This nifty website has been given to me by a person in my discord and the numbers seems staggering. Is shadowlands the expansion with the worst retention rate ? How accurate is this? I remember sitting in 6 hour queues and extreme lag on SL launch where as now LFG looks dead and oribos is empty.
https://mmo-population.com/r/wow/stats
Coincidentally you can also find FFIV experiencing massive growth each year.
https://mmo-population.com/r/ffxiv/stats
Maybe numbers are not correct 100%
yes shadowlands killed game for many people
This never happend in BFA or LEGION and bfa is considered bad expansion
People were playing till the end and i saw dazarāalor and boralus harbour full all the time till the end of expansion
people were spaming low keys because they were gearing alts all the time
till the end
Another thing i can tell is that since shadowlands launched private servers population is bigger this i remember happend last time in WOD
But that is just my observation what happend
no need to take me seriously 
From the website:
The Players and Daily login numbers are estimations based on subscriber numbers and online sentiment
Since subscriber numbers arenāt publicly available itās all just based on āonline sentimentā.
Yeah, Iām sure thatās accurate.
Dunno about the numbers , how are they even getting the data? What are they even basing these numbers on thereās only blizz that has the info. My friends list is empty though, so would say thereās been a huge drop. Had charas in many guilds and 0 are still going, most of which have been going since legion.
And SL did have crazy high sales, was so much hype for the game. Was inevitable it would drop at some point, most games do within the first month.
And for their next trick if you ask them really nicely they will tell you how long a piece of string is.
They also magically manage to separate out Classic and Retail players. Considering we are all on the same sub, there really is no way they can have that data.
The fault lies with you. Itās not the developers fault at all. For all these years you cheered when they chucked rotten meat off the balcony. They figured they could just drop their pants and have a good bang, and since you were gorging yourselves they didnāt change anything.
Not happy with what WoW has become? Okay, well it had to be said as early as 2010. You had to stop looking down on all those who came to criticize Blizzard on this forum. 4 million players have disappeared after MoP, there we are talking about a pack of 6 million which was fired.
By the end of Wrath, WoW was at itās height sub wise. It wall went downhill after Cata from a sub point of view.
That is not to say I want to return to WotLK, although I will go and play a āClassicā version for a bit for Nostalgia, there is no way I want to return to that time.
For me the downturn started with Legion, although the expansion itself was great fun, it started the overload of borrowed power and make you play metrics with constant AP farm etc.
Oh so we back to 6 months ago again with the FF>WoW it is so tidieous now.
I always find that one funny. Didnāt take to FF, each to their own but FF is not some magic fix.
People have always (and should) play various games and if you are bored in WoW then you should go and do other things you find fun elsewhere. Nothing wrong with letting Blizzard know why you are moving on either.
Others play a multitude of games all the time. I tend to stick to one game at a time mostly but people do what suits them best.
Thatās what I think too, and I usually focus on a graph that has been around a lot, on Reddit in particular
We see that Cata triggers the decline. But many were already disgusted at patch 3.3.5, which they saw as a Fukuyama-style end to the story. This is also the time when the game takes on the air of science fiction with a technological boom and urban expansion. Tarrenās Mill was cute before they turned it into Area 51. And they did that with lots of towns like a chemist who empties all his flasks into a cauldron to see what happens.
Blizzard is secretive about it after the big drop from the peak of WotLK to not look bad for marketing purposes so you can not know exactly.
Interesting side note: we do know Overwatch had 5 million unique players in 2021 so I wonder if that has more than WoW.
Also I wonder if Microsoft mainly bought them because of Overwatch because it appears competitive to Halo.
Thatās exactly the problem. Someone reports that 6 million players have left, but sentinels are here to say that everything is fine and that we should not criticize Blizzard.
They must be having fun with the show.
If 6 million left recently, weād probably have negative players. WoW is most probably around 500k to 2-3mil players right now.
I meant, active accounts. But thats right. I dont think there are more than 400 000 players connected currently. Less than Counter Strike
And I just remembered: isnāt it also impossible to know who plays WoW and not other battle.net games? Iām not an expert on anything battle.net though, someone enlighten us.
Well, my cousins next door neighbours have said they heard from a friend of the local hairdressers younger brothers girlfriend that these figures are totally accurate!
In short, nobody but Blizzard know the true figures.
Yes. What one COULD do is to collect in-game data in a way that they can correlate them with the past and make a good guess.
BUT: that implies they collect data since many years ago and their algorithm is good and that the phasing tech doesnāt throw it off.
They strangly donāt want to give the statistics.
But if you go to a full server, and you look at the number of connected in game. You can make a quick estimate of how many people are playing WoW around the world right now. I had done this a few months ago, and it was well below the most played games on Steam like Dota 2 or CS, which are 800k-1m
There is the operative word, āGuessā!
As said nobody but Blizzard have the figures