Massively^™

40% came back? Thats a pretty substantial amount.

And of course there are the guys like me they don't even count who left for AoC, quit (took me a bit) but aren't touching WoW again. Ouch.

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I was one. The only reason I'm still not laying AoC is purely due to instability. Memory leaks, crashes, bugs, etc. Why should I continue to pay money for that? I'll come back once they have sorted it out, maybe.

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I left WoW to blog about an unreleased MMO, however, I have several RL friends who quit WoW for AoC and two months later 100% of them are returning to WoW until WAR releases.

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I'm not surprised Blizzard has felt the dent, as AoC released in EU/US/Aus and that's where fewer of their 10 million subscribers are from; however, I'm not surprised to see AoC doesn't do too well at retaining their players, especially so early on after launch.

Guess what, Warhammer will also put a temporary dent in Blizzard's numbers, but it may or may not last; it might however kill AoC for good.

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Between Guild Wars, Age of Conan (in a few months anyway, with kinks worked out), and Warhammer out soon, I would hope people would graduate from WoW already...

Seriously, WoW is great and all, but I've never quite understood or thought it deserved the popularity it got.

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It seems if AoC would not have had so many problems, they would have made a much bigger dent in WoW.

I think if Mythic makes a game that is fun and captivating, they will take far more away from WoW - and keep them. Wrath is an interesting expansion, but it is a lot of the "same". Blizzard is borrowing working ideas from other games for Wrath, yet I am unsure if that would be enough for me.

I think a lot of players are ready for a new experience, but one close enough to WoW that they feel comfortable. WAR is looking up to being just that.

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I hope that War kills WoW off in the us, WoW is stale, old and boring and AoC seems to be a total flop.

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Age of Conan sold as many copies in 1 month as WoW did in an entire holiday season. While we don't know the current subscriber numbers, if even half those people kept a subscription AoC would still be the second highest subscription-based MMO around behind WoW, even if it never sold a single other copy.

In other words: nasty comments from the same three people on Massively do not a failure make.

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I think a under discussed chunk of prospective WaR customers are the old, grey beard table toppers like me. Out of probably 25 table top warhammer players I know, only 4 have ever played an mmo. But every single one of them is going to play war, at least until the 40k version comes out. That's not a big sampling of people but it is a huge statement about the opportunity mythic has to draw new people to the genre. And who knows, once some of these lead mini elitists get a taste of MMO's it may be that mythic actually brings WoW more customers in the long run!

I left wow to play aoc, got to 80, got incredibly bored and started shopping around for something new. I have discovered more than one really awesome game since that occurred too. One thing to say for aoc, it got me away from wow long enough to realize it wasn't the only game out there!

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I'm one of those players. I played WoW for over a year, only had a lvl 68 character in that time (I'm a very casual player. I must get on average 10 hours of game time a month) and I decided to try Conan.

My first impression was this game is pretty nice, good graphics. But it soon wore off. It had a lot of bugs the client hanged a few times there were issues, the loading screens were just annoying. The UI is unable to scale. Now I play on a 30" Monitor and I have the graphical horse-power to run my games at 2560x1600. I play every game I own at that resolution. But because Age of Conan doesn't allow its UI to scale its like I need a magnifying glass to see the heads up display. Text is unreadable, the mini-map looks like a tiny blob on my screen.. so I have to play it at 1920x1200 which looks a little blurry as its not my monitors native resolution.

And of course once you get out of the lvl 20 starting zone the game changes radically it doesn't have that shine. The NPC's no longer talk to you, no voice acting just text, it feels like a cheaper game at that point.

And yes, I went back to WoW. The addons avalible for WoW are vast, there is a lot of entertaining things to do, theres no loading screens on the continent your on, the UI scales to whatever resolution I want to run it at. And although it doesn't have voice acting it never teased me with it at the start and then take it away.

I look back at my time in Age of Conan and I can really only think of 2 positive things that I liked about it over other MMO's I've played.

1. Quest objective indicators, no need to go to a fan-site which may contain some malicious banner that lifts my login info just to find out where some guy I need to speak to is or some monster I need to slay is spawning.

2. Graphics, they were really nice I hope future MMO's take on this level of graphical quality which I thought you really only see in single player RPG's like Oblivion.

I can't wait for Guild Wars 2 - That will be the 'next' MMO that I try, considering it doesn't have a subscription it may be enough to get me away from WoW for the foreseeable. Not that I hate WoW I've just been playing it for a long time and I'd like another game that I can play to get away from it for a while.

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Yep and it will be the SAME for WARHAMMER some people will quit WoW for it and sure that like 40% return maybe more like Warhammer does not even have the graphics after gone tru the feeling of where are my friends and I not like this game and so on.

Warhammer will go the same road that AoC did everyone known by known that there is a 1 year rule for jump on the next marketing wagon.

People do not understand its not the people grapics or game that make WoW great its the only MMO that not really is a MMO to start with like WoW got a real low entry level and plays like a beat them up. Most new players do not have to worry about stats and so on and really like 80% of the people that Play WoW do not even like real MMOs they want there things setup for them easy and that is where Warhammer will fail to high entry level and way to hard to understand.

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