There is this recurring question of how BFA is doing compared to other expansions. As if, OK, we know that BFA started kind of terrible, but does this really reflect on player numbers? T&E are optimistic, right? We just had a new raid, right? And we have some videos talking big things about 8.2, right? (Frankly, on videos talking big things about 8.2 in particular, I read the transcripts and I don’t find them very promising. It seems to me people miss that most of the talks are hypotheticals and not actually something coming. But whatever.)
Here is a simple chart comparing player activity for Legion and BFA:
https://i.imgur.com/LH0q2TM.png
This is a composite chart. I took the chart for Legion, then the chart for BFA and scaled them to the same vertical scale. The left part of the chart is for Legion, months up to Dec are 2016, then 2017. The right part of the chart is for BFA, months up to Dec are 2018, then 2019.
We can see that the numbers for BFA are definitely lower overall than for Legion.
We can see that no, BFA was not bad enough to just dive and hit the ground. But that it is absolutely doing worse than Legion did is unequivocal.