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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

#371

Post by bick_nyers »

kstrauser wrote: post #337
loosetypes wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m excited to see life in the Diablo franchise after (personal opinion) the abomination that was Diablo 3. But I’ve really lost trust in the company and have a hard time imagining Diablo 4 being much better than Diablo 3. Diablo 2 Resurrected looks intriguing and seems to be going about things in the right way, involving the community, etc. but I believe it’s a contract job by a third party? I have a hard time imagi…

Am I the only person who really liked Diablo 3? I introduced my wife to it as her first game in the genre, and we’ve spent a lot of hours making team runs through hard dungeons. For sheer “let’s kill 300 things at once” endorphin hits, it’s great.

D3 is really, really fun. It started out at launch ok at best. Pretty grindy, and slow. One or two playthroughs was enough for most people. Nowadays though the endgame is definitely on my top 10 list. Once you hit level 70 and get an armor set finished with some Kanai's Cube and start leveling up your legendary gems... Oh man

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

#372

Post by freeflight »

anonymousab wrote: post #322
freeflight wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which was and still is a completely artificial controversy pushed by certain interest groups. Blizzard is a private company, it's their tournament, their platform. If they don't want that to be instrumentalized as a political platform then they have every right to disallow that. For another, very recent, example of this: The International Olympic Committee just issued a strict warning against wearing BLM apparels, or…

> Yet the popular mainstream response to that is That's a broad claim to make. I have seen plenty of prevailing opinions and discussion the other way; commonly referencing Tommie Smith, prior country boycotts and similar events. In any case, I think it's reasonable for Americans to think that US companies should not sacrifice American ideals on the alter of foreign profits by cowtowing to (perceived) regressive deman…

> That's a broad claim to make. I have seen plenty of prevailing opinions and discussion the other way; commonly referencing Tommie Smith, prior country boycotts and similar events.

It's not really broad, even here on HN I'm getting downvoted for pointing this out, even tho out of all places we should know better. If you want to see the overwhelmingly non-controversial responses to this you can check out the Reddit discussions about it [0], those are mostly defined by understanding, and not outrage.

> In any case, I think it's reasonable for Americans to think that US companies should not sacrifice American ideals on the alter of foreign profits by cowtowing to (perceived) regressive demands of foreign countries.

And there it is again: The narrative that there were demands from the Chinese government to do it, instead of Blizzard just proactively putting the lid on it because it's bad for business.

If we would apply similar assumption to this situation, then that would mean the IOC was apparently pressured by the US government to make that statement, yet that's not something anybody even dares to speak out.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/n5i7iu/black_liv...

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

#373

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

kcb wrote: post #365
slaymaker1907 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree and a lot of the popular WoW content creators (Bellular, T&E, etc.) seem to agree. They don't always mention casuals, but lack of progression is a major issue, particularly in Shadowlands. As a person spending too much time playing, you are basically forced to do non-LFR raiding, rated PvP, or mythic+ dungeons to actually progress your gear at all. Not to mention they seem to hate flying yet keep cre…

> you are basically forced to do non-LFR raiding, rated PvP, or mythic+ dungeons to actually progress your gear at all. Those things are the game though and pretty much always have been. Raids, dungeons, or PvP. If you don't want to do any of them why would you have ever picked up WoW.

Because LFR Raiding and non-mythic dungeons exist? It's worked in the past, why is the only way to move forward to remove the casual nature of things? I play FFXIV and I like playing with random dungeons, raids, and trials, and it's to advance without having to have a dedicated group or a super intense focus.

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

#374

Post by bick_nyers »

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…

A lot of people hated Cataclysm, I thought it had the ultimate rule of cool of any expansions. Heroic Ragnaros back then is probably my favorite boss fight of any game of all time.

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

#375

Post by calrueb »

darth_avocado wrote: post #356
blibble wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you have a warped view of how the MMR/SR systems function essentially all that matters is your win-rate, if you can win more than 50% of your games over a reasonable stretch of time your MMR will increase and your SR will follow it performance based SR is only a very small bonus (up-to diamond) initial placement is essentially a guess: over 25 or so games your MMR will converge to where you're supposed to be (4200 su…

I don’t think I have a warped view of SR. Yes the idea that you win more than 50%, you’ll eventually get there is flawed. Especially in lower ranks where there’s an overcrowding of salty folks who leave, throw, smurf, pick heroes not based on need and just straight up don’t play the objective. I agree that the logic works at higher ranks, but it simply doesn’t at lower ranks. Performance based SR is important for low…

This is anecdotal, but when I host my buddy at my place (he is high diamond on all roles) sometimes he'll hop on my account (low silver on all roles) and steamroll. I'd say 3-5 wins per loss, and he tends to stay off his mains. Yes bad games happen, but he consistently will leave my account at a higher SR than when he arrived (please don't ban me Blizzard). I am pretty confident a diamond level player could boost a bronze account in any role without much trouble.

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

#376

Post by Fordec »

catmanjan wrote: post #193
AlexandrB wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spin out tens or hundreds of smaller teams with their own independent creative direction to try out new ideas. My impression is that big game studios would rather put all their eggs in one basket where they're (fairly) certain they can make a decent return rather than spreading it around a bunch of smaller projects and hoping one of them turns out to be Minecraft. This is the same dynamic driving large movie studio…

Yep another thing is that gaming is a zero sum game - blizzard would be competing with itself for player base

Is it worse to be zero sum with your own business or zero sum entirely to a competing form of attention, gaming or otherwise?

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

#377

Post by TOSSAWAY_1 »

freeflight wrote: post #295
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

Which was and still is a completely artificial controversy pushed by certain interest groups. Blizzard is a private company, it's their tournament, their platform. If they don't want that to be instrumentalized as a political platform then they have every right to disallow that. For another, very recent, example of this: The International Olympic Committee just issued a strict warning against wearing BLM apparels, or…

and i am an individual, its my money and i dont just hand it to people with ideas i disagree with.

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

#378

Post by donatj »

Svperstar wrote: post #105
donatj wrote: post #25

I'd almost entirely stopped playing Overwatch for a couple years, but I got back in recently and feel like the tone is overall better than it had been. I think a lot of the toxic players may have actually just moved on?

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.

I mean there's been a huge number of updates since it launched and quite a few added maps. You should give it another shot.

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

#379

Post by russh »

AmVess wrote: post #81
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…

In terms of WoW, I'm sure a lot of it is focusing on the top raiding guilds and leaving the casual player with few rewarding activities. Further, one of their most cherished metrics is how much time people spend doing a certain activity. Instead of making those activities more fun and rewarding, they made them take longer to complete and with fewer rewards. To top it all off, they are nearly completely deaf to their…

I went from hardcore-raider-lite to casual and then they gated my characters progress behind raid level dungeons I just lost interest.

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

#380

Post by sidlls »

kcb wrote: post #365
slaymaker1907 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree and a lot of the popular WoW content creators (Bellular, T&E, etc.) seem to agree. They don't always mention casuals, but lack of progression is a major issue, particularly in Shadowlands. As a person spending too much time playing, you are basically forced to do non-LFR raiding, rated PvP, or mythic+ dungeons to actually progress your gear at all. Not to mention they seem to hate flying yet keep cre…

> you are basically forced to do non-LFR raiding, rated PvP, or mythic+ dungeons to actually progress your gear at all. Those things are the game though and pretty much always have been. Raids, dungeons, or PvP. If you don't want to do any of them why would you have ever picked up WoW.

They do an incredibly poor job expanding the content. The only thing expansions provide, aside from occasionally requiring the relatively trivial act of learning slightly different class mechanics, is progression content.

That is, content that provides new/better gear, more challenging fights, etc. That is: content that heavily rewards a hardcore from day one play style.

They consequently are in something of a race against time: the current game is hostile to casual players, who quickly give up and leave when it takes hours to find groups for leveling, and stale to hardcores that “beat” it quickly.

So one can intend to play casually or hardcore and be poorly served in both cases.

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