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Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

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Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#221

Post by TheCapn »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #120
Jetrel wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself; I can't stand SC1 after all the quality-of-life features they added to 2. There's nothing dumber and more immersion-breaking than watching 15 dragoons get stuck in a small opening because the game's pathfinding is the very best the mid-90s has to offer. Or watching a reaver's scarab just ... get stuck, on the way to a target. They solved all of this crap (and a whole lot more) in SC2, and I can't…

Dragoon pathing is actually a bug where the dragoons think they're smaller than they are IIRC. They just never patched it because it ended up becoming a part of the accepted balance.

I think its because their model changed their hitbox as they moved. So while their pathing was calculated at one point of the animation they could no longer fit and would re-path or something to that extent.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#222

Post by AlexandrB »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #179
hhh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't align with the top tier player opinion about WoW. I feel that this is who they have driven away from the game. I personally spent a large amount of time in that top-20 guild environment and have only progressively seen them care less about the edge case of boundary-pushers and more about the day to day player. The latest systems encourage time sinking less than they did in Legion, where there were infinite di…

> now there is just a full-stop end to your week. Note that I don't think this stuff is casual friendly. As a casual, my problem with the way Blizzard does these systems is you want to do something every day/week/etc. Quite frankly, it turns the game into a chore. It tells me that not only how much time I spend, but also when I spend that time significantly impacts my rate of advancement. Disclaimer: I haven't played…

Yeah, this sounds very mobile-gamey. Systems like this tend to start feeling like a job you have to do when you're not in the mood to play them. My preferred casual style of binge-rest-binge would not not be well-served.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#224

Post by MuffinFlavored »

Grimm1 wrote: post #9

Blizzard has released only the WoW expansion and some minor hearthstone expansions in the last 3 years. They have not really pushed any major IP releases. Acti-Blizzard is as profitable as ever though largely because of the MTX they've baked into COD and other games, their mobile games, and things like their overseas market penetration working out for them. That combined with the fact they've lost a significant amoun…

> Blizzard has released only the WoW expansion

I think the last thing WoW needs is more expansions.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#225

Post by baby »

baumandm wrote: post #197
baby wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diablo 3 was pretty bad imo, clearly targeting consoles. Path of Exile is a much more faithful sequel to Diablo 2 and has a very active player base. It’s almost like if Valve gave it the same treatment they gave dota2.

I don't know if this is true or not, but it seems doubtful since it didn't come to consoles for over a year after release. According to Wikipedia: > It was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X in May 2012, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in September 2013

If you played the game it’s a given that they were planning to do that release a long time before it was announced. The gameplay was heavily dumbdowned in D3 exactly for that purpose.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#226

Post by apetresc »

Supermancho wrote: post #217
vkou wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun. Forcing two tanks, two healers, two DPS characters leads to eight minute DPS queues. But if you don't force this kind of team composition, the game becomes incredibly unfun for the team that has five DPS characters and no tank. You'd figure that this would drive DPS players to switch to the other roles, to reduce the time…

It's about power spiking. Blizzard committed to designing without power spikes and gamers prefers power spikes. Maintenance requires switchups to these dynamics, but when you have created a system that's devoid of these events, your game is going to be stale no matter what you do. New maps, new characters, etc.

What are power spikes?

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#227

Post by nottorp »

idrios wrote: post #218
nottorp wrote: post #113

From my point of view, Blizzard has been slowly going downhill for ages. Some whines in chronological order: WoW died for me when they introduced the random dungeon finder in Cataclysm and cut down the player-to-player interaction outside dungeons by 99%. Starcraft 2 ... might have been polished and all, but honestly I don't see much difference from Starcraft 1. Also, I don't like memorizing openings (either chess or…

So true about WoW. Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder made it so you didn't need to find people or be in a guild to do these things. They also took the sense of enormity out of the world because you don't have to physically go places anymore. The deeprun tram, boats, zepplins were all such elegant solutions to create a breathtakingly open and connected world, and flying mounts & dungeon finder killed the feeling so quick…

> They also took the sense of enormity out of the world because you don't have to physically go places anymore. The deeprun tram, boats, zepplins were all such elegant solutions to create a breathtakingly open and connected world, and flying mounts & dungeon finder killed the feeling so quickly.

I don't know... i think they originally wanted to sell WoW by the hour (I think it actually was sold like that in Asia somewhere) so time wasting travel was more linked to that. Don't forget how long it takes to craft multiple items too.

A lot of other WoW clones allowed some teleportation. Or non WoW clones. Being able to teleport basically anywhere (that you've walked to at least once) in Guild Wars never hindered socializing for me.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#228

Post by hogmainsunite »

iaml wrote: post #55
gmaster1440 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Overwatch is a disaster?

The whole original vision for OWL was teams would travel around the world and play at esport arenas filled with people who bought the ticket. And then covid hit.

I played the game since release in 2016 and when OWL was announced it all felt a bit... forced.

There were huge org buy-in fees (in double-digit millions) for even fielding a team, completely unheard of for an esports league, and it was coming out of the gate with almost zero community competitive scene to back it up. Esports scenes thrive on an amateur/semi-pro/pro feeder system and for the parent company to dump a hundred million dollars at the top end without waiting for organic growth at the bottom smacked to me of a cash-grab by Blizzard. Also, Blizzard established itself as a monopoly with exclusive rights to create tournaments, which really rankled with the semi-pro players.

Aside from the tedious balance issues that resulted in us watching an entire season of OWL where top-tier hitscan dps players were forced to play tank, the whole top-to-bottom emphasis on "support team [geographical location] [adjective]" did nothing to foster support for particular squads. Esports leagues are rootless - there are no Wolverhampton Wanderers or Gunners on the Internet - instead people follow specific players for their individual playstyles and skills.

The most hilarious example of the most tone-deaf enforcement of this was when Seagull (one of the OG beta testers that somehow exploded and got thousands of viewers on Twitch) got signed to Dallas [whatever adjective] and proceeded to spend the next 6 months benched (and offline on Twitch) because his skillset wasn't meta. He then spent a single season in competition, quit, returned to Twitch and made orders of magnitude more money from doing whatever he wanted than he would have got in the League.

The thing that sealed the League as a scam for me was the introduction of linkage between a Twitch account and your OW account - you could gain in-game tokens to buy cosmetics from time spent watching OWL on Twitch, but this was trivially defeated by setting the stream to 160p resolution, muting the tab and continuing to do whatever you wanted. At that point it was obvious it was all about gaming metrics and not making a game, and I got bored and left.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#229

Post by neatze »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #8

I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: They stopped development on Diablo 3 a long time ago. It doesn't have the staying power of more modern online games where new content is added continuously. They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends. Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has over…

> Starcraft 2 is basically dead.

Do you have source for this claim, because population in StarCraft is fairly stable, at least based on ranking statistics.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#230

Post by JohnWhigham »

void_mint wrote: post #40
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #8

I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: They stopped development on Diablo 3 a long time ago. It doesn't have the staying power of more modern online games where new content is added continuously. They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends. Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has over…

> I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: "The Blizzard Way" doesn't work anymore. Fortnite releases content monthly/quarterly. Massive updates with huge out-of-game tie-ins, changing worlds, in-game events, etc. Other games have changed to match/compete. CoD and Valorant both implement similar season-pass style systems. Blizzard, on the other hand, insists on delaying/cancelling games, releasing "o…

The Blizzard Way absolutely works. The problem is Activision is your run-of-the-mill quarterly-targets-chasing company. Vivendi was very hands-off with Blizzard and allowed them to thrive and become the legendary name in gaming they once were.
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