Category: Warcraft

The Unknown Warcraft Subscriber

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a flurry of commentary recently on the recent earnings call by Activision Blizzard, where they provide some highlights on their third quarter performance. If you’re interested in reading through the entire transcript of the call you can find it at Seeking Alpha.

There are a couple of quick facts to pull out: Warcraft has dropped by nearly 2 million subscriptions to 10.3 million worldwide. Most of the loss is thought to be in China, an area which represents over 50% of the total subscriber base. The estimated rough split is approximately 5 million subscribers in the Far East, 3 million in US/Aus and 2 million in Europe/Russia.

There’s also the news on how much money Blizzard has made in the last quarter. The developer made nearly $300 million in revenue and $140 million in income – that’s a healthy profit margin of around 40% once tax gets factored in. Whichever way you slice the cake, Blizzard’s in a strong position considering that it’s not had a major release this year.

There’s only one snag with the information that’s been given to us. Although it’s easy to judge the overall performance of the company, it becomes difficult to judge the performance of Warcraft as an MMO. People will point to subscriber numbers going down and predict that this means doom for the game. That’s just simply not possible to do with the information we have available.

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The Gates of Compelling Rewards

Posted on by Gazimoff

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re somehow missing something when you read a particular piece of news? That’s how I felt when I was reading over Ghostcrawler’s latest blogppost where he talks about item stat inflation and the problem it presents. While it’s a great article that hints at some difficult choices ahead, I’m not sure we’re seeing the whole picture.

The big clue for me was in the phrase “we want rewards to be compelling”. Think about this for a moment as I’ll be coming back to it later.

The problems around itemisation extend far beyond just deciding what numbers to put in the tooltip. There’s also ramifications across the game, from how we experience levelling through to the performance of the game client on our machine. Get it wrong and there could be a whole world of problems. It’s why the Squish versus No Squish argument is more complex than just what kind of number we want to see.

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Looking Through The Mists

Posted on by Gazimoff

This weekend has been a firehose of information. Although I’ve never been to a BlizzCon in-person (something I hope to rectify), I’ve been glued to the internet and live streams for information. There’s nothing quite like getting the latest on a games franchise straight from the source.

Like a good meal, it takes a while for me to digest and fully appreciate all the news that emerges. Now that I’m able to sit back and reflect on the dishes presented to us, I feel I’m ready to share my opinions on each delicate morsel that appeared.

There’s a lot to go through, both good and bad. From the changing pace of Azeroth’s story to the abolition of talent trees, from missed opportunities to interesting ideas, I’ll be giving my opinions on all the major topics. Grab yourself a drink, as this may take a while.

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How Warcraft Will Never End

Posted on by Gazimoff

As Blizzcon rapidly approaches there’s a ton of speculation about what will be announced. Hopes are high for a new World of Warcraft expansion, although details are sketchy about what it may contain. The trademark ‘Mists of Pandaria’ has been suggested as a name following trademark registration, but this was later dismissed as being ‘wildly overhyped’ by the developer.

Regardless of what the next expansion is called, the important thing is where it takes the story and what possibilities open up. Is it possible that the upcoming expansion will close the book on the Warcraft universe, or are we looking at the prelude to something even bigger?

I’ll be the first to confess that I’m no lore expert, but regardless of the story intricacies at play I think that there’s a rough way in which the current Warcraft story arc will conclude, including how it’ll be the jumping-off point for something far bigger.

As always with discussions of this type, this is pure tinfoil-hat speculation. I’m not saying that this is an accurate idea of what will happen, just that it’s an example of what could happen. Don’t go placing any bets off the back of this.

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The Kitten Standard Economy?

Posted on by Gazimoff

A while back I wrote about the possibility that Titan, Blizzard’s next MMO, would feature a real money auction house. This followed on from Diablo 3, which introduced the concept in order to provide a safer alternative to the grey market that emerged around item trading in Diablo 2.

The main argument at the time was that Blizzard would never put in a real money auction house because it would affect the core dynamic of how players gain power. There was a claim that because Diablo 3 is a dungeon loot fest with no competitive play that there’s no harm to other players in buying high quality items for real cash.

The problem occurs when you try and apply the same logic to Warcraft. Currently the most powerful items and equipment are earned through either raiding (for valour points) or PVP (for conquest points). There is no way to shortcut buying them – no amount of gold will help you, while only breaching the Terms of Use and paying someone to play your character for you will get your character geared up quicker. Not something I’d encourage.

Sure there’s a few good quality BoE items from the top tier raids that can be sold on the auction house, but they’re few and far between. As a result, would it really harm the Warcraft mechanic of playtime=power if a real money auction house existed?

My hunch is that it wouldn’t.

Of course there’s the argument that it would ruin the feel of the game, or that Diablo needs this in order to stop a grey market for items springing up. But that still doesn’t make any sense. Warcraft has its own problems, from the gold farming to account hacking. The illicit trade in gold is huge.

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Personal Identity and WoW

Posted on by Gazimoff

Today’s article is a guest post from Bravetank.

Identity in WoW is an intriguing concept. I’ve previously written in my blog about how the “me” in game is distressingly similar to the “me” outside of the game – whether I’m playing Human, Blood Elf, Gnome or Tauren. My real self is always the underlying constant – annoyingly so for a game that should be a form of escape.

And yet some aspects of identity in WoW are more fluid. In the social sciences the term “identity” is often used to describe one’s understanding of one’s individual self and/or one’s role within a wider group setting.

Individual self identity can encompass such things as self knowledge and self esteem. What does this mean in relation to our sense of self in WoW? Self knowledge is a tricky one. For me I have very little “knowledge” of any of the characters I play beyond what buttons to press to get awesome dps (or at the very least to put me somewhere in the middle of the Recount list), to pull the mobs, to heal the tank. I don’t know any of my characters in WoW in the sense of having defined/explored their personality. I’ve never roleplayed so that part of their identity is undeveloped. In terms of their history- I know why I (the Creator!) made them, but I know very little about the history of their race, class and even faction. I casually switch from Alliance toon to Horde without blinking an eye. The other day I noticed my toon looked particularly thin (specifically her legs) and I wondered if my monitor was on the blink. Then I remembered I was playing blood elf not human! The race of the character was clearly not uppermost in my mind. That later led to further problems when I aimlessly wandered into Stormwind and tried to buy some cheese but that’s another story.

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Review: Razer Naga Molten

Posted on by Gazimoff

Last week I took the plunge and decided to order a new mouse. My trusty Logitech mx518 just wasn’t up to the challenge and I’d been eyeing up a rival for months – the Razer Naga. I’d been on the fence about purchasing one, mainly because I wasn’t a fan of the blue colour scheme. All that changed when the Razer Naga Molten Special Edition was announced.

Let’s be honest, I’m not the first person to review this mouse. The first one I noticed was back in 2009, brimming with potential about how the mouse could be used. Even the Razer Naga Molten was announced a year ago. So why the big deal about some two year old tech?

The answer is that I wanted to tackle two questions: is the Naga still relevant to the current crop of MMOs and the current way we play our games, and will it adapt to the way we’re likely to be playing MMOs in the future?

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Reminiscing Isn’t What It Used To Be

Posted on by Gazimoff

Today’s article is a guest post from Bordy.

Patch 4.3 in WoW will introduce the long-heralded art of Transmogrification; the ability (at a cost)to convert the look (but not the stats) of your current kit to match that of other kit that you own.

Why though is this welcomed by so many?

Is it because of some hankering for the ‘good old days’ ™? Do we long for the days of Vanilla WoW, 40-man Molten Core raiding, Onyxia victory parades into Stormwind, Necropolii hanging in the air above our capitals and a truly barren Barrens?

If so, do we gloss over the lack of well-thought out quest hubs, running the length of zones repeatedly to do and hand in quests, no achievements, no battlegrounds,no arenas and no flying mounts?

Is it maybe due to a reaction to the look of kit sets nowadays? Vanilla dungeon/raidsets were distinctive (whether you liked it or not). This was followed by the Burning Crusade when we were obliged to change that kit to the most garish kitstyle/colour combinations that were truly out of this world. The outcry maybe led us to kit and sets that are arguably (in some cases) more dull, but more homogenised and easier on the eye when combined. Do we long for the old days of distinctive kit in a bold, but tasteful fashion?

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Engineer Gazimoff’s Smile Week

Posted on by Gazimoff

Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Game

I’m going to start off with a screenshot. I can’t remember when exactly it was taken, but it was early on in my Warcraft gaming career when the raidgroup I was in was clearing through Blackwing Lair. That puts it at late 2005 or early 2006 – I don’t quite remember but it’s probably something like 5 years ago.

Back then the game was a completely different landscape. Raiding was new, MMOs were new, voice chat was new. Spell rotations were built on what seemed to work rather than World of Logs parses. If I had to give it a smell, it smelled like dirt after a heavy rain. I remember the days when I used to log in and just stand in awe.

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The Flaming Kitty Copter

Posted on by Gazimoff

Crafting is one of those things I love about MMOs. Being able to gather stuff in the game world and make items from them always makes me smile. It doesn’t even matter if they’re useful or not as long as they do something – anything.

The only thing that gnaws at me is that crafting always seems to be a little limited. From Warcraft to Minecraft there are specific schematics that stipulate the stuff that’s required to make the item. You never get a chance to go off schema.

At least not normally…

I don’t know how I made the connection, but it all started back on an episode of GroupQuest. We were talking about Fandral Staghelm transforming into a flaming cat as one of his phases, and how he also dropped loot that would allow any druid to become a flaming cat too. Of course I had to take it a step too far.

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