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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

#421

Post by _carbyau_ »

blibble wrote: post #350
xxpor wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me those are the best games, it feels like you were evenly matched :) I hate getting just completely run over way more, personally.

people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time of course the numbers don't work when you're exclusively playing against other people this is why smurfing is so popular

"people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time"

This is why I think PvE is more sustainable for a player base and more conservatively solid as a business plan. WoW for instance.

But then by definition it isn't PvP and isn't going to get the same player base.

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

#422

Post by Wowfunhappy »

nemothekid wrote: post #87
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…

> Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes. The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games. There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained a…

Why is it that online video games require these steady streams of updates to be viable? Chess hasn't seen an update in, well, I don't actually know the history, a thousand years maybe?

Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...

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

#423

Post by bombcar »

username90 wrote: post #299
TameAntelope wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to completely agree with you re: 2/2/2, but I've been getting back into competitive lately, and the matches are much more predictive and it's much easier to figure out what you're supposed to be doing based on your role now. It's very "coachable"/"trainable" in a way that open queue isn't.

The problem was that for a long time they had no open queue, you either had to play healer or wait a long time. That killed the game, there is no coming back after losing that many players.

Team Fortress had that right - if you have a team that wants to all play medic let them do it. Perhaps have a game mode that forces 2/2/2 for those who want it but allow the mad scramble and the meta to develop organically.

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

#424

Post by sweettea »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #422
nemothekid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes. The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games. There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained a…

Why is it that online video games require these steady streams of updates to be viable? Chess hasn't seen an update in, well, I don't actually know the history, a thousand years maybe? Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...

Chess was actually most recently updated around 1860, when en passant was standardized: https://www.chess.com/news/view/breaking-official-rules-of-c... .

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

#425

Post by redisman »

vaylian wrote: post #142
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither is an RTS. They're MOBAs.

True. But these Mobas are descendants og these RTSs. WarCraft 3 gave birth to Dota 1. StarCraft 1 had the Aeon of Strife map.

Sure but mobas are much closer to action RPGs than RTS games in the actual game experience. The origin story as a mod for a RTS is interesting but doesn’t lock in the genre

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

#426

Post by bombcar »

Meekro wrote: post #237
dstaley wrote: post #37

I've been an off-and-on World of Warcraft player since the Burning Crusade days, and I honestly think that Blizzard is struggling to evolve the MMORPG genre into something suitable for the modern day. There was a great article in Kotaku[1] that illustrated this quite nicely. Essentially, what made World of Warcraft successful when it launched can't really exist today, especially with our hyper-connected world. Blizza…

I recently got into WoW classic, and my experience has been much more positive than what this Kotaku writer describes. I'm in my mid-30s and I never got into WoW when I was younger, but was always curious to try. There were so many expansions that I wasn't really sure how to get started-- do I need to buy all of them? Some of them? One of them? Anyway, WoW classic made it simple to dive in, so I did! Since I didn't w…

The key to WoW originally was having a solid core group to play with - it really wasn’t “soloable” the way it is now - and arguably that’s better for the game.

Last time I played a WoW expansion I got to level cap basically solo.

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

#428

Post by bombcar »

huachimingo wrote: post #355

If you liked OW, maybe you would like Quake(and 2 and 3), Openarena, Xonotic, Sauerbraten or Assault Cube. Those are nearly free these days ;) (at least the online part). Maybe not current AAA quality, but nothing better than the raw speed and fraggin everything you can see (and where the crosshair sees it) with no waits and respawning every time... Seriously, try one of them. Sauer or xonotic would be a nice start.

Nothing since has compared to Action Quake II though some get close.

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

#429

Post by Wowfunhappy »

sweettea wrote: post #424
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that online video games require these steady streams of updates to be viable? Chess hasn't seen an update in, well, I don't actually know the history, a thousand years maybe? Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...

Chess was actually most recently updated around 1860, when en passant was standardized: https://www.chess.com/news/view/breaking-official-rules-of-c... .

(I don't think that's the link you thought it was!)

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

#430

Post by nemothekid »

LanceH wrote: post #397
chimeracoder wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the conclusion should have been: we aren't able to make healers and tanks fun, let's try something else. Instead, they forced people to play them Healers and tanks are fun! The problem is that they keep introducing balance changes that make it incredibly frustrating to play certain tanks/supports. With DPS, this isn't an issue, because there are literally more DPS characters than there are healers and supports comb…

2/3's of the player base disagrees that healers and support are fun. Well more than the majority prefers dps. If I were going to single out one thing that I've never seen anyone mention it is that shields are 1 way only. It makes tanks too powerful and stable, thus support is needed, thus dps is third tier.

It's hard to theorize because Blizzard made so few tweaks to the game. I can't speak on "fun", but before 2/2/2 the problem was supports were way too powerful (Overwatch has always had a problem with supports being too powerful). The GOATS meta was a reflection of this where you were borderline throwing if you chose DPS. It's telling how many metas were driven by a support that was too powerful (Brigette; GOATS, Moth meta; Mercy, Nanoblade/Beyblade; Ana). Having too powerful supports means that ultimates are the only thing that kills anyone.

Of course Blizzard had a challenge designing supports - if they were too weak they were unfun to play but if they are too strong then your entire dedicated player base complains for months.

Ultimately I think the problem was the lack of diversity among the other supports/tanks. The relatively few amount of tanks/supports ultimately meant that the community would quickly coealesce on an optimal tank setup (Rein/zarya, Winston/dva, etc), and as a tank/support player it became boring to play because picking an off-meta tank would be seen as a throw. There's little that is worse than queing to play your favorite tank and the other 5 players yelling at you to switch to $meta.

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