As the "World of Warcraft: Legion" gears up for its worldwide release date, its developer has expressed apprehensions over how fans have reacted to news of the popular franchise's dwindling subscription rates.
In fact, J Allen Brack, "World of Warcraft" executive producer, described the concern as "a difficult problem" during the recent BlizzCon, according to Polygon.
"One of the problems that we have as a team and that I think the community has as well is this perception that there's a direct relationship between the number that we announce and the health of that community, and the health of that business," Brack explained.
"That's not really true," he pointed out. "I wouldn't say that "World of Warcraft" is necessarily half as successful now as in previous times."
Brack however stressed that the game's shrinking subscriber base has not in any way affected the development of "World of Warcraft: Legion."
"The only thing we can do is focus on good experiences, focus on learning everything that we can and trying to put it into what we're working on and make World of Warcraft the best thing that it can be," Brack said.
To resolve the issue, he said that his team is working on how to make "World of Warcraft" more accessible to both new and old players.
For instance, "World of Warcraft: Legion" will be packaged with a 100 level boost which catapults players to level 100, plus a tutorial segment which will teach them how to use their new high-level character.
Another major concern that Blizzard is trying to address is the long stretch of between the release of its expansion packs.
This is the reason why the gaming company has scheduled the release date of "World of Warcraft: Legion" half a year ahead of its two-year cycle.
"Legion is still speeding up our expansion release schedule quite a bit," the game's producer said. "We definitely want to continue to shrink that time."
In the meantime, gamers have taken to Reddit to express their views over Blizzard's announcement that "World of Warcraft: Legion" will be released on or before Sept. 21, 2016.
"They tried that with Artanis in HotS," Birthday Cookie posted. "It probably made them extra money, sure, but it also made the playerbase want to curl up and die because now we have to deal with 3 weeks of people not knowing what they're doing and blaming it on us instead of just two."
"...it's not a long period of time, but I think time-gating any content from players for whatever reason is bad design," GeneticsGuy said.
"There's no way Blizz can win on release dates, but sadly "Sept 2016" is now the date everybody is going to have in their heads from now till an official date is announced," science comic commented, as fans anxiously await the release date of "World of Warcraft: Legion."
