MassivelyOP’s not-so-serious end-of-the-year awards continue today with our award for the Best worst MMO chart. The Golden Yachties series is our run of fauxwards, named in honor of somebody we’ve long forgotten from Old Massively who insisted that surely we make so much money that we’re typing MMO blog posts from a gold-plated yacht. (Joke’s on you; it was always silver. Gold is too heavy.)
And the winner is…
Blizzard’s mystery line
Oh, come on, you knew when you clicked on this what it would be about.
Last spring, Blizzard reps presented a graph at GDC purporting to show the game’s subscribers from 2016 to 2024. There were several problems with this graph, starting with the fact that there is no label or scale on the Y axis, meaning that not only can you not tell what the subscribers actually were, you also cannot guess whether the scale of the Y axis is linear or logarithmic. Blizzard’s obfuscation was kinda gross, and MOP’s Eliot neatly eviscerated the company’s little sleight of hand here, but not before credulous influencers tried to fill in the blanks in a way that just so happened to support the exact assumptions Blizzard hoped we’d make but didn’t actually back up with data.
“The part of this that bothers me is that this trend line tells a lie, and a whole lot of people starved for information – a whole lot of people who should absolutely know better than to be manipulated – fell for it. It does so in a way that is very insidious and subtle by acting like it isn’t a lie but a puzzle you can figure out, which certain figures in our industry were happy to do on video for attention. But it’s not actually a puzzle; it’s a lie that looks sufficiently puzzle-like that you can trick yourself into thinking that you can figure it out. It pissed me off when Nexon did the same thing a few years back, and it pisses me off when Activision the Blizzard Engine does it right the hell now.”
Our parody of the chart is actually just as useful as the real thing!
Want to nominate another winner? Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to check out our serious MMO awards while you’re at it, or skim through our past “winners”: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.
