Hate it to break it for you but people quiting is bad for the game.
This game is an MMO-RPG or in other words: Most of the content is played with or against other people. The more people quit due to game issues, the less players we have to play with.
MMORPGs arent really attractive to new/young players… so we should want the few players we have still left to stay.
While SL is better than BFA it is no way near to be a great expansion and needs to be fixed in some of the fundamental problems.
I told You and I will tell You again, the numbers decreasing, free Blizzcon, TBC classic release and free boost for The Burning Crusade classic aswell as an expensive not so impressive remake of a 20 year game are clearly a proof than no systemland isn’t going well and failed.
That to the point if some wants for various right and absurd reasons to severely damage Blizzard all it needs now is a small more push by letting The classic Burning Crusade rot/unplayed or if the release is poorly executed for some reasons, and ignore the D2 ressurected,the damage will then be tremendous.
While this is not what I advocate for: You did not and do not understand my warning and took it as a propaganda/agenda… and while i do not plan to do that unless I am forced… it is now more than an assumptions but crystal cear pristine water from what could crash 2021 Blizzard income.
As I told You before and I am glad the censorship and ban from the angry and quick draw or careless moderators confirmed my assumption : You people buying systemland and a sub payed for our The burning crusade classic. Aligato, You have protected OUR word of warcraft !
Without your quick anger temper and tendency to censorship everything you do not hold control over or comprehend yet, I wouldn’t have been able to be sure about it.
One more thing of importance to prove you the balance shifted : should you ban unfairly my account, I could still make another e-mail adress, buy classic and get a free boost and enjoy the The Burning crusade experience !
I am pretty sure I saw the same thread on US forums today. Copy/paste or same user /shrug
I like SL more than any, it could have some more in-depth ideas implemented about the afterlife aspect, I saw some interviews from dev teams which they said, “it was a bit hard how to die inside the afterlife” and things like that should not be a problem at all when our global mythology could give them easy solutions and ideas.
For example, our mythology teach us that the supreme GODS have the ability/skills to destroy a soul/spirit, so there is death in the afterlife. In addition, we also know that we never actually die and how that fits the whole picture?
Multiple worlds/dimensions. For example, we are at the 3rd dimension and when we die we move to the 4th. What happens when you die at the 4th dimension? You’re moved to the intermediate state of the 5th and so on and you can re-reincarnate back to the 4th and so on. Trinity as we know it in religions and mythology (for example all ancient weapons of the gods have 3 sharp ends, that represents trinity)… Trinity means SOUL/SPIRIT/Material body in each world we co-exist with the natural laws every world has. Which means all worlds even the spiritual worlds have natural laws. We know gravity, we know 3d vision and so on… in our dimension.
In chains of domination, we see a kind of “murder” of the Archon and nobody calls it that, because they tell you… It is already the afterlife so it cannot be killed. Wrong perception! The world is not only the afterlife, at least in RL mythology we know that very well, in RL myths we know its up to 13th dimensions and imagine we are still at the 3rd dimension… When you die you move into intermediate states of each dimensions (the after lives)… But souls progress and move into higher worlds/dimensions. Maybe the WoW world is a limited afterlife after all. Or blizzard didn’t do their research much.
Another thing the game needs, maybe some balancing, why the Night Fae world is more gpu hungry than the rest? At least my gpu screams when I visit night fae world.
Other than that I love shadowlands and the world I enjoy most is Revendreth, even if I have more toons allied with Bastion because of the special skills.
I’ve had several burntouts while playing the game in the past 15 years, BUT, I have to admin it took me A LOT of time to make a difference between a personal BURNT OUT, and “the game goes downhill with every xpac”.
Unconsciously I prob knew something was not right, but could not see it clear, so my brain invented or resized some issues with the game, making them HUGE in comparrison to how great the game is at it’s core, how great gameplay and mechanics it has.
Sure, every xpac has some bad parts and some good parts, but the GREAT CORE MECHANICS AND GAMEPLAY is still there, and that was what made me join this game, not the STORY/LORE.
After you get to know how your brain reacts, when you really got a burnt out, when a RL problem projects itself in an ingame issue, making you feel like the game is dieing … man it feels good.
After you realise that every game, every company, no matter how successful, at some point dies out because times change, becasue eating pizza every day for 100 days is no fun (reference to the burnt out reasons sometimes), you start thinking different about those player numbers, why they were “so many” during WotLK, why they are less now, and so on. Cause during 2006 - 2012 there were LOADS of companies producing MMO’s, but NOW ? Now there is WoW, FF, GW2, EsO as … kind of “top tiers” and thats about it when it comes to AAA MMOs. What are the ones that still require a monthly sub ? The ones that actually know what they are doing. And if those games are dying, and the reason is NOT “a new and better MMO is out”, then it surely show that MMO as a genre is a niche now and it is going slowly and surely down.
Not sure if it’s that simple.
I certainly find a certain charm in playing games where there’s a small niche audience, because you know that community is tight-knit and everyone plays the game because they enjoy it.
Those gaming communities are the best.
The mass-market and super popular games don’t really have communities so much as they have playerbases. I mean, in WoW there are millions of players, but how strong a sense of community do you feel with any American or Chinese players? Even within the EU, do you really have much of a connection with the Russian players or are they just people you sometimes come across?
I also sometimes feel that the popular games attract people who play them not because they truly enjoy those games, but because they want to play whatever is popular. So they complain and whine and cry all the while continue to stick around, because it’s popular to be playing the game.
If I could choose between a small community that consists of players who play the game because they enjoy it and are generally positive about it, and a large playerbase of random gamers who are just playing the game because it’s hyped or popular and not because they truly enjoy it, I’ll always want the former. Always.
WoW already lost half of subs.
But WoW is no niche MMO-RPG, never was and has a wide spectrum of content to play.
While I like niches in games and how they make a game/community unique… MMORPGs dont really work that way, atleast for most of the time. If MMORPGs attract not enough players, the game gets closed. Just look at Wildstar (Which was awesome) and many other MMORPGs.
The MMORPGs that are still relevant with constant updates cover a somewhat wide audience while the onces the smaller ones often lack new content or go to maintenancemode till they close.
Thats sadly how MMORPGs work.
And yeah it would be great to play with more people that enjoy the game but that could be achived by improving the game instead of doubling down on bad stuff (like big boworred powers). But we obv. cant have that for whatever reason.
Also we just need to make clear that the lack of communities in game is often made by players themself. LFR, LFD, X-Realms and stuff like this were all liked by a lot of players, which were obv bad for in game communities and behavior.
What I personally would like is so much out of reach that we never will get it… and I much likely will quit again in the future. In the end it hardly matters
“so much that is better than BfA”
BFA was a TERRIBLE xpac so this is not hard.
I would highlight a game like EVE Online.
It came out shortly before WoW and has always had a much smaller playerbase.
But the people who play EVE Online are fiercely devoted to it and truly love the game for what it is.
The sense of community is much stronger and you get the impression that everyone who plays the game are much closer connected to each other than for example in WoW.
And that game survives fine with a much smaller playerbase. It has arguably thrived just as much as WoW has over the years. Both go through ups and downs, one playerbase is just proportionally smaller than the other.
Once you have enough players to fill up a server and enough of a solid daily player activity that the world feels alive and buzzing, then you don’t need more. Any extra players don’t really enrich the individual player experience, they just scale up the operation for the game company as they add more servers and localization and regions and otherwise split the community into fractions.
WoW is not a single community. Here in the EU we have zero connection to the people playing in China or Koran or the United States. They might as well not exist as far as we are concerned.
The fact that Blizzard can launch WoW Classic where you have a whole different game type with isolated and individual servers where nothing more than a few thousand players exist, that does show that whilst it may enrich Blizzard to have millions upon millions of players, then you and I don’t really need more than a few thousand fellow players to enrich our MMO experience.
WoW is not a niche MMO-RPG, but MMORPG as a genre is a niche for gamers and gaming, in 2021. And it has been like this for 6-8 years. People still hang on the ideea that WotLK had 12 milion players and the rest of xpacs were bad, but in fact those players got feed with the MMO genre, they are playing other GAMES, not other MMOs. At least this is my perception of how things work. All games have a start and an end. All genres have a start and an end. We used to like to play simple FFA games like Quake and Unreal, but not anymore.
Just as XCOM is a game representing a nich turnbased genre.
When a genre is actual and looked for, many games are produced. Look at BattleRoyale genre. MMORPG’s peek era was 2000-2012, but for the moment no one wants to develop an MMORPG, just like even Overwatch was reworked from MMO to FPS.
I love WoW, I played WoW as a lifestyle, not as a game that comes and goes.
Even in its worst states - (BFA) - , I still had my sub active more then half of the time.
But even for me, personally, I can feel, I don’t want to be involved in playing the best MMORPG (WoW) because as years pass, they are feeling shorter and shoter and my time feels precious and precious, I can’t sit half of my available gaming time to watch the LFG window and try to get a couple of 2s games going.
Once the kids will find their own paths, and be like 10-15 years older, I will probably start playing WoW Classic and ride all the xpacs head to head. But until then, I really wish #soloqueue was in WoW, or another game appears and has WoW’s extraordinary gameplay and mechanincs and 2s Arena solo queues 
I’m not a forum guy, never been, 48 posts in 16 years shows that. But now, I really love SHADOWLANDS and really wish it would have a spot for me, since I am only playing PvP Arena 2s (NOTHING ELSE). In SL I didn’t complet not 1 M+, did only 1 Heroic Dungeon since I had the bastion covenant quest. All i want is to LOG IN, do the weeklies in 1-2-3 hours, and just do arenas. This expac is not forcing me to grind anything else, not forcing me to gear only in PvE just to be PvP ready. It is a great xpac, and not having much to do and leave me just to play over and over the part I want to play, puts this xpac next to TBC and WotLK, FOR ME. But at the same time, out of 30 days of /played at lvl 60, more then half of those played days are representing me sitting in Oribos and looking at that LFG window :(.
GL HF
Good point there - as an entomologist/herpetologist (no, thats nothing to do with dubious infections), some of my tarantula collection would beg to differ. i have docile ones, but my Goliath Bird-Eater isnt exactly sociable at best. I’ve started preparing my garden for a full replant this year, plus i work mainly evenings in retail so WoW although my main game, i tend to spend less time on it and do what i want to do on it regardless of falling behind
Unlike bfa, SL can be fixed.
People are allowed a view and telling others to quit is not helpful at all is it .
friendly reminder - BfA didnt loose 50% of playerbase even through whole 2 years
SL lost them in first 2 months.
clearly BFA did something better.
What the report says is that number went back to normal player numbers.
BFA sucked way harder. Many people like sticked to that crappy expansion, does not mean it’s anywhere better.
I liked bfa more lol
i meant AFTER the refunds.
I do hope it will be good but 9.1 just seem to be lacking alot.
I hope they add more features they havent told us, like new bgs:D
Reason im staying for 9.0.5 is purely because of the bg changes, honestly. SL is not an expansion I like, but with lockdowns and everything, I can still enjoy bging. Yeah, enjoy content from earlier expansions:/
no matter what you will say and how much you will hate BfA it never lost 50% of playerbase in first 2 months.
and nothing you say will change this fact.
SL is garbage. proven by mass unsubs