Taking a brief scan of the world of warcraft forums (I know - big mistake) I see a common theme in most of the threads.

People act like Bliz owes them something.

There was a thread about how someone thought a GM shouldn't take more than 1 hour. A thread about how Bliz doesn't listen to customers. A thread about how Bliz only changes things they way they see fit and not what the customer base sees fit.

This is ridiculous. It's a game and I know Bliz works hard at improving the game. They have a good history and I'm sure they want the problems with the game and servers to go away more than any of us do.

Are these the cries of spoiled brats or legitimate customers?

It's almost as if people think their $15 a month gives them rights to be stockholders who want to control the focus and resources of a major company.

Someone once said the number 1 rule of business is the customer is always right.

Now, American taxpayers pay their hard earned tax money so they can live in a country with the strongest military in the world. Should they accept anything less? No.

So since I have to do a tip top shaped job to defend those people (bliz included), I expect my $15 to bring me the best gaming experience possible. If bliz can't do that then guess what, no more money from me. Which would also explain why I haven't played WoW for about the past 2 months.

I'm not the only one leaving either. Quite a few people I used to play with have also left. And unless bliz gets their act together the next big game to hit the shelves is going to do to WoW what WoW did to EQ/FFXI.

The average player life in a MMORPG is about 1 year. WoW has hit that point. Players are getting restless. The truth is WoW is in its critical days. With other games looming around the corner Bliz is in a position where they MUST put the customers first.

So in summation, yes Bliz does owe us all (the players) something. They owe us a game where we can run instances without getting booted from player buffs. A game where players' armor doesn't randomly disappear after patch day (happened to my friend's valor gloves). If I fail to perform my job to standards I can be court martialed. Bliz has it lucky, they just lose $15 a month.

WoW is showing no signs of slowing down. We just hit 6 million players and a substantial amount of new content (in the form of AQ) has just been released, with more goodies in the near future such as dynamic weather, and Naxarramas (sp?) on the horizon as well.. Certainly me and my friends are all more hooked than ever. I honestly can't see WoW lessening in popularity anytime soon.

In answer to the original post - yes, because people pay a monthly subscription to play (something a lot of us are not used to, and resent) there is a general feeling that we should be getting a top-notch service. Particularly looking at Blizzard's gargantuan profit margins this year, one does have to wonder why the MOTW tooltip is still wrong and why my computer constantly crashes with error #132 every time I go to Ironforge.

At the end of the day though, WoW is a MASSIVE game, and I really don't envy Bliz's job of maintaining it.. I agree with you and think they do a superb job given the complexity of the task and the multitude of opinions spammed in capital letters on the various forums that have sprung up around teh interweb. But these people who spend all their time complaining also serve a useful function - their complaints are often rooted in something that genuinely needs fixing. Keeping half an eye on these people helps Blizzard to become aware of problems that need fixing.

In summary, and in keeping with the druid hippy stereotype, I love you guys and everything is fine, just fine.. :)


-Annik

Blizzard has a good product and I think that shows with their subscriptions hitting the 6 million dollar mark. I have only had a couple dealings with a GM but both have been reasonably quit and very pleasant.

My only two real complaints are sever stability and queue lines. For raids and event there is often to much lag, especially when there is more than one raid going. Having to wait in a qeueu line to get on the server is just plain BS. I dont know what kind of equipment they are using but if they now have over 6 million people paying to play they should have some money to spend.

Only other thing I see is that we just need more stuff to do. We need an expantion now. AQ is nice, but the gear is not that great when you compare it to the difficulty level.
We need more instances of all sizes, or zones that have a chance to drop decent items. This constant mind numbing grind for rep with this this group and that is getting old quick. Right now how can the "casual gamer" get rep with Brood of Nozdormu? They cant. Sure the gear that you can get is awesome but unless your doing AQ 40 man or BWL, guess what, no rep for you. Whats left, grind another char to 60?

As far as BG's go, Im sick of them and dont do them anymore. They killed world pvp which is 100 times more fun. BG's arent about pvp they are just another grind to obtain more gear.

I thin k Bliz spoiled a lot of people by hosting the free online play with Starcrat and WC3, now that people are paying they expect a huge leap in quality and service.

I thin k Bliz spoiled a lot of people by hosting the free online play with Starcrat and WC3, now that people are paying they expect a huge leap in quality and service.

Your probably right there. I dont mind paying at all and even though I have pointed out a couple things that I would like to see improved, I am happy with the game and lately have been enjoying my play time alot. I think thats mainly because I have been focused on PVE instead of the broken pvp system. I even respec'ed back to resto, and yes, I am having as much fun as I did being feral.

I will say that the fun I have is largely due to my guild and the people we play with. I would say my enjoyment of the game is 50% gameplay and 50% people. Really a great bunch of people to hang with.

I really cant wait for the expansion to come out. The build up for it is getting huge and I think expectations from the gamers is very high. Hopefully Blizzard really comes through and we get some really good new content.

The truth is WoW is in its critical days. With other games looming around the corner Bliz is in a position where they MUST put the customers first.

Lol the doomsday prophecy will be fullfilled!

Seriously there are no competitive games in the pipeline, the people that are leaving are going to back to games they left to play WoW. That love affair won't last, they left those games for a reason and it was likely more than the attraction of WoW. After just racking up another 1 million subscribers since their last announcement, bringing their total to six million now I would say the game is hardly in its "critical" days.

To the OP, I have never honestly been disappointed by Blizzard in terms of customer service. I am disappointed by the server queues but its fairly evident that is a major priority for them now. As far as class changes and world changes go, I like the fact that they do what they want instead of listening to every punk poster who has some serious angst issues.

People need to take that 15 bucks they are spending each month and see what else they can buy for 15 dollars over a period of 30 days. I guarantee you it isn't much.

ost games on the market were flooded with bugs in the first year and stability continues to be an issue for some games. How many other games have had the growth rate that Blizzard has had with WoW? I would wager there isn't one out there. I doubt anyone at Blizzard had forcast a one million subscriber increase over the past few months.

Comparing what else you could do with that $15 is a healthy way to approach it.

Given the amount of time I spend playing this there is no activity that compares (less than 2 movies, a night of bowling, etc...?)

Someone once said the number 1 rule of business is the customer is always right.

Now, American taxpayers pay their hard earned tax money so they can live in a country with the strongest military in the world. Should they accept anything less? No.

So since I have to do a tip top shaped job to defend those people (bliz included), I expect my $15 to bring me the best gaming experience possible. If bliz can't do that then guess what, no more money from me. Which would also explain why I haven't played WoW for about the past 2 months.

I'm not the only one leaving either. Quite a few people I used to play with have also left. And unless bliz gets their act together the next big game to hit the shelves is going to do to WoW what WoW did to EQ/FFXI.

The average player life in a MMORPG is about 1 year. WoW has hit that point. Players are getting restless. The truth is WoW is in its critical days. With other games looming around the corner Bliz is in a position where they MUST put the customers first.

So in summation, yes Bliz does owe us all (the players) something. They owe us a game where we can run instances without getting booted from player buffs. A game where players' armor doesn't randomly disappear after patch day (happened to my friend's valor gloves). If I fail to perform my job to standards I can be court martialed. Bliz has it lucky, they just lose $15 a month.

I am in total agreement with all of this. Vanguard here I come.

It's pretty crazy thinking about it though.. that $15 a month, with 6 million active accounts, means a gross income of $90,000,000 for blizzard. That's more than the annual gross domestic product of some countries..


-Annik

It's pretty crazy thinking about it though.. that $15 a month, with 6 million active accounts, means a gross income of $90,000,000 for blizzard. That's more than the annual gross domestic product of some countries..


-Annik

And yet Bill Gates probably pays that for his cable TV every month...

I am in total agreement with all of this. Vanguard here I come.

*falls out of his chair*

enjoy it rofl...it looks awesome :smoke2:

Comparing what else you could do with that $15 is a healthy way to approach it.

Given the amount of time I spend playing this there is no activity that compares (less than 2 movies, a night of bowling, etc...?)

Well for $15 or less I can:
-Hang out with friends (free)
-Go to the gym (free, unlimited access as well)
-Practice martial arts (my usual, go with going to the gym)
-Could take juijitsu class (ok well its $20/month but $5 isn't much considering juijitsu wins on cool points)
-Go to the movies ($3 per movie for me, so that's 5/months if there was something I really cared to see)
-Ride my motorcycle (if I was to spend an equal amount of time on my bike as I do on WoW a month, gas would be less than $15. But I do ride more so I guess I can't really say this)

Anyways I suppose its a matter of relevance. WoW was never a real significant part of my day or week or month. However I can think of many healthier and more fulfilling ways to spend my money (regardless of price) than a video game. Especially one that doesn't really have everything worked out. I'll admit, I'll probably try the expansion. But its just more instances/raids. OK we get a couple new races but that's not really that exciting. Its just more of the same. I don't know if its really going to keep my interest. Grinding for a slightly better piece of moose horns isn't really my idea of fun. There better be major content. Not just new zone but a developed story to go with them. That has always been one of my biggest problems with WoW, its like the major plot stopped at level 10 when I left darnassus. Incorporating cut scenes during quest completions and such wouldn't hurt either. Even if it was just on quests central to the major story.

Anyways I suppose if I was to play 5-8 hours a day it would be one thing. But then I'd have other problems to be worrying about. And you know, you don't have to clear MC in 1 night. Maybe 1...2 hours tops is really the healthy limit. And with that in mind there are a lot of other things that can be done with $15. Like troll the forums :elfbiggri

I hear you on the content, there really needs to be a better narrative thread. I get into some quests and then poof, goes nowhere, on to the next random quest line.

I think the best would be if there were some real epic quest chain, not a 5 stepper, but a 50 stepper, maybe one new leg each level and when you reach the top some sort of cinematic. For the casual gamer would make it feel more like youaccoplished something getting to 60. Could even make separate ones for different races and classes so there is an incentive to grind up an alt.

The thing is, there really aren't any better MMO's. I've played UO, EQ, tried EQ2 but no pvp made me say no. and the best I've seen yet is WoW. People would always scream and cry when something doesn't go their way and threaten to leave for greener pastures. The thing I have learned with MMO's is there is no way to make everyone happy (true with a lot of other things but that's besides the point. With EQ they just kept adding expansion after expansion of the same old thing.

"Content" to some people is more raid instances, gear upgrades, etc, while to others it's more quests, more of storyline like Ghost Bear said. It's just hard to please everyone.

e personally, I'd like to see more of a storyline, a really long chain quest that starts when you're low level and ends with a bang at 60 or something to that effect.

The point I guess I'm trying to make is keep giving Blizzard a chance, it'll get better knowing their track record of making great quality games.

Blizz does owe them something. They pay their $15. The problem is that the only recourse to "you're just one customer" is to say "it's not just me".

The next step was to organize. Quite a few pvp mages formed The Mages' Union. The female character that got it all started did so in the Blizz mage subforum, then moved to her own website when her threads were censored.

I thought this was a very interesting situation. Customers, not employees, were organizing themselves to change their relationship with the company. The more moderate, their leader included, created a list of concerns to which Blizzard had little meaningful response. They chose not to recognize the Union.

Unfortunately, the downfall of The Mages' Union was that they picked up all the extremists along the way. They tended to be the more vocal among the bunch on the Blizzard forums. As a consequence the moderate, reasonable bunch were driven away.

The difference between the situation in WoW and the complints in EQ are that in WoW the mages, at least, chose to organize themselves. Verant EQ chose to ignore things like class message boards. Sony came around when they took over. They would regularly post on the Fires of Heaven, Mage Compendium, and Graffe boards.

Sony found that very reasonable consensus from a class can be reached on uncensored third-party forums. I believe the WoW following, while large, is still too young to organize. It will come, in time, as will Blizzard's recognition of third-party vendors.

Grinding for a slightly better piece of moose horns isn't really my idea of fun. There better be major content. Not just new zone but a developed story to go with them. That has always been one of my biggest problems with WoW, its like the major plot stopped at level 10 when I left darnassus. Incorporating cut scenes during quest completions and such wouldn't hurt either. Even if it was just on quests central to the major story.I have this same feeling. After bringing up a few characters to various levels I've seen most of the game. Sure, I've missed a collection quest here and that Timbermaw faction there. I'm pretty sure I've thouroughly explored every zone in the game save some parts of BWL and AQ.

Attending MC with my druid for the first night can be flat out boring. Two hounds and a few annhiliator is fun. We grind out 3-3.5 hours and clear to Domo. Day two is alot better. We've one-shotted him the last few weeks now.

Rags is getting better. Our organization through the transitions needs work and we're far from it. I do enjoy watching us get better.

That's my new content. Domo and Rags. The spot where they actually put in a great quest line (AQ opening) requires and absurd grind. It's far from what one would do solo, far from the reward you'd expect for the work.

The cut scence from when you create a level 1. That's what I expected to continue as well.

Yes, Blizzard owe us.

The amount of money doesn't make us more or less worthy of a good customer service.

The price is related to what they offer, the quality of the product can't change. If you think that way then all the fast food restaurants could give you crappy customer service, but they don't because they would lose their customers if they did.

Hell even if they didn't charge the monthly fee but charged for the game they would have to offer top notch quality. You paied you have the right to be well served.

Of course that they can't listen to all the complains and in the end the decision are made by them but i bet they read the forums and take in consideration something that is being mentioned in all the forums and by all the classes.

And finally as WoW being the best game i really believe that it is not fair to compare UO, EQ and WoW because the technology used is completely different. It evolved a huge lot from one to the other.

Tarrasque

HAHA, do the math here: 6,000,000*$15 = $90,000,000.00/month in revenue... Now this figure is likely a bit exaggerated, because if you read that press release a bit more critically, you see how Blizzard defines users.

World of Warcraft's Customer Definition
World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules. http://www.blizzard.com/press/060228.shtml

This means that if Joe WoWer, purchased a box with a free month included, but never took the plunge and paid a recurring fee, he is included in this number. I think it also means that if Jane WoWer played for a couple months, but then deactivated her subscription, she is also included in that number??

So, if you factor in some Enron accounting, perhaps you have 3 million ACTIVE subscribers (using 1/2 their figure as a completely arbitray number :elfbiggri ), they are still grossing $45,000,000.00/month... OR $540,000,000.00/year (btw, I'm using digits just for the added dramatic effect) :eek:

Now, how many employees you think they actually need to maintain <100 servers? 10? 20? How many game engineers they employ to continually stay on the cutting edge of MMORPG's? 10? 20? Finally, how many Customer Service Reps/GMs they need 24/7 to answer the needs of WoW? 25? 50? Let's say all told, they employ 200 people JUST to maintain WoW in some shape or feral form (another completely arbitrary figure), and the average pay for each of these employees, factoring in benefits, is, say: $50,000.00/year (random figure I pulled outta my ass again), that adds up to about $833,400.00/month in employee costs. Round that number to a cool million for overhead expenses...THEY ARE STILL NETTING $44 MILLION/MONTH. For that kind of cash, I EXPECT TOP NOTCH SERVICE. Shouldn't we all??

Please remember that I am not an accountant, nor do I TRULY have ANY idea how much it costs to run WoW (left out tons of stuff like marketing expense, R&D etc..), just thought I would throw a bunch of :bs: numbers together to make an entirely invalid argument :deadhorse

The issue of Computer Gaming World that featured the expansion actually had a sidebar about where every dollar we pay goes. I"ll post the percentages when I get home after lecture this evening.

I'd like to see that.

The thing is, there really aren't any better MMO's. I've played UO, EQ, tried EQ2 but no pvp made me say no. and the best I've seen yet is WoW. People would always scream and cry when something doesn't go their way and threaten to leave for greener pastures. The thing I have learned with MMO's is there is no way to make everyone happy (true with a lot of other things but that's besides the point. With EQ they just kept adding expansion after expansion of the same old thing.

"Content" to some people is more raid instances, gear upgrades, etc, while to others it's more quests, more of storyline like Ghost Bear said. It's just hard to please everyone.

e personally, I'd like to see more of a storyline, a really long chain quest that starts when you're low level and ends with a bang at 60 or something to that effect.

The point I guess I'm trying to make is keep giving Blizzard a chance, it'll get better knowing their track record of making great quality games.

Those long quest lines look very very interesting. Obviously it shouldn't be like continuous but say every 2-5 levels, you continue on with the quest. I guess because storyline dies fairly quick.

All those whiners need to grow up. $15/month isn't too much considering how many hours most people put into playing the game. That was one of the things that held me back but a wise woman in the kitchen told me that it wouldn't matter as long as it was time well spent. There's no price for entertainment. Have any of you seen the queues for Blackrock during peak hours? Often exceeds 1000 people, learn to do something else within that time. If life was perfect, life would be dull.

Stop f**king whining, Blizzard isn't on vacation while servers are down or anything. They're workign their asses off and teh GMs are quite nice. And I've also heard that Blizzard isn't that big of a company for the amount of success that they have had.

Those long quest lines look very very interesting. Obviously it shouldn't be like continuous but say every 2-5 levels, you continue on with the quest. I guess because storyline dies fairly quick.

All those whiners need to grow up. $15/month isn't too much considering how many hours most people put into playing the game. That was one of the things that held me back but a wise woman in the kitchen told me that it wouldn't matter as long as it was time well spent. There's no price for entertainment. Have any of you seen the queues for Blackrock during peak hours? Often exceeds 1000 people, learn to do something else within that time. If life was perfect, life would be dull.

Stop f**king whining, Blizzard isn't on vacation while servers are down or anything. They're workign their asses off and teh GMs are quite nice. And I've also heard that Blizzard isn't that big of a company for the amount of success that they have had.

Normally I would agree, but this latest nonsense with the authentication server is really annoying me. Last night before "emergency maintenance" on the authentication server, I could log in within a minute or 2... now with the "improved performance" they claim, I wait 10 minutes to see "Unable to Connect," funny how their authentication server also controls logins on the website. That way they dont have to hear diddly from anybody about the authentication server. Overall they do a good job, but the past 36-48 hours... they have been screwin the pooch in a major fashion.