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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

#271

Post by blibble »

elliekelly wrote: post #206
Svperstar wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was super hyped for Overwatch, I loved my time with the beta. I thought Overwatch was going to be the new Counter-Strike, Quake, or Halo. One of those games that just defines its time period. Then it launched and I got bored after 1 month. Too few maps too few variety.

And whatever algorithm they use for match-making should just be completely scrapped so they can start over. It seems like most games are really lopsided - you're either stomping on someone or getting stomped on. Maybe it's different in the high-ranked competitive play but the hard-fought matches that go back and forth until the very end are infrequent, in my experience, and those are the best part of playing!

this is a nature of the game's design: ultimate advantage snowballing

short of reducing the power of the ultimates: I'm not sure they can do too much about it

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

#272

Post by maxkwallace »

lsiebert wrote: post #45

It's anecdotal, but I know at least five or six people who stopped playing blizzard games, especially HS, after they punished a player and staff for expressing support for Hong Kong in a post tournament interview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy

I did this, and I went through the support process to totally delete my account, including purchased content. Sometimes I wish I could still play SC2 with friends, but expressing support for freedom of speech in Hong Kong and the sinosphere is more important.

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

#273

Post by jayd16 »

jvzr wrote: post #145

Blizzard died the day it was bought by Activision. It has been descending into mediocrity ever since. Many executives left, and many studios/teams inside Blizzard have been shuffled around and between projects, unlike Blizzard's doctrine of old (tight teams focused on a project until it's great or must be stopped -- Blizzard's infamous "Soon(tm)"). World of Warcraft is still being milked till it dries up (and I'm say…

Blaming Activision is too convenient. Activision is pretty hands off of its studios creatively.

The truth is a lot of the good developers left, their new mmo Titan was a massive flop that was rolled into Overwatch, HotS wasn't very compelling, and Diablo 3 never had a compelling endgame to be a "forever game" with constant revenue, Hearthstone was a creative grass roots effort that has since been hit with heavy competition and WOW is an aging workhorse but its not the phenomenon it once was.

Activision is the cause of all that?

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

#274

Post by ev1 »

pizza wrote: post #259
ev1 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first year of overwatch, me and my friends played for hours. Every night. Every day. Then they started restricting your team choices. You could no longer have two of the same hero. You then had to be forced into meta-roles ONLY. You then had to queue specific roles and were not allowed to pick anything else at all. All lack of balance and content aside, what the hell?

But they did address that a bit by re-adding open queue, also flex queue helps a little bit if say one day you wouldn't mind playing tank and then another day you just wanna go strictly dps. But I guess it should be fairly straightforward to expect people playing first person shooters to want to play mostly damage characters, and there's probably no easy queue-based fix for that.

Yeah, but by the time they addressed it, it has already given everyone many, many repeated large reasons to move on from the game.

The worst part is/was (unsure if this has changed) that you are hard locked into specific hero categories even if you are queued as a full premade. Even when you are with a full team that is OK with swapping, you can't swap roles as needed. Incidentally, I played dps junkrat back when it was categorised as a defence hero. And the categories were decided and changed by Blizzard - Junkrat might have been the only defense hero I'd be willing to play, and now the only offense hero since they recategorised him - I would rather heal than play mccree, but there you have it

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

#275

Post by totony »

Jetrel wrote: post #180
david422 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WC3 was my favorite game ever, so much so that I bought multiple copies. I calculated that I probably played so much that my price per hour was a couple of cents. But I didn't buy reforged after how bad it was - and still is. It should have been easy money for them, and instead it was just a half finished money grab.

Ironically, having been a huge WC3 fan; I felt like reforged was great. I bought it, loved it, and am still routinely playing it (in fact, I've picked it up as a semi-regular routine, whereas I'd kinda mostly stopped playing the original). I love the new graphics, the bugs were pretty minor and quickly fixed, and the stuff the community complained about was either irrelevant (complaining about the game being heavier…

>I get that blizzard doesn't want to have its lunch stolen a second time by LoL/Dota

But it's not stolen -- they didn't invent the genre, someone did off of their platform.

>I love the new graphics, the bugs were pretty minor and quickly fixed, and the stuff the community complained about was either irrelevant [...] or was not a regression against the prior version of the game

I have played the game a lot since it came out, and that is not true. There were multiple network-related issues that might have been in the original game, but were fixed by custom hosting bots long ago (GHost++), which cannot be used anymore (so you're stuck with high-latency). Some were not though, you could wait ~45 seconds for someone to fix their network issues, whereas now they get kicked at the first lag from online games.

There were also gameplay-related changes which have somewhat been fixed, although custom game development has become a huge pain, with crashes and desyncs way more common then they used to be (even before the custom hosting bots).

Arguably they didn't break the normal games AFAIK (but they did break the ladder, especially 2v2, 3v3, etc), although there are no more tournaments, but the main fun in wc3 were the custom games and they:

1) Made user-hostile ToS changes (why? map makers are working for free to make your game better)

2) Broke the netcode making desyncs way more likely and removed custom bots making latency way higher (playing USA + EU is now a huge pain because of where their servers are hosted)

3) Broke an important part of the community (clans, channel bots, etc)

4) Made the client way laggier and heavier

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

#276

Post by rubidium »

jandrese wrote: post #33
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…

Blizzard kinda killed the RTS genre with Starcraft 1. It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2. There are still niches for specialized audiences, like historical battles with a more strategic bent, but for mass market RTS nothing has been able to beat a 23 year old game.

AoE2 is another 20+ year old game that has experienced a renaissance due to new updates.

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

#277

Post by fighterpilot »

TheCapn wrote: post #231
dragontamer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a "perfect" game, Dragoon / Goliath pathing is sure awful. Starcraft 2 units really do "what you want" most of the time: automatically balling up into groups or "dancing" together. From one perspective, elite Starcraft1 players who memorized "The Magic Box" and other engine-level pathfinding behaviors saw this as an abomination: other players can gain the same skills now without practice. On the other hand... let…

I've always held that their patch/balance style is what ultimately killed SC2's scene compared to SC1. Just look at how many balance patches were required from SC2 vs. what they applied in SC1. While neither game is perfect IMO, letting the game mature without micromanaging it was a very important aspect of SCBW's success. Instead of mucking with units on a monthly basis they let things simmer and ultimately let bala…

I'm not sure I agree, the balance for pro level has almost no bearing on lower leagues who suck. I think the reason people stopped playing is that it's really really hard (tiring) and it's not a team based game and can get quite lonely.

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

#278

Post by totony »

frozenlettuce wrote: post #129
Covzire wrote: post #14

I still can't believe they butchered WC3:reforged so badly. It could have been a massive boon for them were it not for the hideously greedy ToS along with all the technical issues and straight up downgrades from the original in terms of multiplayer. There have to be some epic stories of mismanagement or hubris, if only someone would tell them.

I used my first salary to buy WC3 on 2003, so I may have an "exaggerated" emotional connection with that game. Two months before the release it was clear that they could not polish the (many) rough edges that the remaster had. Removing features like ladder and tournaments was something so unprofessional and unreal that even today I can't digest it. Looking at the screens for the Diablo 2 remaster, it looks like that…

As much as I agree with you about issues with wc3 (and poor art style that didn't fit the old cartoonish-look), I have seen some people play the d2 remaster alpha on twitch and the changes look way more reasonable. We'll have to see

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

#279

Post by drbojingle »

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…

RTS genre is waning, but Age of Empires 2 is still holding on.

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

#280

Post by gentleman11 »

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…

> don’t you have phones?

Blizzard isn’t the same company it once was. It used to be known for deep gameplay and creative stories but now it’s focused entirely on the free to play skinners boxes of card games, a mmo, and loot boxes to monetize the other games. Almost the entire early-days staff has moved on to other companies. Blizzard doesn’t exist any more, just a big corporation with the same name

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