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5.5 Million WoW Players, Lunar Festival
Gamasutra reports that World of Warcraft has hit another milestone in subscribers, with One Million European players and 5.5 Million players worldwide. From the article: "The figure of 1 million customers is more than four times the previously estimated size of the entire European MMORPG market. According to data from Media Control and GFK panels, plus internal studies and account data from Blizzard itself, the company is also claiming that World of WarCraft was the best selling full price PC game in Europe last year." All those players will have a new world event to look forward to at the end of the month, as RPG Vault gives a preview on the Lunar Festival due to be released on January 27th.
I'd be interested in seeing statistics on the number of people that have unsubscribed from WoW as well. I doubt Blizzard would be willing to share that information, but it would certainly satisfy my statistical curiosities.
Omen sounds like the Chinese New Year Monster which comes out every year on new year's eve to terrorize villages, who would have to set off firecrackers to scare the monster away.
Chinese New Year is on 29 Jan this year by the way.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
When the peasants were getting too smart, the illuminati invented the television. They saw the threat of free information that the internet created and invented WoW to distract the masses. I'm not making any of thi
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
It's kinda funny that Vivendi-Universal is doing so poorly with that kind of userbase on one of the products they publish...perhaps they aren't getting a very big cut of the service profits or maybe none at all? If so...good for you Blizzard ;D
5.5 million users * between 12.99-14.99 per month * 12 months = A shit-ton of money! And that's not even counting the box cost... sure there are development and maintenance costs...but I'm sure they don't even compare... WOW indeed.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
WoW did a lot to make MMO's accessable to the masses, but Im starting to wonder, do we really want L337 Sp34k asshats and just about everyone getting the best armor possible with little to no effort? A great example of this is SWG. Even SE is making its next expansion much more accessable to the masses after making what I thought was the best expansion to a MMO, one where you actually had to put a little effort into playing it to get the most out of it.
Maybe Im just too oldschool I guess, I miss the days of when you died it really ment you where dead, your body was looted and you started from scratch.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
EQ2 had only the punishement of having to go get your spirit shard while suffering reduced stats. The XP debt was no problem, fighting your way back to your spirit usually took care of it. There is no decay or other penalty, now even the shard has been removed. Neither do team members share in your xp debt anymore.
WoW has been a real wakeup call to the MMORPG industry. Do you know that pre-wow people talked about the market having been saturated and that any new game could only hope to lure existing players away from other games? Kinda proved that wrong. WoW showed that instead a good game can create its own market.
Of course smedley seems to think this means that the way to be successfull is to make every game into a WoW clone. I predict that the same will happen as with PC games in general. A over abundance of simple FPS games with more specilist titles surviving in the margins. There are still hardcore flightsims to be found, just not on the shelves, you gotta search the net for them.
Same with hardcore MMORPG's, they will continue to be produced but they will be a niche market. The mass market will go for the WoW angle. It is what sells. You can hardly blame game publishers from wanting to make a profit.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How can you challenge yourselve if there is no risk?
Of course the real problem with MMORPG games is that it is often no fun to be a low level character as you don't want to repeat the tutorial level. If I have to go the Trial Isle of EQ2 once more I am going to scream!
But imagine a game that has lots and lots of content at low level. Where if you have to start over you do not have to redo the same quest you already did a 100 times but can start in a new town with new quests and new skills.
Then dead would matter less. Yes it would be difficult to do in a game especially since most players can't get their head around the idea that it is not the levelling up that matters but having fun.
If you can have as much fun in a game at level 1 as at level 1000th then what does it matter if at level 800 you buy the farm. As long as the fight was good.
Without risk there is no challenge.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Until a guarantee can be made that technical issues beyond the player's control are fully addressed this type of scenario isn't going to fly.
Now how it could be done and impart some of the same "thrill" and "consequence" is to have rules where characters don't start off as lower level but midway through the game progression. Limit the number of characters that the account can use during a set period, perhaps 30 days.
This would reduce the investment but not to the point of making it meaningless. The reason why "hardcore" servers don't exist in MMORPGs of this scale is that players put a considerable amount of time into their characters and will not give that up. Not in a world where internet problems can crop up anywhere at anytime.
I also find the calls for "hardcore" servers to be pretentious simply because most of those making the calls are implying they are better players when its usually just a case of jealously that drives it.
There is NOTHING preventing players who want to play this way from imposing this rule upon themselves. Yet this is the last action these same people will ever take. Lead by example or shut up
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
These games aren't being dumbed down. They are becoming more accessible to a greater number of people. WOW succeeds because more people can do well in the game. Regardless of what game you play you will always find "asshats" and the like. UO not easy? Ah, come on now. The only time it wasn't easy was when it was first released and even then the biggest impediment to playing the game was the stability of the servers. There were asshats galore the first year and still are.
There is nothing wrong with games where when you die you get looted. The problem is that those games attract the very same or worse "asshats" you claim to dislike. Throw in perma-death and you will find a whole new world of asshats - roving gangs of them who will seek no other purpose other than to destroy the play of others. They won't do it for any in-game reason, they will do it because they can. I know, the argument is that the risk will keep them in check but that is never the case. They will find every little exploit that prevents their loss leaving the victim to fight with the game company to prove they didn't deserve the loss they suffered.
That is too hostile of a game world to expect players to stick around in. There have been many "PvP" centric games and if they truly did offer better game play then why haven't they succeeded? WOW succeeds because not only do they offer a world full of adventure they offer a controlled PvP that doesn't become unfairly hostile to the people participating.
As I replied to another, there is nothing preventing YOU from imposing the same restrictions you espouse for others on yourself. If you want perma death then do it! Otherwise your nothing more than a X-wing politician pontificating about the evils of the other side while blithely brushing over your same transgressions.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
MMORPGCHART.COM Hasn't updated since last year sometime (when WOW had half the current numbers, but you can already see where it was going from the 120,000+ page. Lineage (which had been the most at one time) capped out at around 3.25 million players.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Blizzard always refers to "X Million Players". In reality, they count players as box sales and users in China/Korea/etc who used game pubs and log in once (this is a LOT). The number people are truly interested in are "Subscribers", which would be people actively playing the game. Of course that number is no where near as impressive as the number of people who have ever tried it so they put their PR spin on it and dub it "X Number of Players". Really irks me.
Maybe I'm just to oldschool...
/s (say) or /y (yell). All comments put a word bubble over your head.
Not to totally flame you, but maybe you're just elitist?
For a hardcore, 6-hour-a-day player, yeah, maybe WoW is too "easymode".
But you don't think they got to 5.5 million players because of the hardcore population, do you?
I'd guess that something like 80%+ of the players are CASUAL, an-hour-or-two after work players, for whom the game is evidently fun and challenging (but not too challenging).
The problem with games designed for the l33t is that only the l33t will play them, and it IS a business after all. They will continue to appeal to their core $$ source - ie not you.
FWIW personally, I'd *love* to see a ironman server:
1) resurrection is either impossible or nasty like an hour delay for the first death that day, 2hrs for the second, 4 for the 3rd, etc..
2) no ID tags, for anyone, ever (ok maybe for party members).
3) everyone's PVP is on, all the time
4) kill an enemy player, you get xp and drops (whether it's from them or world drops based on their level doesn't matter to me), so there's a more-than-simply-moral value for 60's to 'watch over' the newb areas and smoke gankers.
5) you have a home inn. Your mail goes there, not to 'wherever you are'. You change your inn, it takes a day for mail to get to you.
6) no horde+alliance characters on the same account, on that server (like current PVP server rules)
7) physical size = + modifier for hp, - modifier for stealth. Using humans as a baseline, HP modifiers might be (stealth modifiers inverted):
Tauren 130%
Orc 120%
Troll 110%
Undead: not sure if they are dessicated (80%) or zombietough (120%)
Night Elves: same as humans or maybe 95%?
Dwarves: 120% (innately tough)
Gnomes: 66%
8) because of the world-lethality, I'd make everyone permanently on 2x xp status
9) rep gains also 2x
10) no chat channels. Your discussions are either
Gnomes, for example, would be really frikking hard to spot, easy to hide, so they would probably focus on magic-using classes. The horde, being physically larger generally than the Alliance races, should have perhaps fewer spellcasting options or something to offset the otherwise lopsided advantage in hp...maybe the stealth thing does that already, dunno.
My god, I can't even imagine what those first few instance runs would be like if the people who died are GONE...
-Styopa
i wonder how long its going to take for the EU or the UN to start asking for a WOW tax considering that wow now has more subscribers then finland has people. i can see the socialists in norway now, if you can afford to pay a monthly fee to play a game why not take a third of that to make the real world better.
Considering in the higher end instances you can expect a number of player deaths during each run, I think perma-death would make them virtually impossible.
It is possible to have no deaths, but having good gear helps a lot. Those first runs with mostly green gear?
I would sure hate to be a healer on those raids.
I think if they went with a hardcore server they would have to adjust the raids and probably some of the quests.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Or only in Asia?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).