According to MMORPG1 after a recent poll of online gamers, WoW's stock value was lowered due to declining subscriptions, placing much of the blame on the imminent release (Dec. 20th 2011) of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
900,000-1.6million player drop due to the the imminent launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic alone
Being a longtime player of WoW this sort of makes me sad to see. It's still an excellent game in my opinion. What do you all think of this?
1Source: MMORPG: Activision-Blizzard Stock Downgraded on Declining WoW Subs
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Being a longtime player of WoW this sort of makes me sad to see. It's still an excellent game in my opinion. What do you all think of this?
I have mixed emotions on it; I still love WoW and think it's a top notch quality game, and despite it's age, still think it looks great, and has an unreal amount of content, world size, and depth, that at the moment being a beta tester for SWTOR, haven't seen as much of yet (depth). I personally love the "chunky, cartoony" look that's characteristic of WoW and other Warcraft games. But at the same time, it's suffering from the same problem that I saw Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) suffer; in order to make more $$ you need to get more players, and in order to get more players you can't cater to the "hardcore gamer" alone, the ones who are willing to devote crazy amounts of time into learning the intricacies of really in-depth games, which MMO's by nature are meant to be, so they "dumb" them down for casual gamers, make them less challenging, so they can see more of the game with less frustration, (and skill required). This makes the game boring to the original, devoted, players, so they end up hating it and leaving.
You can see it in their game forums daily, where the "casual" gamers whine about this or that being too hard, and the developers end up listening to them. What they don't realize is that this actually kills the game in the long run, the way it notoriously did to SWG, and appears to be happening to WoW now, and I'm one of those "hardcore" gamers that knows from first-hand experience. I joined SWG the very same day it originally launched, playing it for years, through many game changes. I also played WoW from a very early state. It used to take weeks or months just to get to say, level 30, now you can do that in probably less than a week, maybe just a few days. Not to mention when you've spent countless hours fighting so hard through those levels only to see newbies blaze so easily through them, makes the early adopters bitter.
On the other hand though, I'm really stoked about the new SWTOR, and seeing "a 900,000-1.6 million player drop due to the the imminent launch of SWTOR" means to me that there's going to, right off the bat, have 900,000-1.6 million players playing!
Soooo, let's get this started alreadeh!