Failure is relative of course, but according to Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard, 40% of the people that left WoW for AoC, returned later on. As some people have remarked, if the president of Blizzard mentions it, it must have meant that they lost a significant amount of subscribers to Age of Conan. Which means there's a market out there for a good title. And Warhammer Online could fill that hole.
But, 40% of the leavers returned, which means those people gave something else a try, didn't like it and came back to WoW. Will this impact sales of the next new title to come along? After all, they're leaving a perfectly stable game without too many bugs, which, apparently, they still enjoy. Otherwise they wouldn't have come back. And chances are you won't really find what you're looking for in that new game either. Why take the risk, go through the whole "I'm a newbie" experience, waste time on the levelling grind again, and leave all your friends in WoW, if you already have a maxed out character and loads of friends in a game you still play with passion?
Well, some people enjoy levelling and exploring new stuff. My guess is those people would have tried Warhammer Online regardless, because it's new content. But end-game players that tried out AoC and came back, possibly won't be as inclined to give WAR a try after their AoC experience.
Wednesday 6 August 2008
WoW Recruit a Friend program
Today's top headline on the World of Warcraft main page is their updated "Recruit a Friend" program. Previously, if you referred a friend, they started playing World of Warcraft and paid their first month's subscription fee, you would get 30 days free game time. The new program awards you with:
This new scheme limits the time you have to play apart from each other, and you can easily level up an alt in the process. If your friend gets ahead of your new alt, because you were raiding or whatever, he can easily allow you to catch up by awarding your character extra levels. Your friend will be level 70 in no time, at which point you can truely start playing together with your "mains". In the past, I've had a couple of friends who gave WoW a try. But the game was already mature at that point, I was max level and my friends got bored having to play alone most of the time and gave up. This is an excellent counter to that.
And of course the free zhevra mount will motivate existing players to actively start recruiting friends. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me if a substantial number of these "friends who start playing" will be secondary accounts of existing players who are only after the exclusive mount. If people are willing to spend more than $200 on an in-game social pet, they won't think twice about shelling out for an extra account for two months so they can get their hands on a new mount.
- As it was previously, 30 days of free play time if your friend pays for 30 days game time.
- An exclusive zhevra in-game mount when your friend pays for 60 days of game time.
- If you and your friend are grouped together, you'll both earn triple experience.
- For every two levels your friend earns, he can grant one of your characters that's lower level than your friend's character, an extra level.
- You and your friend can summon each other once every hour.
This new scheme limits the time you have to play apart from each other, and you can easily level up an alt in the process. If your friend gets ahead of your new alt, because you were raiding or whatever, he can easily allow you to catch up by awarding your character extra levels. Your friend will be level 70 in no time, at which point you can truely start playing together with your "mains". In the past, I've had a couple of friends who gave WoW a try. But the game was already mature at that point, I was max level and my friends got bored having to play alone most of the time and gave up. This is an excellent counter to that.
And of course the free zhevra mount will motivate existing players to actively start recruiting friends. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me if a substantial number of these "friends who start playing" will be secondary accounts of existing players who are only after the exclusive mount. If people are willing to spend more than $200 on an in-game social pet, they won't think twice about shelling out for an extra account for two months so they can get their hands on a new mount.
Sunday 3 August 2008
WotLK Beta - Built-in threat meters and more stable slots
This morning I had to download a new patch before I was able to log in to the beta. It wasn't too big, about 22.5MB in size, but it still contained a few things that'll make people excited.
The first highlight is the fact that stable masters now have an additional two slots, for a total of four slots for hunter pets. The first new slot costs 50 gold, the second 150g. I have a level 70 hunter myself, and personally, I think this is long overdue. I always suffered from not having enough pet storage room while levelling up, especially when training new pet skills. Currently you have to tame a certain beast in the wild before you can learn a spell. This means that you have to stable your regular pet if you want to get a new skill or the next rank of a skill for your companion.
Ironically enough, they're doing away with this system in the expansion, all skills are now learned via visiting an NPC trainer or via the new pet talent system. So I guess the extra stable room is actually a little less needed in the expansion than it is right now on live servers. Oh well… Better late than never I guess.
A second important addition in the patch was Blizzard's own "threat meters" system. There have been third party addons that measure the amount of threat you have on a mob for quite some time now, pretty much ever since certain bosses in Blackwing Lair, in pre-TBC WoW, made them a virtual necessity.
And now Blizzard is coming with their own implementation, but contrary to what they usually do when incorporating popular addon functionality, they went for a totally different approach. Instead of a separate window, showing a list of players with the most threat on a particular mob, they now only show each player how much threat only they themselves have, as a percentage. It's added to the combat text, so for each of the mobs you're fighting, you'll see these numbers popping up each time you do damage to them or if you heal someone or…
The problem with this is, it makes it very unreadable, and sometimes you don't know what your actual threat is, because the numbers keep popping up constantly. Especially when you have a lot of DoTs on the target, you see lots of numbers on screen at the same time (see screenshot). I don't know about the rest of you, but it sure confuses me.
A very different approach and certainly not what I was expecting. We'll see if it catches on, but for now I prefer the system the third party addons use.
The first highlight is the fact that stable masters now have an additional two slots, for a total of four slots for hunter pets. The first new slot costs 50 gold, the second 150g. I have a level 70 hunter myself, and personally, I think this is long overdue. I always suffered from not having enough pet storage room while levelling up, especially when training new pet skills. Currently you have to tame a certain beast in the wild before you can learn a spell. This means that you have to stable your regular pet if you want to get a new skill or the next rank of a skill for your companion.
Ironically enough, they're doing away with this system in the expansion, all skills are now learned via visiting an NPC trainer or via the new pet talent system. So I guess the extra stable room is actually a little less needed in the expansion than it is right now on live servers. Oh well… Better late than never I guess.
A second important addition in the patch was Blizzard's own "threat meters" system. There have been third party addons that measure the amount of threat you have on a mob for quite some time now, pretty much ever since certain bosses in Blackwing Lair, in pre-TBC WoW, made them a virtual necessity.
And now Blizzard is coming with their own implementation, but contrary to what they usually do when incorporating popular addon functionality, they went for a totally different approach. Instead of a separate window, showing a list of players with the most threat on a particular mob, they now only show each player how much threat only they themselves have, as a percentage. It's added to the combat text, so for each of the mobs you're fighting, you'll see these numbers popping up each time you do damage to them or if you heal someone or…
The problem with this is, it makes it very unreadable, and sometimes you don't know what your actual threat is, because the numbers keep popping up constantly. Especially when you have a lot of DoTs on the target, you see lots of numbers on screen at the same time (see screenshot). I don't know about the rest of you, but it sure confuses me.
A very different approach and certainly not what I was expecting. We'll see if it catches on, but for now I prefer the system the third party addons use.
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