Under Pressure

The announcement yesterday that World of Warcraft had dropped to 7.6 Million subscriptions, was a shock to most people. Everybody was expecting a far greater decline. All the bloggers I have read recently, are feeling it, (with the exception of Alternative Chat) and the forums and comment sections are getting very angry. The Grumpy Elf even asked whether Blizzard have "Bitten off more than they can chew". Grumpy argued that the delay in development is done to the art team, being a bottleneck for all the new content. The revamped models are obviously taking a lot longer than intended and the need to get them done and dusted is causing delays in the new expansion. Designing buildings for the Garrison must be a piece of cake in comparison.

The general consensus is that Q1 was not going to be the major problem with this expansion and that Q2 would be the danger zone for unsubs. Alternative Chat has highlighted some interesting PTR features which look like Blizzard is trying to create an interest in repeatable content. WoWhead have datamined "Gaze of the Black Prince" and "Heart of the Valorous". These two features will cut a huge swathe through the Legendary Cloak questline. The Gaze of the Black Prince will probably require at least one character to have completed the questline, but it is easy to see how appealing this feature might be to people looking for a reason to keep playing during a barren period. It has certainly piqued my interest, and I am looking into a whole string of possible uses.

Having only recently obtained the cloak and witnessed the huge impact on my performance in a group situation, I am willing to suggest that I can now attain double the damage since I obtained my wings. Even with the number squeeze, (no impact allegedly) this is going to help dramatically on the journey from 90-100, not that levelling is supposed to be difficult in the modern MMO (especially WoW).

Alternative Chat is right to highlight the PvP problem part of the questline, but I feel that with the improved PvP gear from the Weekly Celestials  (iLevel 550 in case you have not done it for awhile), that hopefully it will be slightly less painful. I like to occasionally PvP but these 2 Battlegrounds are not on my list of favourites.

If this idea does get through Blizzard's Quality Control department, I expect an implementation sooner rather than later. Q2 might be a little less kind than Q1.