Is wow [kinda] dying ?

Oh dear god, it was only matter of time when one of you fire mages set yourself on fire. Where do we keep extinguishers in the forum? Ahh here, stand still! :fire_extinguisher:

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They already are.

The game is still more profitable than most new games. It’s almost 15 years old. Fewer people are playing probably because there are fewer new player and old players take breaks. I feel like WOTLK and Legion showed what players really wanted, which was accessible content, new classes and races and big baddies, and yet somehow Blizzard missed the lesson. I haven’t met anybody who loves BFA. The main content people were interested in were allied races, and they are locked behind grinds. And there is essentially no enemy in the game. World PVP is not rewarding, nor interesting to a lot of people.

@Lanabee: WoW does indeed seem to have a hard core (not to be mixed with hardcore) of loyal players… :slight_smile: As for the avatar thing, seems your weapon is… rather bright. :D:D:D

@Rivanon, Orlen and others interested:

I finished my latest calculations. First for comparison the results of 10.4.2019:

US 944 148 minimum, EU 923 533 minimum

And then those from today:

US 939 174 minimum, EU 930 200 minimum

Not really much change… The US+EU minimum possible continues to hover at about 1,87 million.

Following are additional estimates based on data and cross-referencing from WCR, WRP, ingame server activity notes and other sources:

Korea 21 000+ minimum, 42 000+ possible
Taiwan 17 000+ minimum, 34 000+ possible
Russia 71 500+ minimum (based on following figures: each full calculated at 10 000, each high at 5 000, each medium at 2 000 and each low/newcomer at 500, some Russian realms are connected so I used lower values than I would have for singles)

While those figures are just estimates, considering that those minimum numbers without China already amount to around 2 million, I think it is still safe to say that the world wide figure is considerably above 2 million. By how much, depends largely on China.

EDIT: Typos. :frowning:

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‘‘wow is dying’’ is what i used to say when i was a teenager, like 10 years ago. Apparently it was wrong, it was just dying for me.
I recently started and world isn’t empty tbh, whereever i went while leveling or for WQs, no matter what time is it i saw many people doing their things.
But even if the world would have a looot more population, the game would still feel more like a single player game because the design has evolved with the former players.

Slight decline from your last calculations, I believe. Slightly more ‘optimistic’ than the vid I watched a couple of weeks ago, but not by much as they left China out of consideration. I believe over the period they considered, they came to roughly 1.5 million low, 2 million high and thus considered the median to be round the 1.8 million figure as they wanted to air on the positive/cautious side.

Whole earnings model is different in China, so it’s hard to compare and if your game sneezes in the wrong direction, they’ll happily blacklist it and burn people that play it at the stake (see what I did there with the burning mage avatar reference :smiley:)

Also considering they praised themselves for selling 10 million copies of BFA when it first released, retaining less than 40% of those players isn’t great, even if it’s partially down to the natural cycle of the game and praise where it’s due, they beat Fallout 76 and Anthem retention :joy:

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I never said its the sole reason why people leave. I literally said people leave because there is nothing to strife for. Gear beeing easily accessible is just a part of that. Do you think classic would have been fun and successful if the maximum best gear you could get was dungeon gear and you could clear all content with it? I don’t think so.

Whats a good long term goal to set for myself if I play the game? High arena rank, mythic raiding and maybe high keystones, but whats with your character? Where do you wanna get him longterm? How can you make stand your character out of the masses. You cant and thats messed up in the context of and RPG.

I also wanted to try FFXV but i cant handle a 2,5sec GCD and people getting banned for using something like a DPS meter srsly.

They’ll only ban you for using a dps meter if somebody else reports you for it, it’s a bit of a grey area, but I actually like that they don’t allow 3rd party addons, keeps a level playing field for all.

And also taking away every possibility to analyze whats going wrong. Allwoing 3 party addons changes nothing on a level playing field, since everyone is allowed to use them. You could say they narrow it but not allowing it. I rather play BFA and WoD than such BS.

To each their own and to each company their own philosophy. Have yet to bump into anybody complaining about the matter playing FF14. I shall admit there are addons in the WOWverse I consider doing far more than is healthy, but they have so much become the norm, the game would grind to a halt without them…

actually classic was so popular because it was so much user-friendlier than the rest of the mmos back then.
classic wow was about questing. wow is the first mmo to introduce VAST amount of quests. leveling easy through quests instead of killing thousands of monsters ot level. the exclamation marks and question marks to make life easy. before it was speak to every npc in game, converse with them and read to MAYBE find a quest.
wow was revolutionary in that area. it also evolved the raiding to another level.

but all that is the norm now, innovation is no longer a draw, the winners today are high graphics games, that include wow system. wow is successful, but not a winner anymore.

about the gear,
most player didnt get even close to the top raiding gear, because it was locked behind loooooooooooong attunement quests and required alot of time to finish a raid. naxx was huge, too huge for most players. only few elite guilds actually completed it on a weekly basis. most players just played the game and were content with that. pugs were very “dangerous” because of ninjas.

For me it’s mainly the social aspect, the adventure, feeling of being in that world. Everything in current WoW is instanced and phased, doesn’t feel like an RPG game. Only after that do I start noticing problems like abundance of gear and gameplay.

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So much wrong with this.
saying it was successful because it was userfriendler makes no sense, and pure speculation. You think people played things like everyquest and didn’t keep playing because it was not userfriendly? WoW was just a very good game, I didn’t even heard about this kind of game before that. WoW not a winner? In what regard as in making money or having a lot of players? Because compared to most games wow has tons of players and still makes pooptons of money.

Also players didn get close to top raiding gear because there was no catch up, you wanted to do naxx? You might found a guild which carried you through BWL with your quest gear but you better did AQ after that, too. Getting the Prequest for naxx wasn’t that much effort to do.

Not quite right, there was catch-up in the form of the ZG raid and MC attunement wasn’t that big a thing, just beyond that consumables became a huge issue, as well as resistance gear. Some dungeon gear was BiS till Naxx gear because of the weird itemization the game could have.

Most guilds were limited to MC and later ZG and maybe AQ20 though, but that was mostly by choice as they didn’t want the stress of farming up all the stuff required for the other raids, but they were fine with that. Naxx killed quite a few guilds in the day. I remember people in full BWL gear being gawked at by the masses in Ironforge as if they were Gods. You can compare is it HC vs mythic raiding guilds now, just the progression was linear, the difficulty was in the raids themselves, not in a slider on your screen.

I’m still a big fan of regressing to 2 raid difficulties, normal and HC, but I know it’s a pipe dream.

wow drank everquest to the ground.

people say wow vanilla was a grindfest, wow’s original competitors were (and those that still exist) are far worse.

Vanilla was a grind-fest, the difference is that at the time we didnt know that, we had nothing to compare it to. I remember searching the plaguelands for hours for blood on the floor - now there’s a bloody great big arrow pointing to it lol

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there were plenty to compare to, at the time i played TONS of mmos. wow had two things the rest didnt. REALLY big world and questing system.

Yes and we had nothing to compare that system to. I loved it as much then as I do now - yes, I’m often infuriated by stuff but my love for this game far out-weighs my impatience

that is my point. this system is what drew the first players from the rest of the games which lacked it.

Hmm ok - I believe that I’m agreeing with you :wink: This game has many flaws, of course it does. The amount of different people who have worked on it will always bring something else to the table that people will love or hate. Is this game dying? No, I dont think its dying but I do believe that its taking a little nose-dive - usually nose-dives either end in an up-turn or will crash, my fingers are crossed for an up-turn :slight_smile:

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