I just can’t wrap my mind around this. Dragonflight is the most casual friendly expansion blizzard has made and yet I see that the 2004 version of wow with gimped version of modern skills (aka runes) is more popular than Retail. Whenever I look at twitch I see streamers playing SoD and almost nobody playing Retail. Youtube is the same situation, all content creators making videos about SoD and ignoring Retail. I just want to know why? I mean don’t they get tired by doing the same quests and dungeons over and over again for 20 years (even if 1 or 2 dungeons are converted to 10 men raids its still the same). I really cannot understand what does the WoW community want anymore.
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Answers to your questions:
(A) Content creators are not representative of the player base.
(B) Any alternative to retail will be popular at launch (hype)
(C) People usually “kill time” at the end of the season in retail. So they play something else. SoD (or HC) is a natural choice.
(D) SoD is a much smaller team and they get tuning every week basically. Which is annoying cause its what blizz should do.
But eventually the limitations of SoD will become apparent. And when S4 rolls out in retail it will die. Like HC did. Like ANY of the classic wow expansions did.
Cheers!
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It is like vanilla with sprinkles, it’s new.
DF doesn’t really have any new content except an occasional patch we are waiting for TWW.
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Raiding wise, probably.
But not for the other aspects.
There are some positives that can be learned tought.
When a raid is easy as BFD people feel no issue or burden into joining creating pugs.
Also for leveling via dungeons. Where mobs gives a huge chunk and trash very little.
It will create a new meta where people go to kill for the extra bosses instead of zooming to the end boss.
And you won’t by judging popularity from “content creators”… they’re people who have an interest in trying to grab attention, they’re not going to do that with the old thing, they’ll do it with the new thing, the novel thing, the controversial thing or the idiotic thing.
They exist to grab your attention and drive traffic to their channel.
Popularity is from the number of people playing, and it’s not even close.
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Precisely
C is me 
Although I’m actually playing a different game rather than SoD as there’s nothing in WoW that catches my interest right now
Thats an old lesson.
LFR ring a bell?
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Easy answer - different people want different things, there is no one big subject Community with one opinion. I personally have 0 interest in classic and SoD and pretty happy with retail.
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This season is simply lasting too long, at least one month, maybe two. If you’re not pushing higher and higher you had plenty of time to reach average goals (2.5 k rio and curve basically)…
Once you do that everything becomes boring quite fast.
another bait thread.
“insert mad max meme”
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Lol .
And because of this "populariry " they had to givr you 300 % exp boost and gold boost 
Most of sod servers are ghost towns even with this buff
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There is no hive mind community, just a lot different subcommunities.
Because classic is an mmorpg game, and retail is a lobby for instanced content. Simple as that.
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I just like SoD right now because it’s slower and simpler, not as confusing as retail these days. The new runes make all classes fun and the XP adjustment makes levelling good also.
Retail has way to many things going on for me. So many different currencies, different factions, different activities, a very weird and ugly profession change, so many different questlines that i lost the plot completely.
Not saying i’ll never go back to retail, but for now SoD is where it’s at for me
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I do find it odd that people still need to troll the Retail forum with this. There is nothing to support one version being more popular than another.
If you feel your game is more popular good for you. But why not have a discussion with other SoD players about. They are really into that game version.
I personally don’t share your belief but you are entitled to it. There are very few SoD realms. This works out better for the game, we’ve seen it go wrong many times in Classic that they make too many realms and places end up dead. Or people just end up migrating to the busy ones.
Blizzard are generally quite good at not pitting content against each other. So it can catch the most players at any one time. Retail is in a lul until the mystery pirate patch comes out today for US and tomorrow for EU. Many players are on breaks. It’s the end of the season.
Usually at the start of every latest Classic (next one will be Cata) it’s at a time Retail hasn’t got a lot going on so it has that influx (like all variations) when it’s new. It gives people something to do. For some it’s a trip down memory lane, for others it’s their first chance to experience an expansion they missed.
There is a big drop out rate after a certain period, then you get the more regular player numbers. Those are the core players IMO. But there is nothing wrong with people who pop over.
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Okay where do you see that its more popular?
I’m genuinly curious.
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so much slower with 300 % xp and gold
but yes - retail instance are for sure confusing for whole lot of bad players who just cant play well .
in SOD they can be carried by others
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Yes and no because there are behaviors that I noticed in SoD that are non-present in LFR
Just because couple of content creators playing sod doesnt mean sod is more popular. I play both and currently it feels like sod is ultra dry and retail is at maintanence mode basically waiting for new season to happen.
Same with hardcore , content creators will generate content about what is pulling the views and classic wow enviorment is more suitable to generate that kinda content. I rather watch someone die in hardcore then someone do a +30 or rated arena.
I played pre official where everyone was hyping hardcore and only reason it seemed populated was people were stuck at 1-30. After you reach stv you pretty much solo leveling in the game. There was only 1 medium pop realm eu and 1 low pop realm na playing hardcore at their peak .
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That’s because they are not content creators but rather content milkers. There’s no content to milk atm in Dragonflight, so they need to milk SoD.
Oh but they do, they do! But You need to understand that they earn money by uploading videos/streaming. Many people are bored at work, yet they keep on working. And in streaming/Youtube business, You need to keep uploading/streaming or the algorithms will bury Your channel. That’s why they need to keep pumping even if there’s nothing to do/talk about.
On the side note, I miss the time when You needed to actually create something (webcomic, machinima etc) to be called a content creator 