WoW Loses 2.9M Subs

According to Blizzard’s recently released quarterly financial report, World of Warcraft is down 2.9 million subscribers since last quarter. WoW had rose from 7.4 million subs in Q3 2014 to about 10 million subs in Q4 2014 after the Warlords of Draenor launch. It is now back down to 7.1; Slightly below the pre-expansion numbers.

Not really that unexpected but still somewhat surprising as losing nearly 3 million subscribers is a pretty sharp decline, even for a 10 year old MMO. The fact that Warlords of Draenor has offered literally no player retention has to sting a bit. The recent expansion has thus far represents bot the largest expansion spike as well as the largest expansion drop to date.

If I had to take a guess at what I thought the main culprit would be, garrisons are a fairly obvious choice. They kind of had a lot riding on the garrisons and though I liked them a lot at first, investing that much time in the garrisons in my opinion at least, did not pay off. The garrison quests and benefits are little more than a chore now. I think guild housing would have been a better option. One can only spend so much time sitting in their own personal instance.

The WoW Garrison Mission Reward Rule of Probability

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The Garrison Mission Reward Rule of Probability: The actual probability of obtaining a reward that you really want sharply decreases as the limit of displayed success percentage approaches 100. So if say, the game says that you have a 92% change of obtaining an epic trinket. The actual chance of success is probably closer to LOLNOPE at best. This rule is particularly true for epic rewards of iLevel 645 or higher.

*Sigh* I was really looking forward to that trinket. Oh, out of 14 missions completed, zero salvage crates were received.

Keiya’s Level 3 Garrison Build

This would be how my garrison is currently built. If it matters, I am currently level 100 and fairly casual. Still working on obtaining the garrison resources and achievements to upgrade everything to level 3.

Barracks (Large): I dropped the Dwarven Bunker in favor of picking up the Barracks once again. The plethora of easy missions in combination with the Level 3 Salvage yard yields a LOT of salvage and follower upgrades; Way more than the Dwarven Bunker ever did. Plus, Level 2 Barracks = can assign a bodyguard to follow you around, and Level 3 barracks = 5 more followers.

Stables (Large): Not having to dismount while poking at treasures and what not while in zones that aren’t Nagrand is pretty spiffy.  Also: Mounts and easy quests that yield garrison resources.

Lunarfall Inn (Medium): Once a week I can recruit a follower with an ability or trait of my choosing. Super awesome for grabbing followers with rare traits such as Epic Mount and Scavenger. Also, a source of dungeon daily quests; Some of which have pretty nifty rewards: Aviana’s Feather, Everbloom Peachick, Sentinel’s Companion, Ever-Blooming Frond, Oralius’ Whispering Crystal.

Lumber Mill (Medium): At some point I would like to replace the Lumber Mill with something else, probably after obtaining enough resources to upgrade all garrison buildings to level 3. The Barn would be my first replacement choice since at Level 3 it has a chance at allowing you to harvest Savage Blood, which is needed for gear upgrades.

Salvage Yard (Small): The Level 3 Salvage Yard crates pop pretty often and usually yield quite a bit of stuff. Mostly crap greens, but occasionally follower upgrade tokens. If you do not do so already, always check the 3D models on the BoE greens. If they look unique or nice, odds are that they will auction pretty well for people seeking transmog gear. I’ve made several thousand gold just by doing that and selling off extra garrison mats on my phone…

2x Profession buildings (Small): The Blacksmithing building is nice to have around for the sake of having a forge + the follower buff + extra mats. Aside from that, I don’t really feel the need to upgrade either of these to level 3 until the other buildings are done.

The Molten Core Redux

Suffice it to say, now that both my husband and I have our 10th anniversary achievements and core hound mounts, we have no current future plans on ever setting another foot into the Molten Core for the duration of our WoW career. But then again, that’s what we said about 9 to 10 years ago. Pretty smooth second attempt at the achievement (considering that we actually completed the instance instead of having the raid break out dramatically after Lucifron). Also, I didn’t know that the crown was an actual useful item; I figured it was purely for transmog. Nifty.

Personal Loot and Stuff [WoW: WoD]

I had kind of a whiny post prepared whinging about Blizzard reverting the LFG personal loot system back to need and greed, but it appears that it was reverted back the next day the next to so all is well I guess. I am a bit surprised that they reverted it as soon as they did; Typical Blizzard turnaround time is Soon™ not soon.

The final boss for each dungeon is apparently, now guaranteed to drop a piece of loot to everyone in the group, which I think is fantastic and should hopefully mitigate the problem of group members leaving after completing whatever boss it is they are farming. I really have a severe dislike for the time wasted by PuG loot roll drama and the personal loot system seems to alleviate that problem.

WoW’s 10th anniversary goodies are out. We tried queueing for the Molten Core last night, but the wait was too long for how late it was in the evening so we were forced to drop out. I am assuming that a full run is going to take at least 2 hours for a random LFR group. I am pretty sure that I swore to never set another foot into the Molten Core ever again after completing literally at least a hundred if not more guild runs back in the day. But that mount is pretty spiffy so you know…

I used my free level 90 boost on Doombeard, my hunter. I know it’s probably wasted on him given that he was boosted a whole 7 levels, but I really did not feel like playing any other character other than my hunter or my paladin and I really wasn’t digging finishing the Cataclysm content and then trudging through Mists of Pandaria before I can finally setup a second garrison. Also, ore farming. It’s been about 4 years since I had last done anything with my hunter other than use him as a glorified mule. I don’t remember how to play him and my action bars are in a state of disarray

Ding: Level 100

I dinged off of a follower quest. When it said that the reward was a significant increase to character experience, they weren’t messing around because that was a huge chunk of XP off of just one thing. In general WoW news: Everyone is getting 5 free days of WoW for the major server meltage at launch and Tuesday evening marked the second day in a row in which I was able to log on to WoW at prime time with no queue and no lag. So all in all, everything is once again okay in the World of Warcraft.

I had a pretty interesting LFG experience on Monday evening. It is always kind of a bummer having to wait an hour in the instance queue only to have the group fall apart and fail mid instance. I guess it is a pretty bad sign however, that I ended up (successfully) Retribution tanking the two bosses after the tank had died about 10 seconds into the fight. I really don’t know how monk tanks are supposed to work since I kind of skipped most of that expansion, but I am pretty sure it’s not like that. My husband takes that as an omen that I should start tanking once again so that our queue times decrease. We will have to see about that…

Really looking forward to doing the train instance. Certain people need to hurry their asses up so that we can queue for it tonight. Poke poke poke.

Which Character Do I Boost to 90?

I am in a bit of a conundrum as to which character I should instantly boost to level 90. One thing to keep in mind is that I am really not an alt person; The only character that I really care about playing is my paladin. My one and only high level alt has mainly served as a profession mule which is why boosting a level 60+ character looks like a pretty attractive option at this point. My current options are:

  1. Use it on my level 83 hunter: This option is probably a huge waste but my hunter is the only other alt that I really ever play and I really really really don’t feel like finishing the Cataclysm content and then trudging through MoP. The main advantage of course would be the profession boost. I would probably end up dropping alchemy and scooping up either jewel crafting or something else before the boost.
  2. Rush my level 45 Druid to 60 and then boost him: My top choice so far. I would still benefit from the professions boost and would have a tertiary high level alt that is capable of healing, tanking, or casting. Also assuming that I do eventually level my hunter, 3 garrisons > 2 garrisons.
  3. Use it on another class outside of my comfort zone: Probably a warlock or a priest. Eh.

Assuming that I do go with either the first or second option, I would need to decide in which professions to boost. I have enchanting and blacksmithing on my paladin. My husband recommends weed picking and tailoring to make bags. 

Keiya’s Level 2 Garrison Build

I have built my garrison up with leveling and questing in mind. I have no doubt that once I upgrade to garrison level 3 or if I choose to raid in this expansion pack, my build will change.

Dwarven Bunker (Large): The Dwarven Bunker has an awesome, if not the best Level 1 perk for leveling: It doubles your chance of receiving a random item upgrade from quest rewards and increases the potency of the upgrade. So instead of receiving a green or blue quest item, I quite often receive blue or even purple items instead. It works on any quest reward, including followers by the way.

Lumber Mill (Medium): It is to my understanding that until you are at least at garrison level 3, the Lumber Mill is probably your best best since it yields extra garrison resources for poking at trees that you find while out and about in Draenor. It takes a little under 13k garrison resources to upgrade to level and I think someone calculated it out to be a month’s time approximately, so every little bit helps.

Enchanter’s Study (Small): The enchanting building is great if you don’t have enchanting or anyone to hitch a ride off of since it lets you disenchant gear in your garrison. If you do have enchanting, it allows you to get patterns and extra mats. Between my two professions, I find enchanting more useful than blacksmithing.

Salvage Yard (Small): Allows you to receive Salvage from missions, which have a chance of dropping items for your followers or something like that. I’m taking the Internet’s word on this one. I just built this and have not receiving anything useful to date.

Warlords of Draenor: Day 3

Ding level 94. I actually got a decent chunk of unhindered WoW play time in today (since we were out most of the day yesterday and I absolutely refuse to take time off of work for WoW); We had managed to logon just before the queue started so go us I guess? I haven’t had a chance to do any of the new instances yet. We were going to run one this morning before heading out to run errands, but my gear level was slightly too low.

The unscheduled maintenance as well as me probably falling out of leveling sync with the majority of the realm seems to have hammered out the in-game latency problems that I was experiencing on Thursday. The queue, which I am sitting in at this moment, however is still quite silly. I guess if anyone was on the fence regarding purchasing the expansion pack now or waiting, waiting for at least a week or two would probably a more prudent decision.

Leveling up in Warlords of Draenor feels more or less inconsequential. Instead of getting a talent point to spend every other level or so, we now instead get a randomly chosen perk which may or may not be useful. In my case, it leans towards ‘not.’ Yippee.

I am pretty surprised at how large of a role the garrisons are in this expansion pack. I had figured that they would at best, be a moderately sized minigame with a couple of perks, bht they are actually an integral part of both gameplay as well as the storyline; I guess after saving the world of Azeroth several times over, we deserve a to feel important. Having fun mentally planning out how I want to optimize my garrison on my main and alt.

In internet drama news: The r/WoW was shut down due to general Internet tantrumming. Still unclear if the new “official” World of Warcraft subreddit is /r/realWoW or /r/WorldofWarcraft.

Warlords of Draenor: Day 1

Warlords of Draenor marks the first expansion pack in which I did not order the physical copy of the Collector’s Edition to add to our shelf. Part of me feels mildly sad that we won’t be adding to the Blizzard shelf, but the majority of me knows that it’s probably not worth paying $20 more for a couple of toys that I will likely never use. I purchased WoD and logged in yesterday morning. Everything was awesome and near empty until I had caught up with virtually everyone else on the server (after completing the introductory quest line and hopping on the boat), at which point the game started to go slow as balls.

Proudmoore definitely wasn’t empty last night, to say the least. I happened to get home from work and also happened to sign on just as the server was starting back up from a crash so, no queue time for me! My husband on the other hand literally had to wait almost the entire evening to sign on. I don’t recall the previous two WoW expansion pack launches having a queue over several thousand (or much of a queue at all) and I don’t recall having that much of a lag problem. Several people have suspected that not having a secondary starting zone or a new race/class to split the player base may be part of the issue. Then again, I don’t recall the previous two expansion packs being DDOS’d on launch either.

Aide from queueing and server issues: Ding, level 91. Enjoying the garrison thing so far even though it’s obviously the WoW version of one of those mobile apps.