Opinions and all that. But I don’t view them as 32 boss encounters. They are 8 boss encounters with four difficulty levels each.
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I think it’s nuts to compare BfA to any other expansion because all of those expansions are complete. Right now we’re at 8.1, so there’s a long way to go before any proper/fair comparison can really be drawn.
At the start of Legion there was a mahoosive wave of complaints about the grind and AP and legendary weapons and all that. ‘Worst expansion ever’ was posted a lot. By the end of Legion the general (and I do say general) view on the forums seemed to be that Legion was 2nd to Wrath as the best expac. That’s quite a turnaround.
But all of that is pretty irrelevant to me. I enjoyed the game in TBC and I still enjoy it today. Yes it’s not ideal and it has been better, but it’s not the worst it’s ever been and to be honest, I don’t really care about graphs and activity of BfA vs ‘insertnameofexpac’. When I log on, I’m on with mates or I’m on myself, questing/crafting etc. either way I’m having fun.
It’s a game. If folk don’t like it, don’t play it. Don’t pay money every month to do something you don’t like, when you have the choice not to. If it gets better, come back. If it doesn’t, well then you’re not wasting time and money.
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If you read the first post, you’d see that the comparison is between player activity levels several months into each expansion.
BFA after the first few months is not getting compared to other expansions after they complete. It gets compared to other expansions after the same first few months, to the state they were back then.
I am not implying you are saying that, but just for the record and for the information of everyone else reading. what you are reporting with the current December still being higher than May 2016 does not contradict at all what’s in the first post regarding BFA activity levels being lower than for any other expansion. Because May 2016 is end of WoD and the first post makes a comparison of the first few months of each expansion. So, in a nutshell, give BFA a little time and it might easily hit the previous low record of May 2016 and go below it - we aren’t far above.
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Good point, my bad.
Can I ask you though. Do these graphs change your enjoyment (or lack of) of the game? When you log on, do you feel that there are things that you could do, that you would enjoy, that you can’t do due to a lack of players?
do YOU think BfA is worse than WoD?
Yes. Legion too.
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Cool, so from that. If I were to show you a graph showing you that BfA had the highest player activity of any expac and that it received fancy awards for it’s use of RNG and titanforging… would that change your mind?
Of course not, but I don’t think the point made by the OP was to change the minds of people that like BfA, but to point out to the designers that they managed to create an experience that on average gains less traction than the previously existing low point.
If you like it, you really probably have no interest in such thread, because no average trend or “majority likes this and that” could nor should drive your own enjoyment. Nevertheless, it is a good point of discussion, because it can for once provide the basis with some facts instead of assumptions about how systems work for the average player.
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Yes, these graphs change my enjoyment and they quite likely change your enjoyment as well. As the game is losing players, it also loses funding. We can already see that in the amount of effort they spend on the game, it is reducing. This is a very long topic, but shortly, I can point to new features becoming fewer and simpler, about most of what they do being rehashes and features being first cut and then re-added with minor changes, about everything getting multiple difficulty modes and being prolonged by minor iterations in ilvl rather than actual new encounters and systems.
There are several more direct consequences as well in that, for example, with the number of people dwindling, it gets much harder to find partners for anything. Folks in top PVP tiers felt that a long time ago, and by now they accept that even at relatively moderate ratings they meet the same teams. PVE has been moving towards a single faction also partly because the number of people is dwindling, if the number of people was increasing the snowball effect from one faction having more potential recruits than the other would have been diminished by the new entrants severely. Etc.
Again, you might say you don’t feel it, but if we dig down, we’ll find that yes, indeed, your gameplay could have been much better if the game was doing well rather than being in a very long and significant decline.
Do I think BFA is worse than WoD in terms of gameplay? I will say this: if we take the first few months of WoD and the first few months of BFA, I’d vastly prefer WoD. For everything else, let’s wait and see, like you suggest. But, quite frankly, I think there is a very big chance that I will take WoD as a whole over BFA after BFA comes to an end as well. A very, very big chance. Saying this completely seriously (and yes, I was there in WoD, and yes, I didn’t like it a lot, and BFA is still worse).
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@Mellinora: I am well aware that I am comparing a different relative time point, but you are representing a different view point than some other posters in the past threads have done.
Allow me to try to explain. Some people have made claims that the activity is at its absolute lowest point when examining the past few years. At least as far as US servers are concerned, this simply is not true.
Your claim of activity being relatively low in comparison to the time from expansion launch is not contradictory to that conclusion. In fact, I have no grounds to deny that. It is, indeed, also possible that if thing go badly, the activity will drop further.
However, the current data suggests (emphasis, suggests, does not guarantee) that things are plateauing off (or as far as US servers are concerned even rebounding lightly). 8.1 has been out only about a week and many things people are waiting for have been slated for 8.1.5 or 8.2…
If I look into my personal submissions history… Year 2017 was basically flat. There simply were no major changes. There are other, older pretty flat periods (with higher averages, yes). The point I am trying to make here is: WoW has a (relatively speaking) large player base that pretty much goes through thick and thin. I have been around over 10 years by now and I am not even close to being the “oldest” remaining active left.
Things could be a lot better, there is no denying that. What I am saying is that situation is not hopeless. I also do not criticize people who leave. Voting with one’s wallet is entirely valid response.
I can still find things that I find fun in the game… and there are a LOT of things I have not even seen / tried yet (my highest characters are still in the 111 to 114 range) and still want to… Such as a dark iron dwarf and Zandalari troll. That obviously is not true for everybody and I have no reason to blame them, none at all. WoW is a hobby, at times a VERY time consuming one… and ultimately, it should be FUN from the view point of the person playing it. 
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Red. I think this is the only thing we disagree
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Mellinora & Redoctober:
Some interesting points there. I don’t necessarily agree with them all, but I can see your logic. I have to say here, I’m not on here trolling or be awkward. There are a lot of complaints about gameplay etc in BfA, that I agree with, but this thread interests me because I wonder how much effect of general or public opinion has on individual players.
As an example the posts on these forums are over 50% (prob a good bit over) complaints about different aspects of the game. That makes sense because by and large if you have nothing to complain about, you won’t look for a way to voice that contentment, as opposed to a person who isn’t happy and needs a medium to raise their complaints. However a random person looking at the forums might think that the percentage of complaints relates to the percentage of unhappy players vs happy players, which would be incorrect.
Player numbers have been dropping, pretty much consistently since Wrath, but personally that drop (significant as it is) hasn’t affected my experience of the game at all. Are there too few players now? Were there too many before? Is there such a thing as too many? Obv there can be too few, but what is that number?
Personally I think the community has changed as much as the game has. In some cases both have changed negatively and I think that this is where it is noticeable. PuG (for example) was meant to make things more convenient, but as a consequence many of these groups have become negative/toxic/impatient. Maybe it was the same before, but there were so many players it wasn’t so obvious, who knows.
For me, the graphs etc are a good measure of how successful a game is, but not necessarily a measure of how good a game is. Compare BfA numbers to Fortnite and I think Fortnite has more users. But is it better?
I’m sure that if we dig, we can find others too, but who cares? We are fellow WoW players but we are also independent human beings, it’s okay if we don’t prefer the same thing all the time. ![:slight_smile:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
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hahah cheers mate!
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It actually might have affected it, but indirectly.
For example, something like this: there was a drop after Wrath. Every reasonable designer would, at that point, ask him or herself why, and come up with answers. They would also have a budget, which is obviously limited, that they could use to do something about it. Let’s assume for the sake of the argument that you didn’t like Wrath. But then, the designers sink a lot of resources into attempting to attract a different demographic, that likes the same thing you do. At this point, you would say “the game just got better!” The budget goes into features that you connect well with, and you feel good. But the people that liked Wrath are exactly on the other edge. This increases the probability that some of them one day decide they had enough. At the same time, the influx of new players of that new demographic doesn’t seem to be enough to offset the bleeding of new players. The people handling the budget start to panic, start asking themselves why they provide this high budget, if the game doesn’t do as well. They then reduce the budget, and this new features you originally hailed as good actually are developed more cheaply. But that doesn’t stop the bleeding either, as even some of this new demographic begins to be discontent, as they get lower quality things that what they were used to since they joined. The old group, the one that liked Wrath, is already at this point two years into an expansion where very little effort is being spent appeasing them. The investors and designers panic, and go back to the drawing board. They repeat the same mistake another 2-3 times, and the end result is that you have a game in which a large group of players relate with relatively tiny segments, and not with the rest. This causes discontent over a large range of things, and contradictory feedback, and the game keeps sinking, together with it’s budget, and keeps providing lower quality content.
This is pretty much the point we are at now. What is universally hailed as being high quality in WoW? The art and music. I almost didn’t see any WoW player saying “the art and music in WoW sucks”. Why? Because the art and music never were part of this destructive cycle I just described. They were the same from the beginning and until now, evolving organically but keeping the same basic ideas, the same basic art style, the same basic music style and so on. The systems design on the other hand did not, and the result is that as soon as the smallest thing goes wrong, players are instantly up in arms. If you look at things objectively, there is practically no major difference between MoP and WoD, or between Legion and BfA. The differences between them are minute, and yet the level of discontent was vastly different.
And I agree with you. Being a “good” game is an abstract value, not something quantifiable that can then be defined absolutely. It only exists in relation to yourself and your list of preferences. A completely different “good” exists in relation to mine, and there is a “good” for every different person. The graphs only show an aggregate of these different values for “good”, which in the end transforms into “popular” or “successful”, and can be really disconnected from your own evaluation of “good” (or not).
I don’t think we should even start comparing WoW with Fortnight. They are different genres of games. The thing they have in common is that they are both games, but it’s as if you would compare the books Dune by Frank Herbert and Anna Karenina by Tolstoi, and ask which one is better - there simply is no point where you can start comparing the two, and just both of them being literary works cannot serve as a starting point.
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Hahahaha no I agree, let’s not compare Fortnite to WoW. Dog poop vs a diamond that needs a polish lol!
Good points there. That’s giving me food for thought. It would be interesting to see the budget that the WoW devs get, or for example, using OP’s player numbers vs budget to compare numbers decline vs budget spent.
It’s safe to say that in every expac, the devs have tried something new to shake things up. I’m not sure if they necessarily had to as of Wrath, but they have made changes. As per many posts on the forums, some of those changes were bad choices (of course you can’t please everyone), which have led to other changes and like you said, they weren’t great either.
But is the reduction in player base a direct result of these changes? My interest/concern is that the popular view of WoW is of a game that is being abandoned by players who are fed up with how it is vs how it was. 'WoW is dying!" I wonder how much of that is true.
When you see the games that are currently outselling WoW on the market. Faster? More immediate? Easier to pick up and play? One of my mates said he really fancies WoW, but is intimidated by it’s shear size! ‘I start at lvl 1 and there is so much to do to get to max level’ I can imagine that being a consideration for a lot of people when they are looking at a new game.
How many of the players who have left WoW since Wrath, and have caused the decline in numbers are currently playing League of Legends or Fortnite? Good luck to them lol, but for me I think while I can see what you’re saying in the devs and budgets thing, the reduction in numbers should be a concern to Blizzard. Not necessarily to the players.
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I wouldn’t be so harsh about Fortnite tbh. 
I mean, I don’t like it either, but it’s simply the genre, which makes me completely unable to appreciate if the game is good or not for the demographic that enjoys such things. All I know is that it’s pretty damn successful, which means that many people like it, and I’ll leave it at that.
Look, I am not saying and won’t ever say that no new thing whatsoever should be tried. Sure it is ok to try new things, because if you never try you won’t ever know, right? What I’m saying is that while trying new things is fine, it should be done in a conservative way, and always being mindful of keeping in touch with the roots of the game. During the first 5-6 years of existence, the game developed a life of it’s own, a playerbase that by all accounts liked them game (generally speaking), that was growing. But then new systems actually aimed at breaking up this social structure crept in, they chewed at the fabric of the WoW community, and Blizzard only doubled down on them throughout the years. I’m thinking of all those systems that destroyed world integrity and immersiveness, and the ability for the community to self-maintain.
For example, you yourself noticed that the community seems to have become more toxic and generally speaking less pleasant. But the real question, at least in my humble opinion, is whether this isn’t maybe a problem generated by the game and systems design rather than explaining it away in a way that hints that the community magically became more toxic because of lower age of players or another absurd reason like that. In truth, we behave in society because society has the ability to impose norms on us such as politeness, patterns of behavior, and I’m not talking only about legal, formal norms, but mostly informal ones, such as morality. We had that in WoW too, but only when we were capable of policing our communities efficiently. However, when the game designers come up with a system that all of a sudden lumps us all together in randomly shifting cross server shards, an automatic system that guarantees access for everyone everywhere regardless how miserable their behavior is, how could anyone that isn’t Blizzard themselves actually enforce norms of conduct? And Blizzard aren’t willing to enforce such thing, and for good reason! because it would be extremely costly and extremely hard to do.
That’s true, but it’s again the nature of the genre. For example, I also play StarCraft 2 and I love it. But while I have no problem accepting that in WoW or SWTOR things come over the course of months of playing, I wouldn’t accept that thing in SC2 - that’s a game where I want to jump in and do a Versus or a Co-op, depending on my mood. But that’s got to do with the genre, not with my general nature. It would be absurd to me if the content would be locked there to begin with.
I think that’s hyperbole and shorthand for “WoW is declining”. Sometimes it’s better to not read things literally.
Anyhow, tl;dr would be, I guess, that while it’s fine to try stuff, it’s very, very important to do them considerately to already existing players, and never deviate too much from the roots and from the basic things that make your game work.
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Totally agree with you there.
Well thanks for breaking up a pretty boring morning at work
How is SC2? I’ve been tempted to look at it, but I think WC3 would be nearer the top of my ‘to buy if I had the time’ list. I liked the original Starcraft, back in the day but haven’t spent any time trying out SC2.
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- It’s a Real Time Strategy game, but you know that already.
- In my own experience (I won’t vouch it’s the same for everyone), it has a pretty great community compared to things like League of Legends, DotA and even WoW.
- The gameplay is in my opinion absolutely top notch. At pro level, the 3 races are pretty much balanced almost to perfection, with win ratios over a year varying between 49% and 51% in all matchups, which means that the design team is doing an excellent job.
- The game is, I would say, the hardest game I ever played - by this I mean the versus part (1v1). I think the units are better thought out than in SC1 - for example, SC1 had units like the Wraith, that were a bit too jack of all trades instead of having glaring weaknesses next to their strengths. The Wraith equivalent of SC2 is divided between the Banshee, which is an anti-ground fast attack flying unit with cloaking, and the Viking, which is the standard Terran air superiority unit. But I’m ranting already.
- There are far more unit abilities; almost every unit now has a special ability, and their roles are further defined by these abilities. Zerg tends to have easier unit control in terms of unit abilities, but they emphasize engagements, tactics and synchronizing multiple unit groups that come from different directions at precisely the right time, and their macro is probably the hardest; Terran is the most micro intensive race by a fair degree, but has the easiest macromanagement; protoss focused on having the right unit compositions for every given situation, which means the overall strategy needs to be flawless, as well as the scouting of what the opponent is doing as well as inferring and putting pieces of information together in real time.
- the game is now FREE. Or rather the Versus part is free, while the campaigns and co-op commanders need to be purchased. Try it out, don’t be shy!
- the co-op is really, really fun, with different commanders that have different unit setups and at times a lot different units, abilities, and so on. On the bad part, it’s a bit easy, and the hardest mode is Brutal difficulty Mutations. Mutations are sort of like mythic+ dungeons, with affixes that change weekly but without the scaling factor, and they are still not extremely hard (though if you are new to the game, you will find them very difficult for a fair amount of time).
- the story is nice, I liked it. It’s a typical Blizzard story, it’s not Bioware level of storytelling, but it really isn’t bad. It also has some of the most bad@ss cinematics, and although you can see them on youtube, it’s way more satisfying to earn them in-game.
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Thanks for the info! If I get time over the holidays, I’ll definitely give it a look
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hahah i tried FFXIV cuz morra backed it and i was satisfied but i never switched to it because i hate to have 2 subs active. maybe ill give sc2 a shot
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