Monday, October 31, 2011

Poll Results: Blizzcon Reaction

Based on an impression that the reaction to Blizzcon and Pandaria was generally strongly positive or strongly negative, I asked the following poll question:

What was your reaction to Blizzcon?
  • Pandas = Jumped The Shark. Will never pay Blizzard again. - 42 Votes, 32%
  • Signed up for the year-long subscription. - 28 Votes, 21% (includes my vote)
  • Something in between these two extremes. - 60 Votes, 46%
There is indeed a silent moderate plurality in between the two extremes, and it's possible that these folks would take the lead in a legitimate random scientific poll.  Even so, I wonder if Blizzard may actually be happy with these sorts of numbers. 

There's a solid core - larger than I had expected - who like the direction the game is taking enough to make the long term commitment.  There are a larger number, at least amongst those who are willing to come to blogs to vote and comment, who are dissatisfied, but how many of those were really going to be in Blizzard's corner for the long haul in any case? 

Where cash store mounts are concerned, I've long maintained that anyone willing to cancel their subscription over a cosmetic mount was already on their way out the door for other reasons.  An entire expansion of Pandaren may be a bigger impact on the tone of the game, but I think the direction of WoW (both in general and under the recent dev team) is reasonably well understood at this point.  Perhaps in this context, it actually makes sense that so many people already know what they think of the expansion.

3 comments:

  1. Sadly, the "solid core" you refer to appears to be well within margin of error for the crazification factor.

    A bit low, actually.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am totally not the demographic to be answering this question so I'll go with universal fact.

    Anthropomorphic wolves > anthropomorphic drunk pandas

    ReplyDelete
  3. I voted for the middle path, but it has to be said that I had no particular desire or intent to play WoW again anyway. The expansion seemed to me to be unremarkable and no more interesting than any other WoW news. Only the reaction has caught my attention.

    I do like the melee healer thing though.

    ReplyDelete

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