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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

#551

Post by rkuykendall-com »

joppy wrote: post #510
me_me_me wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are touching on some interesting points, but don't go deep enough. (Just as a point of reference I played up until the hamster release) I would say that the core design of characters with cooldown skills and very powerful ultimates that need to be chain to team wipe opposition ARE the crux of why everything is impossible to do right in the Overwatch. I have played ladder for first few seasons and its esse…

On the other hand, one of the things I like so much about Overwatch and TF2 is the importance of mobility and crazy movement patterns - with some characters you can be flying around the map, ending up in odd places, and characters usually have enough HP to be in a good fight with someone when they land. By contrast CS offers nothing like this - movement is always strictly along the ground/ladders/stairs etc, and gunf…

I haven't played Halo 5 multiplayer (no PC release) but I've seen movement-videos and they look _incredible_. Incredibly fun even just to watch! I'm curious to see if an improvement on that, plus the possible addition of grappling, can do in Infinite.

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

#552

Post by brianwawok »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #534
brianwawok wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the flipside, you want to play with cheaters?

Yes. Very much. The idea that you should be playing games online with strangers you'll never see again has done terrible things to computer games. The solution to cheaters is to tell them "hey, knock it off", because you know them socially. Or to use the same cheats (call them "mods") while playing with them. Or to be so much better that you win anyway. Any of those is better than what we have now.

Yah, that's just not fun to me. I have seen entire games become not playable due to cheats. I would opt in to a kernel module anytime

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

#553

Post by idrios »

nottorp wrote: post #547
411111111111111 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either through the ingame recruitment tool, whispering guilds from wowprogess that are recruiting Or even city chat. Blaming lfg/lfr for the current wow community is misguided at best. The rewards from it are just too low for it to have such a large impact. I mean the game has become pay to win at this point as you can pay real money for ingame gold... Which you can use to get carried through mythic raid/pvp/m+, givi…

Funny, back when I was playing we recruited people after meeting them in PuG instance groups. If they were fun to play with we tried. We specifically did PuGs with 4 people from the guild and one random for recruiting ;)

This whole thread has brought back so much nostolgia. I remember joining a guild this way. It really was such an organic way to meet people and make friends.

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

#554

Post by TameAntelope »

setr wrote: post #137
TameAntelope wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a small thing, but the community really needs to get over these "layoffs". Companies execute layoffs at the volume Blizzard did all the time, they were not any kind of indication of any major strategic shift whatsoever.

Strategic shifts are the only reason mass layoffs exist. If it's a slow shift according to market pressure, then you expect the ratio of incoming:outgoing to drop slowly. If it's stable, you expect the ratio to be stable. If someone decides to a do a re-org, or a new strategy and this whole department is no longer necessary in the new model, the ratio drops fast. Otherwise, why would you drop a whole slew of people s…

They weren't mass layoffs, it was a handful of people. For some reason 50-190 people out of 9,500 is getting called a "mass layoff", when in reality it's nothing more than a fat trimming exercise.

0.9%-2% is not a "mass layoff".

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

#555

Post by tmpz22 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #315
tmpz22 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overwatch queue times are still pretty good outside of Masters+ competitive play (remember most players are quick play or Diamond and below). I'm fairly certain overwatch 2 and beyond will be just fine barring some massive screw-up. The main problem with OW was how much money they blew on the Overwatch League and E-sports partnerships - hundreds of millions of dollars invested and the top talent keeps leaving because…

>and the top talent keeps leaving because they are miserable Can you expand on this please? Why are things so bad?

Three main factors:

* Work/life balance is fundamentally broken for most E-sports players (in all games). Bad habits like playing/streaming 6+ hours after 7+ hours of practice/scrimmages, terrible diets like 100% uber eats + pounding energy drinks, and finally the stress and anxiety of performing what the internet community breathing down your neck. Many E-sports players have never lived on their own prior to moving out to team houses, and some of these individuals can barely take care of themselves - and it shows. Most players burn out within a year or two.

* Meaningful incomes are almost never provided via your salary or tournament winnings - the real money comes in through sponsorships and streaming revenues. Even though OWL has a generous minimum wage and provides housing allowances, top talent has consistently spurned six figure salaries for seven figure streaming salaries. Sinatra, XqC, Seagull, Harbleu, are some examples of top talent who chose not to sustain their professional e-sports careers.

* There's very few roster spots available and tier-2 teams that on paper are supposed to provide a career path into the league are openly considered a joke for most games.

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

#556

Post by sralbert »

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…

I'm also enjoying leveling my first character. I'm about to hit 40 but I still need over 20g for a mount + riding.

Do you plan on staying on classic or going to TBC next week?

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

#557

Post by Meekro »

sralbert wrote: post #556
Meekro wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm also enjoying leveling my first character. I'm about to hit 40 but I still need over 20g for a mount + riding. Do you plan on staying on classic or going to TBC next week?

Me and my group are definitely going to TBC when it does full release on June 1. I'm playing a Druid bear tank for our group-- we just did Deadmines with me tanking-- and Druid tanks were significantly upgraded in TBC so they could rival Warrior tanks.

If you're struggling with gold, I would suggest buying some. I'm not normally one to cheat, but my group bought 4000 gold for $100 on g2g.com and it helped quite a bit. To the extent that there are rules against this, they are basically not enforced. It's unheard of for anyone to be banned for buying gold.

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