I think people kind of overstate how fast they're losing members. The average MMO developer would sign a pact with Satan to even approach those numbers. Even a big title like Star Wars had like what, 20 percent of the user numbers? They're being aggressive because they have a new expansion coming out.

It all looked rather normal until they mentioned autoboosting to level 80, honestly the free expacs are just sane (who really is gonna resub if they have to pay 30 bucks for expacs before their first fee? And that's probably on sale!). It would be funny just to autoboost an old bank alt, lol, leveling from 60 or 70 to 80 (and then 85) probably isn't that bad, 1-80 is likely gonna be a bitch still.

I think they seriously boned themselves with this whole Pandaria thing, they had lore left that wasn't nearly that stupid, iirc. What do you mean? They can't bring those players back without alienated the current subs. The casuals have been footing the bill for WOW for years now, even TBC was a lot easier than vanilla (comparatively). WOW pvp and raiding used to be extremely hard, and frankly wasn't all that fun except for the accomplishment of being in the elite club that could actually hack it. I'm not sure that made you special as much as it made you dedicated (probably to an unhealthy degree).

Fights like the original 4 horseman are never coming back to WOW, it's extremely exclusive and they've been about inclusion for too long now to backpedal.
Maybe so, but Kotick is getting his balls chewed off at every board meeting. WOW isn't competing with those other MMOs, it's competing with its younger and more successful self and not doing so well. Those falling subs mean stock price decreases and dividend reductions (not sure of Activision pays them).

They're being aggressive because their sales projections on that expac don't look so hot and Kotick doesn't want to have to explain that one to the board as well. Also, near expacs you get a lot of guilds claiming they will call it quits when it comes out, might be true this time if the guilds lose enough core members.

Beyond that, subs doesn't tell the whole story, Blizzard tracks how long you log into your account, if that number is falling too much it might tell a story you and I do not get to hear. But Blizzard hears it and this may be a response to it.

To do the next raid and stand around in town and have everyone worship you. Seriously, if you could kill Rag or Onyxia early on you were like a fucking NFL quarterback to a bunch of high school players. It sounds lame when I put it that way but that's kind of what it boiled down into. There's also a lot of team work and camaraderie the core guild members tended to share since they spent so long trying to eek out the last bit of performance from gear and the raid party. You still gotta get to 85, so you don't get to skip the current expac. Oh, and you'll be leveling on AH greens and charity.

FYI, according to their FAQ, if you haven't linked your WOW account to your Battle.net account (a very real possibility if you quit before Wrath) you have to do that first or you can't get the scroll thing.

It depends on the group you're with, as always has, I guess. But raiding is now even more popular, there are the Raid Finder tool, cross-realm raiding with friends, transmogrifications raid parties, the casual raiders, and the hardcore ones that want to do realm-first kills. Lots more options for everybody.

Also to be taken in consideration is the problem that players finish the expansion's content way too fast, and most just cancel their subscription once they run out of content to play, until the next expansion comes. This was a major issue with WotLK, and it is a major issue right now with Cataclysm.

I think there was a 3-6 months period of no new content being published, between the last patch for WotLK, 3.3.5 which brought the Ruby Sanctum, and the release of Cataclysm.

For a subscription-based MMO, such a long period without new content is bad. And they've been repeating that they're trying to do content faster, but aren't that much able to.

Their latest postmortem says it all: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3793436/Cataclysm_Post_Mortem_%E2%80%94_Greg_%E2%80%9CGhostcrawler%E2%80%9D_Street_-07_03_2012#blog

EDIT: I don't doubt that WoW will live for another 7 years, but not sure if it will be subscription based during its whole lifetime. Mike said that they were hoping to pass the 1 million subscribers for the game, and that anything above it would be a huge luxury. Well, they did that a long time ago, I guess now they're just trying to hold on to their subscribers in every way possible.

From my wife's account I sent a scroll to my own account. Yey! Free Cataclysm upgrade!
Boooo! Half my high level characters were deleted, all my gold and my own guild gone.
Missing 4 level 80, missing a ton of lower level characters, missing A GUILD, missing about 40k gold and Blizzard's answer:
"I have completed my investigation into the loss of items/gold on your characters, and found nothing missing."

Well Fuck You Blizzard!
They "restored" on my main char about a thousand grey items, a few hundred green items, a few hundred netherweave cloth stacks and they think that's normal? How the hell is there plausible that I had a thousand grey items??? It would be impossible to even hold that many items on one character!!!
Yeah, sure I'll resub again with such wonderful service.

I found this post on the WoW Community Forums. Pretty much explains why everyone blows this whole thing out of proportion.

"About the scroll ordeal, at first glance I was mad, I called up to cancel my year, and asked to speak to a manager, the wait time was pretty bad, so they offered to call me back.

The guy I spoke to, wasn't a robot(trained to say this and that etc) he was pretty damn cool as a matter of a fact. Anyhow, at the end of the day(+3 hours) I would just like to say this; The people that say "You got your game to play over the years" don't mean, hey dude, you got to play, shut up(for the most part I wouldn't think so anyway). What I believe they're trying to say, is what the manager said to me today...

The part about "you got to play" might be better put into perspective like this (managers words as accurately as I can remember) "did you get your !@# kicked(yes he said $%^) by any firelands bosses?" "yeah why?" "did you down that boss?" "well yeah after a bit" "wasn't that aweosme?" "hah, I suppose you're right" (I understood right away what he meant).

it's not all about free items, and levels, after all is said and done I think we're the ones who got the better rewards (memories and awesome moments we've had in WoW) but the convo was pretty much like this...

I mentioned that the instant level 80 could be seen as a decline in the quality of WoW, and he said "well, be that as it may, we're determined to bring excellent quality, the instant level 80 and free cataclysm expansion is so that your friend whom you haven't played with in a long time, can log on and play with you right away"

I then brought up the fact that the cata expansion and xfer seemed unfair and kind of a slap in the face for the loyal customers who have made pleas for help on a dying realm etc etc.

so he told me that it isn't exactly an xfer per-say and it's not exactly free either, they do have to pay the 15$ etc. and that the xfer was a one way-one option deal, either xfer to your friend or don't.

with that said, it's really not as big of a deal as people are acting like it is.... so please, before you rage like I did (btw I didn't cancel after talking to dude, he was friggin awesome) read up on it... or look more into it.

TL;DR the SoR deal isn't as "unfair" as you might think it is, yes, it's a marketing ploy, but they're a busines"

Tell them you were hacked a while ago. It is possible that you were hacked before they started logging about characters' inventories.
Well, yea, and as I've said above, it really doesn't matter in the end whether they get level 80 or level 85 character. Those returning and starting with level 80 characters will most likely miss all the fun in leveling, exploring the world while you're still too weak to kill stuff, finishing low level quests and just being amazed at the +1 stamina sword that you just got as a reward.

I don't personally care one way or the other, but I suspect that this is either going to be a good move or do little to prevent the decline.

Autolevelling is something I'm usually opposed to in games I play, but it's not like WoW isn't many years old at this point. It's not like they brought this into the game immediately.

I did, because I was. I replied to their "we checked and everything is in order" with "no, it's not" and details. And they said they restored some of my high level chars (will have to check at home which I got back) but none of the low level (the banks, the chars with the heirlooms - I had heirlooms for every class :(( ), not the gold, not the guild. Because it was too long ago. Well doh, of course it was long ago. I though that was the whole point of this offer, to bring back players who stopped playing long ago...

I'll probably pay for a month so that my wife can have her Spectral Gryphon and I'll probably level one char to 85 to see the new areas but that's it. I'm not coming back. I'd sell the damn account if I'd get anything worth while for it but I wouldn't even get $100 after investing about 800-1000 euros and many hours into it.

Check PM.

It will spike the active players number for a month or two, but it won't prevent the decline. After all, once you're level 80, in two months you'll be done with all the content of Cataclysm (from 80 to 85 and all raids / content patches). Unless players start doing the low level content, they will leave again after paying for that one month or two months of playtime (assuming the players start accepting the SoRs right away).

MoP is still in development, I don't think it will be out in Q2, maybe not even in Q3. Blizzard probably can release another content patch, similar to what they did after 3.3 in WotLK, when they brought 3.3.5 and Ruby Sanctum raid / lore, but it won't do much good since no doubt the content will be cleared in a few weeks, maybe even faster.

They are probably trying to lure people back for the release of their new expansion. I think they realized that adds nothing to the already bloated gameplay but can't scrap it because they have already invested too much $$.

I think they should go f2p. That way they can hang onto the more casual players who don't feel like taking out a subscription along with the £50 purchase and they will dilute the hardcore population who ruin it for the rest. They will still have plenty of cash rolling in from all the micro-transactions and game sales and will boost their numbers more substantially, rather than people joining for a couple months and quitting.