I’d argue that people disliked them for different reasons.
As a casual pvP player for me wod was great couldn’t fault it. Easy for me to max out my hard player hitting gear, lovely side activities, lovely sense of really solid progression with both my gear/ enchants and garrisons. Characters were pruned but not too badly.
I think people biggest fault with wod was lack of content I can see that I guess but couldn’t say, I felt like I had enough to do and actually liked the fact that for once I felt maxed out for my intended purpose of PvP.
BFA I feel like I will never max out and totally defeated, especially with mythic+ range loot and time gated content does not inspire me to make the extra effort. I also really dislike the feel that my druid now moves like a decrepit old man with dementia as he has less knowledge know than he had 20 levels ago. He feels slower and weaker.
well the world changes and players have more interesting things to do and seeing as bfa has been a holding pattern for previous expansions* rather than what I would call an expansion (ie, very little inventiveness or new things … unlike newer games), you cant be surprised that these numbers are low. Fair weather players will always go to the newest game, purely because its new out. Magpie players. Theres more to do these days than there was even 10 years ago. More distractions.
Ive always called bfa, even during beta, “an amalgamation of the unused from previous expansions all lumped together” and I stand by that.
So yes, the numbers only show one side of reality and thus are closeted nonsense that shouldn’t be paid attention to. Two sides to every story, eh
you might also realise that most wow vanilla players are now in marriage age and don’t wow any more, so all we are left with are singletons and fair weather players … who don’t dedicate themselves to games, just flit between them with the amount of games out there now.
All I can say is: not to me. WoD didn’t have enough content and I understand that was not OK, but what content was available was to me more fun than the whole of Legion. And all that BfA is so far.
This, but as a filthy pvp casual it had enough content for me, so it was absolutely magic. Really unpopular when i say it was actually the best expansion for me. I should have stopped on it as i found it borderline perfect.
Worst expansion by player activity: TBC 2.1… queues of 20 minutes to enter the game… I hated it so much and enraged me…
worst to me is not playing at all.
At the same time though, I’m not sure I’m actually that surprised - but to explain why would take too much effort that I’ve already exerted in other threads.
I have to say though, personally, I prefer BfA to WoD. Sure, BfA has terrible systems, but WoD had terrible systems and no relevant content.
As a returning player I am enjoying the game after a long break.
Still, I’m amazed at how little raid content BfA delivers. For me, and this is a personal opinion through tinted glasses and all that, Wotlk was the perfect launch. Sure, Naxx was a rehash of an old raid, but at launch we had three raids and a PvP raid boss to boot.
Yeah, dailies were a bit unimaginative and wqs are a better replacement, if nothing else because at least you don’t have to turn them in, but as pure Raiding content BfA is a little barren.
Yes, I haven’t cleared Mythic Uldir, not going to happen for me, I’m trapped in pug land, and yes M+ is a good thing indeed, but raids are a totally different ballpark game, and 8 bosses is very little to go by IMO.
@All: Despite trying multiple things, I did not manage to make any of the links in the OP to work.
On a personal experience level and at least to an extent shared by hundreds of other CensusPlus users, the lowest activity point in the past several years in the EU and US was in May 2016 and that level has been exceeded every month since, sometimes by fairly little, sometimes by a lot. At the moment, based on activity updates by myself and nine other current leading monthly data submission makers, I would say December will roughly tie with May 2016 or slightly exceed it.
Because I have actually missed several days (or parts thereof) due to being absent and not able to play/census, I am going to have to make a more thorough comparison once the month is over. But for comparison for now…
In May 2016 I personally recorded 122 334 activity updates (daily average of about 3 946).
This month I have a recorded total of 59 695 activity updates so far. Those translate into 3 316 daily average, if I count towards total days. But due to my absent time, the time adjusted average is closer to 3 980 or even 4 264 and those figures are actually too low, because I still have a very large file that I have not yet uploaded.
I like the game at this point. I still can find something to do . Reputations … Achievements… Alts … I am not doing Uldir … it’s boring . We are waiting too long for a new raid … or it’s just me ? Different people, different opinions… To be honest I really miss Legion a little bit …
It is a little bit troubling that activity on the month of the first patch in an expansion is low, tied or thereabouts with lowest ever. Sure Christmas is a factor, but again if there was anything meaningful in terms of endgame content engagement would be higher I’m sure.
Don’t know if this is a thing in WoW now as I quit early in MoP due in no small measure to too many dailies burnout, but I’m amazed, nay, AMAZED, at so little raid content for so long.
Will be all caught up with alts and most relevant (for me) achievements and reputation grinds in a week or so and the truth is looking at my alt that’s where I’ve spent more time since late October.
So can anyone confirm this? Do we not get multiple raids in a patch anymore?
^^ It’s not AH (auction house) numbers, it’s player activity numbers. As in, the number of players logged, averaged per time period, compared for different years and months.
M+ reeks of diablo rift tiers to me and i despise it in warcraft (I like diablo), especially as a pvp casual meaning that I have to deal with M+ players whilst i can’t seem to get anything else besides my 46th pair of pvp boots.
You will always struggle to ‘prove’ a subjective viewpoint using metric data only. How are we to define ‘worst expansion’? Strictly in sales, or perhaps sub count? Player activity or social media activity? Do we account for bad PR, for controversies or innumerable other valid methods to measure what is ‘worst’ regarding an expansion.
Same old debate, new expansion and same point’s parroted time after time. WoTLK is the best expansion by your standard, given player activity/sub count for example, but it still had many huge flaws: clunky questing, missing expansion features, terrible PR with the real world ID, the toxicity of gear score and long stagnation before and after ICC to name a few legitimate grievances, so is the opinion that WoTLK, for some, is the worst less valid?
All expansions are subjectively based in the which was good and bad for an individual, and simplistic ‘low sub count, must be worst’ mentality fails to account for the mirriad of complex reasons to why some stop playing wow or prefer other expansions over others.
@Lepanto: Well… It seems there were some sort of delays (not able to tell whether by choice or problems) in data uploads by certain US players. I can now confirm that US servers will exceed activity update levels of May 2016.
As for EU side… I personally do not cover enough servers to speak for the entire EU, but in terms of my “play and watch list”… I just uploaded another file… before it is processed I am now at a point of where I am 19 (nineteen) updates short of my average of May 2016 for today. The probability of not getting 19 updates within the next 4 hours is effectively zero, because the already submitted file is pretty much guaranteed to contain a lot more than 19 updates despite its’ small size. In terms of the monthly average… the non-adjusted average is now reading at 3 519 (vs 3 946 in May 2016) and the time-adjusted average has gone up to 4 458 with a following additional note: Even if I upload no new data at all, the non-adjusted monthly average for me already exceeds 2 157 daily updates and the time adjusted average 2 476.
Form a group, which as a total has an activity level at least equal to May 2016. The sample is not quite big enough to guarantee that the entire EU would follow the same pattern (there is too much individual variation).
I am going to continue to keep an eye on things and will probably post more on my subscription count estimates once I have time and energy to execute more complex calculations on those again.
EDIT: Corrected a rather big error in one of the values.
Agree on opinions being subjective, how could they be any different!
I’m not dishing BFA as an expansion rather the very limited raid options AT LAUNCH. WOTLK wasn’t without its flaws, some glaring, some just terrible, rose tinted glasses be damned.
Games change, the gaming landscape changes. Wow is a more refined product, far more than it was 10 years ago. But for me at least I need more raiding than 8 bosses in four difficulty levels. It becomes stagnant.
This is not an attack so please don’t treat it as such.
And yet that’s 32 boss encounters. Just for one tier! Next one will have more. I’m not sure more = better. We have more content than ever before in bfa - even WoD had more content than Wotlk. Imo it’s the quality, not the quantity of the content that is lacking.
Yes it is, there’s no denying that. Maybe it’s those refinements that made so many people pick other games instead.
![:thinking:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/thinking.png?v=6" ":thinking:")