Comments on: [WoW] Thought for the day: What happens when the content fits F2P but the model is subscription?

By: Why Play, Why Pay? « Tish Tosh Tesh

Why Play, Why Pay? « Tish Tosh Tesh — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:17:32 +0000

[...] Spinks’ WoW Thought for the Day [...]

By: Simon Jones who is blogless

Simon Jones who is blogless — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:45:13 +0000

They’re going to die off gradually because Mandatory Socialisation Isn’t Fun and if people don’t have to, they’re not going to.

This has nothing to do with community building and everything to do with people not really wanting to have to hang out with 40/25/10 every thursday.

By: Kring

Kring — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:08:41 +0000

If you quit now, one of the possible answers to select for the question why you quit is (from memory):

There is no way to progress without running dungeons, raids or PvP.

—

I’m still positive for Pokewow. Especially since you can also select “I don’t like daily quests”.

By: Zellviren

Zellviren — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:37:04 +0000

The one snag, Tonk, is that they’ve been promising that for years; yet we manage to get seven or eight bosses every six months.

It’s just not good enough.

And, yes, I totally agree with your assessment on guilds. They’ll either be mega-perked or they’ll die off. It’s a shame, it really is.

By: Tonk

Tonk — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:55:07 +0000

I seem to recall that Blizzard is wanting to make their content cycles faster. Sounds like they want to eliminate the “few months” between updates so that it does make sense to stay subscribed. If they put enough resources behind this, it could work. The downside is that more frequent updates make any one update less significant.

I agree that LFR transforms the raiding endgame for most people. The guilds I see thriving in Pandaria are the anonymous, mega-perks guilds, the HM raiders and the ones with actual friends. In other words, most guilds will atrophy.

By: Zellviren

Zellviren — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:00:02 +0000

It’s hard to say for certain, but I think a growing number of players are starting to wise up to the fact that the subscription fee model just isn’t worth the money. In the case of World of Warcraft, I’d be paying £108 a year for content that I could get through easily in one £9 month. The question right now is why you’d subscribe longer than the month after the patch, but that question might well become why you’d subscribe longer than the month prior to a new expansion. Guild Wars 2 being free of subscriptions is only going to reinforce this fact, assuming the game does well.

And the Pokemon will fail utterly. I agree, it’s a wonderful RPG in its own right; but Blizzard want everyone in their raid content and, while that remains the case, no new feature is going to receive anywhere near the required polish to make it worthwhile after an initial “cap” grind.

Just look at archaeology.