You might have seen the graphs suggesting that SoD has allegedly lost roughly 2/3 of its playerbase. And no, that’s not since the start of phase 1, that’s since the start of February, meaning it’s entirely due to the content of phase 2 and not due to external factors or the nature of the expansion’s life cycle.
Why?
I have prepared a few reasons. TL;DR: phase 2 is much less casual - friendly than phase 1.
-Terrible levelling. The road from 1 to 25 was tolerable despite the horrible overpopulation because people were mostly within their factions’ safe zones, filled with hyperspawns and good quest chains. Now all of it is gone, and players have to do the much longer and tedious grind from 25 to 40 while playing the wait-for-the-mob-to-spawn game and being killed non-stop by the opposing faction in every corner of the world. The alternative is even worse: spam Scarlet Monastery 70 times, paying 4 gold for a summon every time you need to repair/sell.
-Blood Moon. Once (if?) you’re 40, you get to experience the new event. It is extremely unfriendly towards casual players in so many ways that i don’t even know where to start:
It’s not realistically soloable, unlike the Ashenvale event, which is automatically offputting for casuals since they are by nature mostly solo players
It is too competitive, with the outcome (coin gains) strongly depending on how good/prepared/geared you are. Casuals have none of those. Also you need to start creating a group 1 hour before the event if you want a good run.
It is meta-oriented and you’ll have a hard time finding a good group unless you’re a shadow priest / healer priest / moonkin, and even if you do find a good group you’ll still get much less coins than the aforementioned demons
Extremely laggy AND buggy (offputting for everyone, not only casuals)
The only redeeming feature, and a significant one, is that power-oriented rewards are relatively cheap. Unfortunately, other rewards including mounts and AB rep are expensive and demand much more effort than Ashenvale
-Gnomeregan. If you survive until endgame, you’ll face a raid that is substaintially harder than BFD. The last 3 bosses are not realistically doable without using third-party software such as addons / discord and without watching guides on third-party websites (casuals usually don’t do any of those or do only to a very limited extent). This difficulty in turn causes another problem: the inability to find a group due to players’ refusing to take non-meta specs into their team. Also, Gnomeregan profession items are an enormous gold sink and cannot be easily done by casuals.
In other words, phase 2 has proven to be substantially less regular-player-friendly and much more hardcore-oriented than phase 1, which has made casuals, who comprise the majority of subscriptions, to leave.
But have those Numbers been active Accounts or Active Chars?
For now i just play 1 Char, it has been 4 Chars in Season 1. If your graph is just looking for “Charackter Logs” i dont think it has that much of a meaning.
Its not, because I’m not worried about it. Some zones are very much populated, a lot of zones even feel overpopulated. I’m personally not experiencing the issues OP is facing. Yes, they exist. Do they affect me? No:
1: I enjoy the leveling
2: I like blood moon, only fault it has is the lag. PvP isn’t noob friendly and never will be
3: Gnomeregan is piss easy
The people that have already quit were going to quit regardless, even faster if it was normal ERA classic. Plus, I’m fairly certain the population will see a substantial boost once lvl 60 is unlocked and some people don’t feel gated, or even before that if next phase is more fleshed out.
BG queues are fast and popping fast, zones are populated, raids are easy to find, grouping up for leveling is easy to find, dungeon groups are easy to find and form. I see no big issues on the horizon.
Also, you really have no idea what the population drop is all about. Was it a banwave of bots? Because at phase2 launch there was a distinct lack of them, atleast on my end. Only now am I starting to see a lot of them, and they are still in the process of leveling. Or perhaps it was the GDKP ban getting rid of the cancerous portion of the population. Who knows. For sure a decent chunk of them quit because they can’t even handle the leveling. But why can’t they handle it, is it because its not casual ez fastgogogo or is it because of overpopulation(and if its because of overpopulation, doesn’t that kinda render the whole depopulation thing a mute point?)
Everything that is missing or lacking is clearly the result of Blizzard allocating a minuscule budget for what is needed. Hence why in a game that is 95% “done” they cant push the other 5% to finish the puzzle.
Hence why a ton of the rewards are… laughable, like the PvP rank reward, its a new pvp trinket. So this took what ? All of 30sec to copy paste it from one file to the next ?
The Azeroth CA ? They compleatly forgot to add anything, now they did, and its Bind on Account Rings and Necks + a bag. Again, took probably a lunch break to put into the game.
Ashenvale, STV, BFD and Gnomer ? All of these were finished products long ago. All that was done is minor additions, it did not require massive dev time and resources to build up.
The only thing that actually took time were the boss changes and the loot from the raids. But thats about it.
So once again, Blizzard is prepared to invest 1 out of 10, but expects 100 in return. Its no realistic. So naturally people wont really stay. For me SoD is still good, p2 is a clear miss. But I think it speaks volumes in regards to how much Blizzard is willing to invest into this, and that “Classic +” will never really see the light of day as it would require massive resources and dev time.
From where did they get the data? From logs? Did Sod lose 70% of players, or is it more like you cannot read data at all? Isn’t it more like there are 70% fewer raiding characters after two weeks in the new phase compared to the end of season 1, where everyone had tons of time to level multiple characters to max and had time to raid with them because raid was so short and easy? I am not even 40lvl…but I am playing prety often, few hours every second day. BTW, but I quited too according to your data.
The reason why you don’t see them is because there’s too many people on each server. So it really went from, let’s say, 10 overpopulated layers to just 3 overpopulated layers. The problem is very much real, you just haven’t yet started to experience its consequences. You will experience it when Blizzard cut down expenses due to SoD’s not being as lucrative anymore. And then every one of you sweats will start complaining that there’s no balance, that there’s nothing to do, that the world is empty - because there’s no development resourses and no players
It’s still very casual friendly, we did some XP grind for the first day, cleared Gnomeregan druing first ID and until then, I can play like 3-4 hrs / week to do the raiding and some preparations. SoD P2 is very friendly for casuals, it’s not so friendly for idiots. You cannot balance the game around the most stupid people - nothing in the world should be done like that.
Why do people ‘moan’ about the levelling? It’s been a known quantity for nearly 20 years. It was not a shock or surprise. If you don’t enjoy levelling then is classic anything really for you?
Idk how much easier you want to this game to be. Even a casual player with the bdf xp the sleeping bag etc should be 40. You need one day to get all runes. 2-3 stv events to get all items. Getting the gold for and doing the crafts is another 2-3 days at most.
The problem with this game is that it is too hard for the casuals and too easy for the actual players
I don’t know where you get your numbers, but the only thing I discovered in this phase is that there were like 4 runes, a new raid, and melee classes get destroyed by everyone in every content.
Phase 3 is gonna be the same, you can’t just add 4 runes and call it “A NEW ENTIRE SEASON TO DISCOVER”. It’s laughable.
The “Gnome too difficult and need a guide” part is ridiculous. Omg a part of the game with an actual learning curve ? Remove that immediately.
People who complain about needing a ( micro ) investment in the game to clear the highest end game part should probably stick to play candy crush. That’s ridiculous especially seeing how easy gnome is.
There’s 2 reason for people leaving that game.
Arriving at lvl 40 there’s pretty much nothing to do in the game except 30min of gnome and a event laggy as hell. Not even dg to grind since the current preraid bis is mostly bfd stuff.
The leveling 25-40 is boring af. The questing zones are pretty bad and farming SM is brain damaging.
So basically you suffer 15 levels of boring farming to arrive lvl 40 and realize the game is empty. Of course people are leaving.