More on the subscription question

Eurogamer ran an article with a few links to other articles, including this one on Yahoo that ran on 24 June.

Among other things, it said....

Many World of Warcraft players in mainland China have also migrated to the Taiwan server during the transition, even though that means a slower connection and having to start a new account, the Blizzard representative said.

The flood was so bad that...

The flood of players has caused waits up to several hours to log into the Taiwan server during peak evening hours, local media said.

Tobold sticking to his guns

In followup to yesterday's tussle with Tobold over what I see as highly flawed logic, Tobold posted a couple more comments to yesterday's post. According to Tobold there are no--zero--Chinese accounts right now due to the loss of license by the9, and the rumor that NetEase will not receive permission from the Chinese government to activate WoW until the Chinese courts have adjudicated lawsuits filed by the9. MMO-Champion just happened to run a timely post of their own yesterday that stated a Chinese guild had the world-first kill of Yogg+0 kill. Tongue in cheek, I posted that to his blog and his reply was:

So you think that Taiwan is an inseperable part of China? You communist!
;)

Again, this story is about millions of mainland Chinese players losing access
to their characters. The fact that they can make a NEW account and start over at
level 1 on a Taiwanese or even US server doesn't change anything. They can't
MOVE their existing characters.

I won't get wrapped up in the whole Taiwan/China bruh ha ha, but my point is that Chinese players that had been playing on Chinese servers had moved en masse to Taiwanese servers. There have been ample reports of this nature in the months leading up to Tobold's blog post yesterday so I do not agree with his logic here. It does matter because the premise of the blog post indicating that the WoW subscriber base was down to 5 million is based entirely on the loss of those Chinese accounts on Chinese servers. Once a Chinese player moves from a Chinese server to a Taiwanese server the net effect is 0. One loss to Chinese server, and one gain to Taiwanese server. 11,499,000 players at the loss, an 11,500,000 players at the gain.

An individual character has nothing to do with the discussion what so ever since we're speaking about the player base. An account is an account is an account, regardless of where it's hosted.

WoW has 11 million subscribers. No it doesn't?

Its not often that I really disagree with Tobold but this is one of them. Tobold opens his blog post of the day with the title " WoW subscriptions down to 5 million" and then goes on to write about that since the9 has now officially shut down it's servers because of the loss of its license to netease it effectively means Blizzard has lost about half of its subscriber base.

In asking Tobold where he got his figures from since Blizzard hasn't stated a break down of its subscribers in recent memory tobold replied:

The source is the last Blizzard press release which still announced user numbers by continent. Unfortunately they stopped doing that a while ago, and we can only assume there have been no major shifts since then. Of course from now on that assumption will not be valid any more.

Unfortunately he couldn't point to the source any better than that, however the last time I recall Blizzard releasing any information that detailed was prior to the Burning Crusade when WoW had a few million subscribers. That was at least three years ago if I recall correctly. At the height of the Burning Crusade the best information available indicated Blizzard had approximately 8-9 million subscribers which was a significant growth from Vanilla WoW. I thought Blizzard had indicated they had achieved 11 million subscribers in January or February of this year, but it was actually in December 2008. So from mid to late 2007 to December 2008 Blizzard's subscription base grew from 8 to 9 million subscribers to 11 million. Not nearly has high an increase from Vanilla WoW to the Burning Crusade but still a healthy increase, and still dwarfing any other game on the market. In fact dwarfing pretty much all the major MMOs combined.

Unfortunately Blizzard has not delineated where the growth in that subscription base is taking place. Tobold's belief is that since Blizzard had indicated about 50% of their subscribers were in China (three years ago? And I would still like to see this myself since Tobold can't point to it officially apparently) that any increase in subscribers is linear. 50% three years ago would still be around 50% today. That's an astounding leap of logic considering the amount of advertising Blizzard has done in the United States in 2007 and 2008. Remember the WoW commercials? Perhaps he is right, but perhaps he isn't. One would think that if you are going to make pronouncements of this magnitude one would at least link to evidence of some sort but instead the only link to information in his post was a link to a rumor that NetEase's license is on hold in China.

When I pointed out to Tobold the flaw in his logic, or at the very least the weak evidence he was basing his post on he replied:

I am not suggesting there has been a big drop in subscriptions in the US or Europe. And if WoW comes back up in China in a few weeks, Blizzard will probably be back to 10 to 11 million subscribers. But as Blizzard for years artificially inflated their "subscriber" numbers with the Chinese players (which don't actually have a subscription in the US/Euro sense), it is only fair to point out that these Chinese players currently aren't counting, because the servers are down. Whether the remaining number is 5 or 6 million isn't really relevant for that.

Actually it is relevant Tobold. It's very relevant since you are claiming half of all WoW subscribers are Chinese when we have absolutely no evidence to base that claim on. It could be 10%. It could be 25%. It could be 75%. We simply don't know until Blizzard releases that information so any argument you make about the servers--the9's or NetEase's--are simply an ambiguous figures pulled out of thin air as far as I can tell. I would, however, like to know the demographic breakdown of WoW subscribers as I'm sure you would.

Tobold continued by saying:

Well, when Blizzard last detailed their numbers by continent, half of the 8 million subscribers were in China. In the latest official statement (see http://www.wow.com/2009/05/07/activision-conference-call-wow-still-at-11-5-million-subscriber/) they said that they have 11.5 million subscribers, and growth has been highest in China. So take a bit over half of 11.5 million, and you get 6 million Chinese subscribers. A number that is frequently quoted on all sorts of WoW blogs and forums, because it is the best guess we have. It also fits with the last statement of The9 of over 1 million concurrent users, as the industry rule of thumb is to multiply concurrent users by 5 to 10 to get subscribers.

Of course I could change "6 million" into "5 to 7 million", if that would make you feel better. But the exact number really isn't relevant at all. In any case it's roughly half of WoW's player base that is currently excluded from the game. And with Blizzard's official definition of subscriber saying that "Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers.", they officially lost those Chinese players today, WoW China being down since June 7.

Unfortunately Tobold seems to have misinterpreted what Mike Morhaime said in May. The WoW blog post Tobold linked to just above says:

Morhaime says that numbers are growing everywhere, but that China will be a main focus of growth this year as Wrath of the Lich King releases there soon.

Morhaime actually says:

“We believe there continues to be growth in WoW in all regions but especially in China. Our first expansion launched eight months after it did here. We’re looking for a similar response when “Lich King” is launched there,”

WoWinsider is saying that Blizzard expects to focus growth in China this year (2009). is Morhaime saying the highest growth has occured in China? He doesn't actually say that, but rather is saying they expect it. Remember, this is a conference call to investors discussing quarterly returns and he would be focusing on what just occured in the preceeding quarter, as well as trying to paint a picture to investors to what they expect to happen in the next.

Obviously Morhaime's expectation on continued growth in China is on hold, and obviously some number of Chinese aren't currently playing. But there have also been a number of reports during the period where the9 was attempting to bring WotLK to China that many Chinese moved to Taiwanese servers. WotLK was never released in China, so they were still playing the Burning Crusade in China proper. The9 lost its license, reportedly, because they weren't able to get the proper permission from the Chinese government required to do so. Blizzard apparently believed NetEase could get that permission and ultimately awarded the license to them.

Whats important in all that is that we don't know how many Chinese moved to Taiwanese servers. It could be all of them that were playing in China, or it could be none. Again, we simply don't know. Which is entirely the point I was trying to make to Tobold and was unable to get him to grasp.

I'm sure we can all agree that Blizzard would have lost some level of subscribers throughout all this. But is it the 50% Tobold says it is? You be the judge--without any more information that I, or Tobold have at our disposal.

Multi-Boxing WoW and you

Saylah had an excellent article on her Multi-Boxing experiment in WoW. Definitely read it if you are interested in the topic. If anyone has a knack for paring something down to it's core, it's Saylah and she's got me thinking about giving multi-boxing a spin again.

AION and why players are silly

People are creatures of habit—even bad habits like predicting each new MMO that is getting ready for release will bury WoW. It’s a refrain we’ve all heard a dozen times or more by now, and such is the current refrain of AION admirers. One would think that after jumping ship and buying new MMOs only to quickly learn that the new MMO wasn’t as good as they had once believed, that they would be more skeptical about developer claims. One would think.

I can only look on amusingly as thousands of AION fans attack anyone that speaks ill, or even deigns to speak of AION in neutral terms. Death to those who are not rabid fans! Such has been the case recently on Tobold’s blog, but he’s hardly the only such example. Forums and Blogs everywhere that write about MMOs are feeling the same phenomenon and it really makes one wonder why people get so upset that someone they don’t know likes something somewhat less than they. I like the color green, and you like the color blue much better, how dare you!

I’ll admit I haven’t played AION yet. I didn’t even try to get a beta key and I’m certainly not well enough known to be sought out by NCSoft so my information comes only from those who have played. As Tobold found out some of that information may be wrong, but in my case even if select facts are wrong it still wouldn’t change my overall impression. AION sounds like a very polished game. Afterall, it’s not a new MMO. Its been in operation overseas for some time now and its just being ported to the U.S. By all accounts the character creation system sounds fantastic. I’d love to see something like that in WoW. I also like what I’ve read thus far about the profession system, which allows you to learn all of the professions but enables you to learn only one to maximum skill level. That is something I would also love to see in WoW.

AION sounds a lot like WoW in many respects, but also sounds like it has flavors of WAR thrown in as well. Like WAR, AION’s combat abilities are multi-tiered. Using tier one abilities enable you to then use tier two abilities. There are similarities in the class system as well, though the implementation is different. In AION you assume one of a handful of base classes, then at level 10 you specialize. Unlike WAR you can’t cherry pick talents from different “trees”, so you are locked in to whatever specialty you choose. Very linear.

Initial game play revolves around PVE questing but I haven’t read enough to get a sense of how many quests are available, or whether raw grinding is also required. The latter stages—otherwise known as the “end-game” revolve around PVP. What I’ve read gives me more of an impression of WAR than of WoW, and I already know I wasn’t impressed with the system in WAR which requires a stable, substantial character population to maintain indefinitely. My negative impression isn’t so much a result of AION itself, but more of that type of implementation. It only works so long as you maintain a high level of subscribers and the faction balance isn’t out of whack. How often do those things happen?

In any regard, I’m confident that AION will garner a few hundred thousand subscribers, but I’m also certain that it will not unseat WoW as the next best thing. If it follows the typical MMO pattern many people will jump ship from WoW when AION is released but will generally come back in a few months when the newness of AION wears off. I’m someone who invests a great deal in the characters I play, so it generally takes a lot to lure me away from my game of choice. In fact the state of my game of choice has more to do with whether I continue to play it, or leave it, than anything else. I’m happy with WoW, so any competing MMO would have to be truly great to lure me away. And would have to be better than great to keep me.

I may stop by and play AION when it’s released to see for myself, but as of right now I’m just not feeling an overwhelming desire to play it. And that probably isn’t the mindset NCSoft is really shooting for.

Farewell Mid-Summer Festival

I was sad to see the Mid-Summer’s event come to an end over the weekend. The 10% bonus to XP you could get during the event was a terrific buff that stacked with the 10% XP bonus you earn from the heirloom shoulders. That 20% XP bonus (20% on creatures killed only – 10% from heirloom shoulders apply to creatures killed, as well as to XP earned from quests. Midsummer buff applied only to creatures killed) quickly added up. Normally when I level a character through outlands I’m hitting level 65 when I first enter Nagrand, however on my Rogue I was already level 65 when I entered Terrokar Forest. I hit level 68 within the first few quests in Nagrand and left for the Borean Tundra shortly thereafter where I hit level 70 Saturday. That nearly 3 level advantage was all thanks to those two bonuses. I can’t even begin to imagine what magic those bonuses would have worked for me in Northrend where I normally hit level 80 in Sholazar Basin (Borean Tundra > Fjord > Dragon Blight > Grizzly Hills > Sholazar Basin). 80 by Grizzly Hills was probably quite feasible.

Alas, the Mid-Summer celebration is past and I now have about nine and a half levels to go before I can start running my Rogue through any of the end-game content. I’m not really looking forward to the leveling, but am looking forward to what comes after, so there is my incentive. Not even a dyed in the wool alt-a-holic such as myself can grind day in and out without some less stressful down-time though. I spend most of yesterday afternoon PVPing on my Druid and still lamenting the fact Cat AOE is so abysmal. I had to take out some aggression on some poor clothies to make up for it all. It’s amazing what a Pounce, Shred, Mangle, stun, and a couple more shreds tend to do to them. Unfortunately you can’t see the very big grin on my face right now.

Happy 4th!

Just a quick note to wish you all a very happy 4th of July!

As the raid turns

Remember those Summer Doldrums I’ve mentioned recently? Sometimes things click after a while and the team hums along until the Fall when the original team members tend to come back online? And sometimes things do not go so well? Well, that is exactly what I’m going through right now. So I’m going to vent a little.

We have a minority of players on the raid team right now that are just not pulling their weight. The same people are dieing, over and over again on nearly every boss pull. Either because they are not doing anything to save themselves, aren’t doing anything to avoid damage in the first place, or aren’t getting healed. There are a couple healers I have to lump into this category, which makes matters all the worse considering how vital they are to the raid team. We got rid of one healer a few weeks ago because she was completely devoid of any skill and would die every boss attempt (and sometimes more than once if she would get rezzed) and consequently was of no use to the team. I wish they would get rid of another such healer and that we could find a good replacement.

Anyway, I digress. The issues are that people need to do a certain amount of self-preservation. They need to avoid damage as much as possible, which includes not standing in front of bosses, move out of fire, avoid adds, and a host of other things that can loosely fall under the “situational awareness” category. In other words if you can’t remain aware of your surroundings and DPS at the same time then you perhaps should go down to the minor leagues and get more experience before coming back up to the majors.

Healers, unlike DPS, have a more critical role and really need to be on their game. They need to be able to remain aware of their surroundings at all time as well as react quickly to the damage their team members are taking. It’s a stressful job (I know). If a given healer isn’t remaining aware of their surroundings and is dieing either because of effects they aren’t avoiding, are getting eaten by adds (which isn’t necessarily a problem they can avoid at all times if the tanks aren’t doing their jobs properly), or aren’t healing adequately then not only will they die, but then DPS starts dieing as well. Once too many healers/DPS dies it’s wipe no matter what happens. Its even more egregious when tanks die, and this is really where I start to get even more frustrated with the healers on our team right now because our tanks die all too often. When the main tank dies on Ignis for example, despite two healers dedicated to him, that is a problem. There simply can’t be any excuse for that sort of thing because there isn’t any huge burst of damage coming toward the tank that can’t be anticipated. It’s a simple matter of the healers not remaining aware and not acting according to the conditions. Tuesday night we wiped five times on Ignis before we finally gave up, and on a boss that we had had on farm previously. Very frustrating.

So these last two weeks what we’ve been seeing is a less than steller initial Tuesday night raid where we’ll get to Auriya (if we’re lucky), kill her, then go back and kill the bosses we skipped. The last two weeks we have been unable to kill Auriya and people are really beginning to get frustrated. We couldn’t even kill Kologarn Tuesday night either. It shows in the decline of raid attendance that resulted in the last two days of raiding last week to be cancelled and thus far two days of cancelled raids this week.

The Officers are recruiting but they’re having problems finding “good” raiders. Most of the raiders (not all) we’re recruiting these days are sub-optimal and hasn’t improved our situation any. Most of those end up getting kicked from the guild after a few weeks because of their performance (they’re on trial when they’re invited) or because they’re not meeting raid attendance requirements.

I’ve found myself actually hoping raids don’t happen these days because I’m just so sick of the lack of progression and the wipes. I’d rather spend my time leveling my Rogue and running dailies and farming then sitting through another night of failure in Ulduar. The knowledge that the Argent raid is only a number of weeks away at this point makes the situation all the more frustrating for me because I should be decked out in all my Tier 8 pieces at this point (I’m missing gloves, shoulders, and head). Raiding isn’t all about gear of course, but anyone telling you they don’t want to improve their gear is lying. Raiding is about gear progression as much as it is in boss progression and having fun. Dieing on boss attempts and failing to progress in Ulduar after weeks and weeks of attempts is not fun. Not at all.

Unfortunately there isn’t a lot any of us can do about it.

Faction Change Update

Obviously they have a lot to work out, but here's the skinny on it right now:

We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, in response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it.

As with all of the features and services we offer, we intend to incorporate the faction-change service in a way that won’t disrupt the gameplay experience on the realms, and there will be some rules involved with when and how the service can be used. The number of variables involved increases the complexity of implementing this service, but we plan to take the time needed to ensure that it lives up to expectations before officially rolling it out. We’ll go into much more detail on all of this here at http://www.WorldofWarcraft.com as development progresses. In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that because this type of functionality requires extensive internal testing well in advance of release, you may be seeing bits and pieces of the service in the test builds we use for the public test realms moving forward.

Updated* 7/1- Due to the many questions that have come up with the announcement of this new service, we wanted to take the time to answer the ones we can at this point in time.

Q. Will we be able to switch between the races on our own faction?
A.. No. Players will only be able to switch to a race of the opposite faction.

Q. Will I be able to choose the race on the opposite faction that I want to change to?
A.. Yes, but you will only be able to switch to a race that has your class type available to it. So if you play a human paladin, you’d only be able to change to a blood elf paladin.

Q.How much will it cost?
A.. We do not have further information on this at this point in time.

Q.Will I be able to switch back to my original faction but a different race?
A.. No. You will only be able to switch back to your originally chosen race.

Q.. How will the switch between reputation, gear, mounts, etc be handled?
A.. We’ll have more details for you at a later point in time, though we plan to keep these as close to a reflection of the other faction as much as possible.

Q.How often can you change your faction?
A..We do not have any information to share on this at this point in time, however we will have restrictions on the frequency by which players can change their faction.

Q. How will this affect the balance of Horde and Alliance on the realms?
A.. We are taking great care in how we implement this new service in order to maintain balance between the factions on the realms but do not have any further details to share.

Greedy Goblin doesn't like "boosting"?

Known by many names, I personally have known and spoken of it as "power-leveling". Greedy Goblin calls it "boosting", and he doesn't like it one bit. Call it tough-love, but according to Greedy Goblin, you should never help a friend or family member level because they apparently won't grow up to be big and strong if you do.

I have agreed with many of Greedy's posts in the past, but on this one I just don't see eye to eye with him. His stark, take it or leave it, logic simply doesn't add up in most respects. Take for instance a guild who asks someone to re-roll and play another class that is needed in the raid. Ignoring completely the question on whether the guild owes said person support in that leveling process, isn't it in the guilds best interest to give it in order to get make that class available at the earliest opportunity? Asking someone to re-roll is most likely a last resort, taken only after they had been unable to find a qualified player of that class previously. And sometimes the "bring the player, not the class" just doesn't work out as intended.

How about a situation where a group of friends convince another friend to transfer servers in order to play together. Perhaps that individual could transfer a fully leveled character, but what if they want to play a different class or can't transfer the character for whatever reason? I suspect the friends would probably not completely power level the other player, but would one really expect to transfer to a new server at the coaxing of friends and then be left totally to their own devices for a few weeks while they level to 80? Would the friends not want their friend to get to 8o as quick as possible so they can play together?

Does 1-79 matter that much that helping someone destroys the game? Greedy certainly alludes to that, but I think it's clear that isn't the case. WoW really begins at end-game. The path from 1 to endgame is just an obstacle that must be overcome as quickly as possible in order to experience it. Any argument that someone power leveled won't have learned their class adequately are completely without merit. Someone can be just as much a noob at 80, having taken the time to level on their own as someone who was power leveled the entire way. What matters is the person behind the keyboard. If they are in any way competent and have an ability to read and comprehend then they will shed the noobness regardless of how they get to endgame.