Not even 2 million subs, people leaving in masses

Community General Discussion
103

I love it when people repeat those Streamer links with the mantra “Numbers can’t lie”

Anyone who ever worked in Finance, in the International Fraud speciality will tell you that “Yes, Yes they really can! There are even famous quotes about it!”

What is fact, is that you cannot accurately assess something, when the numbers themselves are not even correct.

How can they be? They’re shackled to tables of one particular activity of the game that not everyone does. I don’t give a monkeys about Mythics, personally. Don’t even raid current content to be honest. I know many others who don’t. So basically we’re not going to factor into these websites. I still pay a sub though. Now that is just -one- player plus their acquaintances, which is why the more reputable websites claiming to know things actually do state that it estimation and not indicative of the -actual- number of Subs.

However, that doesn’t appeal to the ‘Ka-Ching’ factor that Streamers get out of claiming that these are all facts, when even the websites they nick the data from say that they are -not- facts.

So there you go. Numbers -Can- lie, if you are not dealing with the actual raw data. Which they’re not.

If you ask a hundred people if they eat meat (and if they actually do) but don’t take into account Vegetarians, Pescatarians and Vegans then Any conclusion you reach as to the percentage of all people who eat meat is going to incorrect. To claim that Number is therefore an absolute is not collecting core data by including say, Vegans into the equation.

So in that example, the numbers are simply inaccurate.
Now to then make a Stream claiming that these -are- accurate numbers, especially when you have a financial interest in misleading people?

Yes. That is lying.

All Asmongold is really showing us is that whilst numbers (Having no Sentience or Sapience) do not lie, how -People- interpret those numbers -Do- Lie.

Nothing more than that.

104

You’re just taking this out of context. Iirc, Belular makes a comparison between m+ and raid activity between patches and there is an obvious drop off.

No matter if you specifically play something or not, having like 50% of player drop off in a certain core activity is indicative of playerbase dynamics.

1 Like
105

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics
i wasnt in forensic audit but general and financial audit i was involved

106

Current Blizzard cannot pull off ARR, not even close. Doing that would require them to acknowledge they made mistakes.

107

Well that’s something that could change. Let’s wait and see.

108

Bellular did not assume this and presented total player estimates based on different “alts per player” assumptions.

109

They would also have to fire the majority off the dev team and hire someone with an actual vision.

110

They have a lot of job openings… so again let’s see.

111

Yeah, it is indicative of player trends with expansions, but this is nothing new.

There is a pattern, to be honest, which is kinda a thing with every expansion (Obviously not including Vanilla)

Something is released, people play. Now raiders are notorious (as many admit themselves) for unsubbing when they’ve done all the Content available until new Content is released.

Which is fine! I mean, hopefully they’re playing for -fun- and if their aspect of the game that is fun is in a lull, then we -always- see many of them Unsub. It’s a trend that has endured for more than a decade now. Boom and Bust. To a lesser extent you see it with PvP’ers I guess, but then Seasons are handled differently there, than with PvE content. Hardcore RP’ers who aren’t typically (By no means -always-) that bothered about such things, will stay subbed.

But they won’t feature on these tables at all.

Think of it like the tide coming in and going out. Except in terrible incidents like Tsunami’s or Floods or (probably) Global Warming, the shape of most continents has remained the same for thousands of years now (Or less),

We don’t redraw our maps every time the coast regions have tides, we don’t see the tide ebbing and go “Oh My Gods, the Sea is Dying!” because, well, it’s kind of normal, sea goes away for a bit, sea comes back for a bit, rinse and repeat.

I don’t know, maybe this is an RP realm thing. Because we tend to -stay- subbed, even during ‘content drought’, we do see this constant ebb and flow.

Maybe it is less noticeable on pure PvE servers. Who knows. I can’t say for certain, as I only play on RP ones, so the above is all empirical evidence.

That was the one that sprung to mind, yes!

Yeah, so likely you’ll know as well, that unscrupulous people can make numbers indeed tell some gross lies! :slight_smile: But then that’s -them- Numbers themselves are an abstract.

1 Like
112

Nowadays I’m only interested and genuinely pleased regarding posts which talk good things about the game tbh. I don’t care anymore if somebody hates it. I’m tired of it.
I changed my main in 9.1 and I’m having the time of my life, this class is fun.

It has become harder finding dungeons but somehow I’m doing them because I love them. I don’t like some systems locked behind heavy grind and raids but at the end of the day I can play without, with the wrong legendary for my spec and with a bad talent spec.

Game is good because I make it good for myself. I don’t have to follow streamers opinions, I’ve got my own. I like the game because I do what I want to do.
I also play a paladin in FF14 but at the end of the day I’ll keep coming back to WoW, the game of my youth and the game where I put my sweat, tears and effort into it.
If it dies it dies but I’ll stay until then.

2 Likes
113

Yes but the argument is that, compared to BFA, the drop off is significantly bigger.

I suggest watching the video rather than just dismissing the numbers as a lie.

114

now its truly over.

115

ARR only worked because it was done at the start of the game cycle. Blizzard can’t do this, there’s too much content they’d need to remake unless they simply remove it.

116

I’m really hoping they cut back on the borrowed power… that would be a big improvement.

117

True for a standalone. The problem is that Activision have their own internal ROCE which might be higher than WoW can sustain, compared to cheap to make mobile games. In the long run this would hopefully see WoW spun off again, but I’m not holding out hope - a profitable cash cow, even if its not as profitable as you want it to be, is still a cash cow.

118

There isn’t.

AFAIK, there is no info available from CN . At least, none of the sites I am aware of lists any.

There is reliable data available on US & EU characters’ (not players’) M+ Activity. You linked a source. I haven’t checked it myself, but it could be reliable, since Blizzard rolled out an API to track M+. Similarly, the Wowranks featured in Bellular’s video, or RaiderIo, could also produce reliable M+ Activity. So could anybody else who made a collation system from Blizzard’s API feed.

Blizzard used to have an API for AH activity, which obviously would be much wider than M+ activity. The great site Realmpop used to grab that and then branch out to get the guild rosters of all characters who used the AH, and collect all characters listed there. That was clearly a much better number, but of characters, not players. However, it said nothing about current activity. Once a character was in its database, that character stayed until it fell off the armoury API after … 6 months or so? It also said nothing about how often the character was logged.

However, Blizzard removed character IDs from the AH API, and that was the end of that. Realmpop wasn’t perfect, even in principle. It couldn’t be. But the author was very competent (he still runs The Undermine Journal) and I trueted the numbers to be what he represented them to be.

To make an accurate count of people subscribed/paid, we would need to 1) be able to extract all character IDs on a realm, which we’re not 2) and identify multiple alts belonging to the same account, which we’re not reliably, though some people have at some times made creditable efforts in that direction and 3) identify which accounts currently have game time, which we’re absolutely not.

All of the various sources put various amounts of effort into one or two of these three, and try to get the best information they can that is consistent with their goals - and none of them have the goal of counting players.

And every so often, we get an eruption of claims about sub numbers from this mess.

There are things we can track. We can track M+ activity. We can track social media mentions of the game in some vague way. We can track character numbers with a considerable degree of inaccuracy. So long as the method is consistent, though, we can put some faith in the direction, even if not the absolute numbers.

So, for example, I would be inclined to believe the shape of the graph you linked for M+ activity. I haven’t checked anything about it, but it is plausible that it is correct. And from that, I would be inclined to believe that character activity follows a similar SHAPE, though with higher numbers.

But there is more to activity than paid character numbers. The graph shows a peak of 1.5M M+ runs at expansion launch, dropping to half of that over 12 weeks, then dropping to 0.5M over another 15 weeks, than back up to 750K at 9.1 and starting to drop again. Certainly, that can reflect active character changes, but it mote likely reflects activity in this one area of the game, as people just stop running M+ more than once a week.

It’s all very murky, because Blizzard wants it to be murky. I can’t blame them for that.

3 Likes
119

There’s also total number of unique characters that ran at least 1 m+, but that’s hard to use to measure active accounts too.

120

I bet the Blizzard Shills have over 30 accounts each to mess with the total subscribers numbers.

121

That’s the start of driving yourself nuts trying to guesstimate things. I’ve been there.

Let’s say we know for sure the number of unique characters that have run at least one M+ in 9.1.

Now, what fraction of people run M0 or M+ at all, ever? Wowhead samples put it at around 50% for Shadowlands, with a wide margin. Can we apply Wowhead samples? 1. Wowhead numbers are for accounts, not characters. 2. We may reasonably assume that Wowhead members are much more involved with the game than average, and so would have a higher proportion of people who complete end-game activities. But how much higher?

And now, of the people who run M+, how many have run it on alts at least once in 9.1?

The fudge factors become extreme, and people cherry-pick the ones that give the answers they expect … “now if that factor is 3, we get … naah, that looks wrong; let’s say the factor is 4 …” :clown_face: :rofl:

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122

The less content creator’s and streamers we have the more people have to think and discover for themselves and the better the community becomes.

Use your own experiences to form your opinions not the voice of online strangers.

1 Like