obtained.

You try to distinguish between WOW's 'expansions' and ESO's 'chapters' ... you fail to do so, they're the same unless that doesn't fit your agenda in which case you try to make a case they're not.

I'm not at all saying WOW is better then ESO, modern WOW in the form of BFA is as bad as the game has ever been, but ESO is not as different and you'd like to think.

Wing wrote: »

bluebird wrote: »

Got any actual proof for that? Or a link to the article or 'inside source' or wherever that info comes from? Because it's a long-established fact that ESO like to bloat their statistics. '1mil active players' for ESO might mean that somebody opened the Launcher on Steam and didn't log in, it would still count as an active player. Or if somebody logged in for one day at the start of the event, realized that there is nothing new to do and never logged back they'd be counted as an 'active player'.

Because being an 'active player' doesn't mean anything. It can be free to play people who log in to PvP only to ragequit after 10 minutes of not getting anywhere because of lag. It might be people who log in in their house for 5 seconds, collect the daily reward, then log out. In WoW you actually have subscribers which translate into revenue and thus success directly. Subscriber stats are still not meaningful to find out how many players actually play the game, but that's doubly true for ESO. Besides, they literally launched a new patch last week so it's hard to imagine that they'd be at their lowest right after a major content update.

https://kiwifarms.net/attachments/blizzard-png.819183/
they go into details on all blizzard projects, scroll down to world of Warcraft.

Thanks for the info. Though all I see is an Anonymous post allegedly from a disgruntled employee that was fired. And even if they are legit and not lying, clearly their information isn't up to date since they talk about possible changes that might come out in 8.2 (even though 8.2 launched a week ago and if somebody has recently worked on it they would know what it includes and what it doesn't, it was already released to the public for testing 3 months ago).

Edit: Forgot to add, but the 'leak' does indeed talk about active subcribers not users as I assumed earlier. WoW also has a f2p version (up to level 20) but they're clearly not including that because it's a useless metric that generates 0 revenue. ESO is f2p so their 'users' are meaningless, let's see ESO+ sub numbers and then we can compare that to the WoW numbers, until then this whole discussion is disingenous. (And before someone mentions that f2p players may be generating money through the crown store, WoW has a store that sells mounts and pets and ingame character services too, on top of the subscription, so that point is moot.)

KerinKor wrote: »

Wing wrote: »

and I guess in house they are pretty upset about it.

*this is all inside sources and leaks with no official statements, obviously*

the went under 1mil right as ESO announced over 1 mil. I guess they also consider ESO to be their main competitor (they do mention FF14 but still consider ESO to be the direct competition)

supposedly they are going to level squish down to 60 and scale world content to this in a similar fashion to ESO. as they keep making their vast quantity of content obsolete every expansion / update. this is a huge downside compared to an MMO like ESO were all of its content is relevant. WoW has more content (as well it should) being the older game, however have actually negated their lifespans benefit of having all this content with a dated model of updates and expansions increasing levels and introducing higher level gear.

(note you see this same problem in games like Destiny 2, where they try to sell new content by making all previous content irrelevant and it ends up hurting their game as a whole)

so in reality ESO has more actionable and relevant content compared to WoW, they see this and plan on trying to fix it by adopting a similar system to ESO.

it took them 15 years but they finally discovered horizontal progression

Clearly you know little about modern WOW .. level-scaling has been around since Legion and was expanded throughout most of the content with BFA.

Also, level scaling DESTROYS the RPG aspect of the game for many, like me, it totally eliminates the sense of 'power progression' when the same mudcrab that killed you in three hits at level 1 does the same at 50/810 .. being able to go everywhere at level 1 removes a lot of insentive to level-up and be able to see the areas where you get one-shotted at level 1.

Your comment about 'horizontal progression' also shows your ignorance of that game, character themselves haven't progress AT ALL since they hit level 100 in WOD, all 'progression' since then has been from gear .. the raising of level from 100 to 120 simply bumped attribute numbers there's not a single new skill obtained.

You try to distinguish between WOW's 'expansions' and ESO's 'chapters' ... you fail to do so, they're the same unless that doesn't fit your agenda in which case you try to make a case they're not.

I'm not at all saying WOW is better then ESO, modern WOW in the form of BFA is as bad as the game has ever been, but ESO is not as different and you'd like to think.

and there not as close as you would like us to think.

Wing wrote: »

and there not as close as you would like us to think.

Core WOW: a phat lewt grind to run dunegons to get more phat lewt to run raids once the story is completed.
Core ESO: a phat lewt grind to run dunegons to get more phat lewt to run raids once the story is completed.

Same for every expansion/chapter ... very similar if you take your blinkers off I suggest.

Oh yes, to the OP's comment about 'horizontal progression' .. the CP system is NOT such a system, your character gets ZERO new skills, abilities or powers from CPs, they're entirely passive boosts and some non-combat buffs like gathering speed etc.

My character that hit 50 before Unlimited, naked, is no more powerful and knows no more skills now, thus he hasn't 'progressed' in 4 1/2 years!

To that extend ESO post-50 is no more progression than WOW post-120.

KerinKor wrote: »

Wing wrote: »

and there not as close as you would like us to think.

Core WOW: a phat lewt grind to run dunegons to get more phat lewt to run raids once the story is completed.
Core ESO: a phat lewt grind to run dunegons to get more phat lewt to run raids once the story is completed.

Same for every expansion/chapter ... very similar if you take your blinkers off I suggest.

Oh yes, to the OP's comment about 'horizontal progression' .. the CP system is NOT such a system, your character gets ZERO new skills, abilities or powers from CPs, they're entirely passive boosts and some non-combat buffs like gathering speed etc.

My character that hit 50 before Unlimited, naked, is no more powerful and knows no more skills now, thus he hasn't 'progressed' in 4 1/2 years!

To that extend ESO post-50 is no more progression than WOW post-120.

Yeah, WoW and ESO are pretty similar in their progression tbh. ESO does absolutely have vertical (NOT horizontal) progression in CP and gear. A cp810 player with BiS trial gear is more powerful than a cp810 player with crafted gear and certainly more powerful than a cp160 player in literally any gear. That's a vertical power progression. If ESO didn't add more powerful item sets to their new dungeons and trials, there would be no reason to get those items - just as there is less reason to grind cp now that they stopped increasing the cap every patch like they used to.

Apart from getting all your skills and talents unlocked at max level (same in ESO and WoW), ESO has raw cp stats (which WoW gives players through ilvls) and WoW even has extra max level skills on top of those (active skills and passive synergies with your class spells in Azerite traits and essences). So ESO progression isn't any less vertical, but WoW's progression could arguably be considered more relevant.

Also, story zone scaling is absolutely no progression, it's RP fluff. And story zones in ESO aren't any more relevant than old zones in WoW. I can go out in the world with my 700+ cp character and annihilate everything, but I can do the quests for the story. That's the same in WoW where I can smash my way through old story zones for the story or for achievements or rep or mounts or whatever.

Sure ESO has variety, with its leveling zones scaling up to level 50 (they do NOT scale with you even up to cp160, let alone cp810 and the power difference between a fresh 50 and a cp810 is so significant you might as well call them separate levels entirely like WoW does), but WoW also introduced leveling zone scaling, only in brackets (1-60 zones scale to 60, 70-80 zones scale to 80, 85-90 zones scale to 90, etc.).

And when you actually look at the zones, it certainly doesn't make ESO look all that great. WoW has 45 leveling zones in its 1-60 bracket alone while ESO has 32 in total (and before someone tells me that Chapter zones are huge and should count twice, 32 includes minimaps like Bal Foyen and Bleakrock). Not to say that quantity is better than quality, but with several expansions worth of zones that all scale within their level bracket, WoW has 97 questing zones so players have a lot more new paths to choose from while in ESO you'll find yourself running through the same zones after you make your 4th alt or so.

That is not to say that WoW doesn't have its flaws, but misinformation and hearsay don't really make ESO look better. I'd rather praise ESO for its actual achievements (immersive fully voiced storylines with choices) rather than try to criticize WoW on false premises (both games have heavily vertical not horizontal progression). There are heaps of content to do both while leveling and at endgame, and it's quite telling that ESO never talks about their subscriber number, while all these 'WoW is dying posts never look at their f2p playerbase. So I have to agree that this thread is rather pointless and ESO isn't all that different, nor is it doing better than WoW.

I was a long time WoW player and active reader of MMO champion(old habits die hard). Not once has one of these "leaks" turned out to be true, and every years there's half a dozen of them.

Only an idiot would believe ESO has a larger active playerbase than WoW. Just look at twitch and youtube. There's wow videos with 100k within a day of release, there's maybe one ESO youtuber getting 10k views within a day. On twitch ESO streamers struggle to get 100 viewers, while on primetime there's 20+ wow streamers with 1k+ viewers.

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Only an idiot would believe ESO has a larger active playerbase than WoW. Just look at twitch and youtube.

^ This.

Reality hits hard.


All The Best