Has WoW lost a lot of players?

cheyane

I left classic after a time as I found that as I expected I could never really recapture that feeling from 2004-2005 and although I was not expecting to it definitely coloured my own experience. I was also very disillusioned by some of the community problems and my own lethargic response to something I wanted like forever. I realised that I wasn't that invested and nothing really worked the way I thought it would.

This was very different from my P99 Everquest experience which I enjoyed far more and in spite of not having the feeling I had in 1999 I was able to enjoy the game far longer than I did with Classic. I thought I was alone in this but apparently not. This article in massively overpowered suggests otherwise.

https://massivelyop.com/2020/02/21/superdata-visions-of-nzoth-boosted-world-of-warcraft-subs-but-its-lost-tons-since-wow-classics-2019-peak/

"Of most interest to MMORPG players, the analytics firm also sheds some new light on how World of Warcraft is doing, especially since Blizzard stopped releasing sub numbers and the recent earnings call made multiple explicit claims from Bobby Kotick and other Activision-Blizzard reps about how the addition of WoW Classic “doubled the size of the active World of Warcraft community in the second half of 2019.” Kotick did not, as we noted at the time, claim that Classic had actually held those numbers through the end of the year. And now we know it definitely didn’t – and that he knew that as he talked it up anyway during the call. Here’s SuperData’s statement:

“The new World of Warcraft update Visions of N’Zoth successfully turned around declining user numbers. Subscriber numbers grew 17% from December to January (not including China). However, they were still down substantially (64%) from August 2019, the month World of Warcraft Classic was released.”

If we’re reading that right, WoW’s sub base spiked way up in August, then plummeted over the course of the fall, then perked back up a bit in January – but Blizzard still lost the majority of subs it had picked up with Classic over the quarter.'

Dibdabs

Everyone was wearing rose-tinted nostalgia spectacles and thought Classic would be awesome.  It wasn't.

cheyane

https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guilds-have-already-disbanded-because-of-bwl/128383

Although the title of the thread is not what I want to highlight just read the discussion below it.


They talk about how guild members just stopped without even saying they are leaving. How it is becoming difficult to find the necessary numbers for the content. It is an eye opener  for me at least because that is exactly how I dropped off too.


One post on the thread 

"Another “not struggling because BWL is hard, but because we can’t get a full raid team”-guild here. /wave

We started leaking raiders (badly) already during the holidays and after clearing 3/8 in BWL during the first week with only 32 people, we simply couldn’t get enough signups to give it a proper shot during the second week despite our recruitment officers working their behinds off, which of course left to even more people leaving.
Now the domino-effect is in full swing, and I’m expecting either a disband or a merge within the coming week.

It’s the perfect storm right now basically;

• People leave the game because they’re bored after 6 months of Classic.
• People took a break during the holidays and couldn’t be arsed to come back.
• People leave their guilds because BWL posed more of a challenge than they anticipated and hope a different guild will have more/better people.
• People got comfortable clearing MC for months so when they actually start wiping again, they stop playing. (quite common whenever a new tier drops.)

All in all, a lot of guilds are seemingly having troubles filling their rosters right now, and players are ping-pong:ing left and right because they know they’ll get recruited."

Balticthunder

It was funny how it all began - people stood in lines for quest mobs, everyone was sooooo friendly and helpful, like in old days, forum posts about great community and how classic is the best MMO experience since long time and then... somebody said "screw it, it's 2019 outside!"  and all hell break loose lol.

It turned out that all those casual moms and dads with jobs and families can became fanatical try hards just to show each other or "somebody out there" who's the BEST at the game now!

The magic has long gone, now it is only numbers and quotas to fill.

BruceYee

I'm still playing classic leveling up my dwarves and still having fun.

TEKK3N

A drop after the first rush was expected.
I still think Classic has more players than retail though.
And considering that Classic has no future (Aka non new content planned), it’s still an amazing feature.

What if Blizzard announced they will keep investing in Classic?
My guess is that far more people would stick with it.

cheyane

At the 6.07 point onwards where he discusses WoW.


People are also not happy with the coming "corruption" gear in Shadowlands the coming expansion to retail WoW. It seems it is turning WoW into an ARPG- like game. 

jimmywolf

 despite the endless topic every month/year wondering why WoW is/has/will die/not fun, it still moving along with a player base even if it dwindled down to a million players that still good numbers we don't need 10+ million to justice why something is good or for someone to enjoy it. in fact it leads to more imbalance as everyone has a opinion on  " how to make something great again." while others are saying, " it fine, don't touch it ". 



for myself i still enjoy classic and play randomly on and off, the thing that keep me not fully invested, is it a game i played for years and know it very well, so the drive too keep going is less but i still enjoy exploring on the side. the tipping point for me was after WOTLK,  i did not like how they handle unlocking new things with each new Xpac, with more times gates that before felt like a option  to  grind and get something now felt forced and drawn out for the sake of padding short content.



 

AAAMEOW

It is probably expected, when an mmorpg is released there is an influx of players who play a couple of month and quit.

I also heard people saying 90% of people who are on free trial of any mmorpg never stayed more than 2 month.

kitarad

It's not too shabby still number 7 on Superdata list. Don't see ESO or FFXIV up there do you, still WoW. It is a 16 year old game and Classic definitely breathed some life to the numbers but it is on a decline and that is probably just the fact that it is an old game.

TEKK3N

kitarad said:

It's not too shabby still number 7 on Superdata list. Don't see ESO or FFXIV up there do you, still WoW. It is a 16 year old game and Classic definitely breathed some life to the numbers but it is on a decline and that is probably just the fact that it is an old game.

I would say that Classic doesn’t have any new content planned.
I guess many people are unwilling to commit their time to a game that has no future.
Add to this that many raiding guilds have already exhausted the available content and you get the picture.

kitarad

TEKK3N said:

kitarad said:

It's not too shabby still number 7 on Superdata list. Don't see ESO or FFXIV up there do you, still WoW. It is a 16 year old game and Classic definitely breathed some life to the numbers but it is on a decline and that is probably just the fact that it is an old game.

I would say that Classic doesn’t have any new content planned.
I guess many people are unwilling to commit their time to a game that has no future.
Add to this that many raiding guilds have already exhausted the available content and you get the picture.

Yes that is definitely a real problem. How many times can you do the same content over and over again before you are forced to admit it is simply not something you enjoy.

Theocritus

Short term gratification is 95% of the players though....Most don't look at games for how long they will be playing it.

Panther2103

Plenty of people still playing classic on my friends list (saw 7 people on yesterday compared to the 15 or so when classic came out). I jump on and play when I get the chance, and the server I'm playing on still is quite packed, run into people every single leveling area, and the main towns are still so populated that there is server lag in them (3 second delay on selling sometimes). 

Not sure what people expected. Classic did what people thought it would, it brought people back to the game. A lot of the people still playing classic are people who wouldn't be playing retail so they have still have a gain of population. 

Mackaveli44

Classic wasn't/isn't classic.  Tons of under the hood changes, scaling,  Etc etc.  Some people would argue otherwise but that's ok. Also, I couldn't get into the fact that the content would eventually end. 

Iselin

I was part of that 3 month August bubble last year and towards the end I actually spent more time checking out the regular WOW than Classic and I didn't find enough in either to want to stick around.

There was a good community buzz in Classic at first but I found the game play just tedious and it reinforced what I already thought: that there really is no correlation between slow, awkward mechanics and community.

The great communities we all remember from those good ole days were all about the times and the fun of being online with others in those pre social media days. The very slow fights and other crap mechanics were just part of it that we put-up with just because that's all we knew back then, but they sure as hell were not responsible for creating the good vibes.

Quazal.A

i find this convo a lot of me nodding my head, i love the game, but i was defo part of the 'xmas period drop off' sadly real life is too much for me, trying to work full time, start my own business and play wow is a touch hard.
Yes i log back in, but i was one of the guildies who got to cap quite early (only maybe 6-9 days ) before every one else, so i was happy to help them in BRD etc... then when it came to the guild start raiding i had missed a few weeks due to r/l come back and just couldn't get back into it....
i would love to go back for the gates opening as i missed it when it first happened. but honestly i cannot see this happening, i took a 3 month sub out when it came back, and renewed that last month, but that was more accident than intentional.
I will maybe try and play some next month, but in all honesty cant see it being much more than a day here and there...

To be honest i love it, and loved playing it, but real life was more of a time sink than it used to be, my next hope... and i wonder.. will be the continuation of the WoW storyline, blizz have proven to themselves and the world what they can do with an old game, do we see the next, and most peoples favourite TBC, and maybe evn in a year or 2 WOTLK - after that the game took a dive, but lets be honest anyone who played or plays wow would struggle to name a better expansion then one of them (for me TBC was best....) but i think if TBC came in then i would almost force myself to put more time to thegame, it has more personal feeling for me and just sort of kicked my MMO love in..

gervaise1

cheyane said:

https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guilds-have-already-disbanded-because-of-bwl/128383

Although the title of the thread is not what I want to highlight just read the discussion below it.


They talk about how guild members just stopped without even saying they are leaving. How it is becoming difficult to find the necessary numbers for the content. It is an eye opener  for me at least because that is exactly how I dropped off too.


One post on the thread 

"Another “not struggling because BWL is hard, but because we can’t get a full raid team”-guild here. /wave

We started leaking raiders (badly) already during the holidays and after clearing 3/8 in BWL during the first week with only 32 people, we simply couldn’t get enough signups to give it a proper shot during the second week despite our recruitment officers working their behinds off, which of course left to even more people leaving.
Now the domino-effect is in full swing, and I’m expecting either a disband or a merge within the coming week.

It’s the perfect storm right now basically;

• People leave the game because they’re bored after 6 months of Classic.
• People took a break during the holidays and couldn’t be arsed to come back.
• People leave their guilds because BWL posed more of a challenge than they anticipated and hope a different guild will have more/better people.
• People got comfortable clearing MC for months so when they actually start wiping again, they stop playing. (quite common whenever a new tier drops.)

All in all, a lot of guilds are seemingly having troubles filling their rosters right now, and players are ping-pong:ing left and right because they know they’ll get recruited."

I could see all of these being reasons if the population has dropped - Superdata guess so has to be an if!

Another reason - and maybe why A-B delayed Classic - is the disruption to the servers pre-Classic. Lots of players - but maybe not all - moving will have disrupted things including guilds. What they were like when anyone thought about returning - may not have been pretty. 

Nilden

I love classic I have 2 level 60's so far and play pretty often. It's not nostalgia, I just really enjoy the game.

My problem is Activision-Blizzard as a company is not what made classic. In fact all the higher ups that made classic are gone. Activision is pretty much wearing a Blizzard skin suit.

Activision-Blizzard is just doing horrible with Diablo Immortal, Blitzchung, Warcraft 3: Refunded and firing 800 people in a record year or profit.

Not exactly thrilled that my money is going to end up in a Bobby Kotick version of Scrouge McDucks money bin, but oh well.

delete5230

All ANYONE can do is give their opinion.
Overall it equaled or exceeded what players and company expected. 
-16 years old.
-A fixed amount of content.
-full monthly price tag ($15)

Putting aside nostalgia, IT REALLY PROVES second generation mmorpg's work !

The games has on average 8 months worth of content IF THE PLAYER WERE NEW on first play through.  3 months if expert on content.

The game has 3 years of content of re-playable content for playing both factions and other classes.

If released as new (never seen before) exactly as is, Classic would be #1 and break all records.

Where do I get my numbers ?.... read the first line.


Bottom line..... Everyone enjoyed themselves !

MMOExposed

Told you all, that the mentality of the players have change. The problem with the MMO genre is that the Developers dont actually understand why things are Successful and Why things fail in the MMO genre. Developers really dont know or understand the player base mentality shifts. Its hard to grasp because we humans and tend to have our own egos and think we know whats best, instead of actually stopping and looking at shifts. 

Amaranthar

MMOExposed said:

Told you all, that the mentality of the players have change. The problem with the MMO genre is that the Developers dont actually understand why things are Successful and Why things fail in the MMO genre. Developers really dont know or understand the player base mentality shifts. Its hard to grasp because we humans and tend to have our own egos and think we know whats best, instead of actually stopping and looking at shifts. 

Players don't have any better idea than Developers, it seems. 
What's happened to the gaming community is exactly as predicted by a few.
They 
got tired of the same old rinse and repeat gaming. 
But most still can't quite understand that, and are shifting the cause to anything else because they don't want play anything else. 

See the confusion? Don't want "that" anymore, but don't want anything else. 

Ungood

MMOExposed said:

Told you all, that the mentality of the players have change. The problem with the MMO genre is that the Developers dont actually understand why things are Successful and Why things fail in the MMO genre. Developers really dont know or understand the player base mentality shifts. Its hard to grasp because we humans and tend to have our own egos and think we know whats best, instead of actually stopping and looking at shifts. 

This is a solid point.

DunmerSwit

I'm not surprised. Think I quit around two months in. I had quite a bit of fun playing with my brother, but something just felt terribly off with the game. It wasn't the same experience. Someone mentioned under the hood changes, and this is exactly what I mean. Player-base was terrible too, bunch of cut-throat egoists, although I met a few really cool people on the role-playing servers. Perhaps I was just young and naive the first time around and am wrong on this aspect, but I stand by the altered game values statement.

delete5230

Ungood said:

MMOExposed said:

Told you all, that the mentality of the players have change. The problem with the MMO genre is that the Developers dont actually understand why things are Successful and Why things fail in the MMO genre. Developers really dont know or understand the player base mentality shifts. Its hard to grasp because we humans and tend to have our own egos and think we know whats best, instead of actually stopping and looking at shifts. 

This is a solid point.

Well it's almost a solid point,
Developers knew exactly why things are successful.  Problem being we as players don't like the answer........ "They know everyone plays everything".  With that they make crap games on-line, 30 days of content and sell it. 

The trick worked several times and were on to them now.  BUT ITS TOO LATE !

Developers don't have to care they made their millions, it worked. 

Shaigh

It would be shocking if classic didn't lose a lot of players over 3-6 months when people find themselves out of options of things to do in the game.

It was different during vanilla because you had lots of people jumping in at various points and a majority of players experienced their first mmorpg.

My classic experience was far from being rosecolored, partially because of my state of mind back then and I had zero plan of joining classic. I still did, and I had far more fun doing leveling dungeons than I imagined. The reason I enjoyed it was because I spent two months with leveling and 18 months doing endgame back in the days. 

I quit after three months because I was out of stuff I wanted to do and found no motivation doing the endless gear hunt to do stuff I did to death already.