Blizzard the company who has had to clear house after being investigated by the SEC, and whose subs base keeps dropping like a stone. Microsoft have picked them up nice and cheap, it might be too late for WOW though by the time they get to clear the decks fully at the end of 2023.
If you took a cursory look at Activision revenue streams WOW is less and less consistently as a percentage of that.
Classic was pretty populated at least a year in though. It certainly didn’t lose the majority of players in the first patch.
Retail is still pretty populated.
Which has nothing to do with it ? You are literally arguing that blizzard doesn’t know what % of the players does what. The level of ego trip you are on.
Just the biggest deal in gaming history but ok.
That’s not my point though. My point is that most people quit retail because there’s nothing meaningful to do long-term.
On the contrary…casual content stops getting harder, long before PVP-only or Mythic-only, despite the ‘core principles of rpg’.
Casuals are actually supposed to do other content, to progress…and I seem to remember that PVP-only and Mythic-only players have a real problem with that principle being applied to them
You edited your post.
Yes, classic lost a majority of its players shortly after launch. The servers were absolutely hammered at launch. All zones were obscenely congested. It didn’t take long for queues to disappear and for it to become possible to do quests requiring named mobs again.
you do understand this is a game right? Back in the WotLK you could do easy heroic dungeons and get emblems and then buy raid gear… FFXIV actually follows WotLK reward system. The player who does easy dungeons only have 10ilvl gear lower that the one who does savage raiding. Guess what? People who do savage raid in ffxiv never complained about it… this toxic childish behaviour is just wow thing and I am afraid also affected developers as well…
You’re aware that not only did they add considerably more servers straight after launch but they also enabled sharding to ease up the load, yes?
Yes it’s stop getting harder, so they stop getting better gear. That’s how rpg work. You don’t see people clearing heroics asking for mythic loot, they move on to the next thing. Same with normal with heroic.
Because casual/hardcore are categories that goes beyoned pve player and pvp player, you can be a pvp or pve casual. One is a type of gameplay, the other is an attitude towards the game.
Sharding only persisted for a longer time on a few select servers.
Fair enough. Unfortunately that’s the time we’re living in… people always complain about anything and everything.
But another thought; I wonder if Blizzard ever considered removing the mythic ilvl entirely (from raid, pvp and m+) and cap everything at max heroic ilvl and just make everything above it difficulty-wise about the challenge and reward cosmetics instead. Certainly would reduce the ilvl inflation and the huge power gaps between players.
Or maybe just reduce the ilvl gaps 
I don’t really get why it jumps up so much anyway.
In view of player numbers…Discuss.
Wotlk wasn’t popular due to the gearing system.
It was popular because of it being the end of the WC3: frozen throne story. At least back then until blizzard were like “lol, here’s the jailer”.
Well I don’t know about FFXIV so can’t really argue about it since I don’t know how true this is, but I will just say that the popularity of a thing doesn’t necessarly equate to it’s quality. Rpgs are a niche genre, and FFXIV strikes me as being leaning quite heavily in more of a solo game with social elements.
Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say people did quit soon after launch (Which they didn’t, most players were doing well all the way until phase 6). That doesn’t mean that Shadowlands lost most of its players because they are just tourists. The expansion is simply not good enough to keep players from leaving.
Hell, most of my friends left for other games, and they’ve been playing since Vanilla and Burning Crusade.
The expansion is far better than Legion and BFA.
regardless of why wotlk was popular. FFXIV is also popular and follows same exact reward system. But my question was more specific. I played ffxiv for 2+ years. Never ever seen a savage raider complaign that casuals get easy gear…
that only wow players philosophy and of course is the same philosophy of the game designer who was the owner of a site called “elitist jerks”… this guy took over in wow and he succeeded to make ffxiv super successful
It’s objectively worse than Legion content-wise. BfA is debatable.
You assume everyone who played WotLK, had played WC3, I think that’s a massive stretch…fact is, it was easier and more engaging to play than Vanilla or TBC.
So…
