[Speculation] Player activity at WoD levels?

[lolpve]

It's not surprising, they duped a lot of people into thinking world quests and mythic+ would be fresh content. Pvp is worse than WoD if that was possible, raiding more frustrating due to the legendary system. Artifact weapons have been a failure, alt gameplay is dead this expansion.

I don't think Legion is as bad as WoD, but it's really not much better. I'm amazed that we haven't seen wholesale changes to the dev team since they have only created failure after failure since WotLK.

[Mawnix]

It's not surprising, they duped a lot of people into thinking world quests and mythic+ would be fresh content. Pvp is worse than WoD if that was possible, raiding more frustrating due to the legendary system. Artifact weapons have been a failure, alt gameplay is dead this expansion.

I don't think Legion is as bad as WoD, but it's really not much better. I'm amazed that we haven't seen wholesale changes to the dev team since they have only created failure after failure since WotLK.

See this is what I don't get since I raid Mythic. I don't know a single person in guilds either at the same skill level as mine or in one above mine that have kicked/benched people due to Legendaries.

I mean I have my own personal gripes with the system but that's what they are: personal.

It seems like everything else is a fabricated stigma.

Give me an actual, real example outside of the top 10 guilds that actually bench people due to Legendaries.

[Eggroll]

I noticed the game world to be more empty then ever before, bot bans helped, but yes the general playerbase dropping this much makes very much sense.

Herbs and Ore everywhere I look, a lot of the times 2-5 nodes on my minimap.

Maybe it's because they have upped the spawn rate of herbs and ore plus banning farm bots? Honestly, some people just can't be pleased. No matter how they are doing it, they are doing it wrong.

From my personal experience I can say that there's hardly any time I'm alone anywhere in the world, so to me it doesn't feel empty. I feel a sense of frustration though but can't quite put my finger on it. That said Legion is miles ahead of WoD imo-quality and quantity wise.

[Gsara]

I have noticed less people out in the world but there is still decent numbers overall. Id wager a lot of players are doing what Im doing, play 2-3 days a week and play other games or do other activities the rest of the time. Personally Im glad Im to the point I dont need to log in everyday so I can catch up on other games.

[RuneDK]

I didn't. And I know a lot who also don't want anything that resembles Vanilla.

It's just the natural cycle of games these days. People have less attention span now more than ever. The subs will explode again when Nighthold comes out.

exactly this, if wow ever went back to what it was like in vanilla I would stop playing.

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I have noticed less people out in the world but there is still decent numbers overall. Id wager a lot of players are doing what Im doing, play 2-3 days a week and play other games or do other activities the rest of the time. Personally Im glad Im to the point I dont need to log in everyday so I can catch up on other games.

Yea, im close to that point. Once I get my 35th trait I'm done playing wow a lot...2 raid days and then a few hours a third day for M+ farming

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

It's not surprising, they duped a lot of people into thinking world quests and mythic+ would be fresh content. Pvp is worse than WoD if that was possible, raiding more frustrating due to the legendary system. Artifact weapons have been a failure, alt gameplay is dead this expansion.

I don't think Legion is as bad as WoD, but it's really not much better. I'm amazed that we haven't seen wholesale changes to the dev team since they have only created failure after failure since WotLK.

I think Mythic + is a neat feature, but so far it's not been anything that you can build an endgame life around right now.

But World Quests may be one of my bigger disappointments in WoW (of course, by bigger we're talking at best 3rd place. As nothing will beat Garrisons and Old World Revamp). They just don't feel rewarding. I don't care for Order Resources, short of the 500-ish a week I put into Artifact Knowledge. The gold rewards pale in comparison to what you can get by ignoring Legion and running old raids (or just doing your faction box each day instead of seeking out gold quests). I have all the artifact traits I care about (as a non-raider, non-arena player) so I don't actively seek out AP quests (unless they're big ones like 2k drops). And I'm already sitting at like 840-850 iLevel in all slots, so I only care about gear drops if they roll -forged.

And the boxes, I still don't know what half of them actually drop, because all I ever get is Order Resources and maybe some gold or a piece of gear I already out-leveled.

They're fixable, though. This isn't like the Garrison where it would never be a good feature. But it needs Blizz to take the emphasis off the rep boxes, and put the emphasis on making the actual quests worth seeking out on their own merit. Not because "well I need another Stormheim quest for my box, and this is the easiest one."






Though I think Wrath set Blizzard up for failure. It was too big, too successful, and players loved it too much. It's impossible to replicate what Wrath did, between being the final exclamation mark on Warcraft 3, to having a raid where everything broke perfectly for the dev team, to having no real competition from other games. Yet Blizz, and the playerbase, continues to chase Wrath's shadow ever since.

[Cheze]

every post wrath expansion has featured a spike of activity in the first few months, then a tailing-off as people get bored. We're beginning to see the tailing off happen as 1) ultra-casual players just lose interest and 2) the first raid instance(s) come to the end of their lifespan.

There is nothing weird or unprecedented about any of this; total subs have been on a downward trend since the end of wrath and there's no reason to really expect that to change

[Deleted]

I appreciate your desire to know the unknowable but I have to wonder what knowing this information really does for us, as players? Using trends to make statements about player activity only lends itself to terrible arguments along the lines of, "everybody quit because of {x feature}."

What is funny is that by looking at this google trend : https://www.google.com/trends/explor...q=%2Fm%2F057m6 you ll notice that the "MMORPG" genre has been in decline since the Trial of the crusader patch during WOTLK (released in august 2009). As a player it is exactly when my interest in wow has started to decline.

[Cheze]

also BC/wrath were as successful as they were because of the environment at the time, not because they were anything so much greater than what we have now. In the 8-10 years since wrath released many other genres of games have incorporated the features that once kept people coming back to MMOs. The 'themepark MMO' in general is a dying genre.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

every post wrath expansion has featured a spike of activity in the first few months, then a tailing-off as people get bored. We're beginning to see the tailing off happen as 1) ultra-casual players just lose interest and 2) the first raid instance(s) come to the end of their lifespan.

There is nothing weird or unprecedented about any of this; total subs have been on a downward trend since the end of wrath and there's no reason to really expect that to change

Also, just throwing this out there, it probably doesn't help that Overwatch is running another time-limited holiday event with time-limited skins to unlock.

[Deleted]

also BC/wrath were as successful as they were because of the environment at the time, not because they were anything so much greater than what we have now. In the 8-10 years since wrath released many other genres of games have incorporated the features that once kept people coming back to MMOs. The 'themepark MMO' in general is a dying genre.

BC and wrath were successful because they brought something to the gaming world never seen before (WoW used to have the best PVE encounters of any MMORPG). Since then no true (relevant) innovation have been brought to the MMORPG genre, be it in the game design of the MMO or the technical aspects of the encounters, and the new game have a tendency to bring less than what the older game brought (at least on a game design standpoint).

[Cheze]

WoW still has the best raids of any comparable product; I don't know how you can play the BC/wrath encounters, compare them to the current ones and say nothing has advanced. Players routinely do more complex shit in five mans now than anything that raids required in BC, with perhaps one or two exceptions (vashj.) If what you're interested in is PvE raiding WoW is still by far the best thing on the market.

high end pve raiders have always been a relatively small portion of the population though, and the people who were raiding casually or not at all in BC/wrath are probably now getting their daily skinner box fix elsewhere (mobas, hearthstone, etc etc etc)

[Deleted]

WoW still has the best raids of any comparable product; I don't know how you can play the BC/wrath encounters, compare them to the current ones and say nothing has advanced. Players routinely do more complex shit in five mans now than anything that raids required in BC, with perhaps one or two exceptions (vashj.) If what you're interested in is PvE raiding WoW is still by far the best thing on the market.

Mechanics in PVE encounters in wow came to a standstill since ToC in WOTLK. While innovations were found in WOTLK compared to BC, no innovations can be found since then.

Also, encounters in legion are probably the simplest (mechanically wise on a technical standpoint) since BC.

[Osmeric]

I think Mythic + is a neat feature, but so far it's not been anything that you can build an endgame life around right now.

But World Quests may be one of my bigger disappointments in WoW

The big theme in Legion is Reuse. They've tried to reuse design elements as much as possible, to stretch increasingly limited design dollars as far as possible.

WQs are just them reusing leveling quest content.

I am very concerned that as revenue continues to decline, future expansions, if they exist at all, will be even more compromised by budget constraints.

[Dystemper]

Warcraftrealms pulls data from Armory, so it isn't really speculation at all but at the same time it's not 100% accurate, buy i would say it's very close.

If you use commen sense it's pretty clear the numbers are down a whole lot, why else would Blizzard force CRZ in Legion zones. They are trying to force the illusion of players around at the same time they are damaging their own game with it. A lot of QQing over CRZ is going on over on the official forums and Blizzard are ignoring it, it's the main reason why i stopped playing. It was taking so damn long just to complete WQs, with all the mobs being tagged and the excessive ganking it's just not worth my time anymore. This game has become trash with these new devs, they are clueless morons who don't understand one bit about the game as a whole. WoW will continue to sink down further and further if these devs don't pull their head out of their own asses.

I quit 2 mnths ago but a good friend of mine stuck it out on Aerie Peak until this week. His guid pretty much just stopped logging on he said. And for the last month every time he was running 5 mans or raids, there was a lot of players from Brazil on and no one could understand each other. So the group fell apart and it took another 30 minutes to a hour to get a group for mythics. He finally just stopped playing. The people who say there is not a problem as the same people back durig WOD who said all was well.

[Usernameforforums]

everyone thought they could be little illidans. Then they faced the fact that there were millions of little illidans and they stoped playing. and because daily quests are getting repetitive.

I guess you can say... they weren't prepared

[Lady Dragonheart]

If this is the case, then I'm not seeing it, at all.

I have no issues find groups for even obscure things.
Most of my friendlist is active and online most of the time.
I see people running around and doing things constantly.

[Dystemper]

If this is the case, then I'm not seeing it, at all.

I have no issues find groups for even obscure things.
Most of my friendlist is active and online most of the time.
I see people running around and doing things constantly.

Thats because they implemented CRZ into legion, where before they said they wouldn't do that for the leveling areas. CRZ gives the illusion the server is active. If so many people were really playing then why bring CRZ to legion?

[Lady Dragonheart]

Thats because they implemented CRZ into legion, where before they said they wouldn't do that for the leveling areas. CRZ gives the illusion the server is active. If so many people were really playing then why bring CRZ to legion?

I play a high-population realm and have for many years. I rarely ever see CRZ characters.

[Deleted]

Thats because they implemented CRZ into legion, where before they said they wouldn't do that for the leveling areas. CRZ gives the illusion the server is active. If so many people were really playing then why bring CRZ to legion?

The sharding technology isnt there to make you think there's billions of people playing, it's there to level out the realm playerbase, which is why Legion had pretty much the best launch in WoW's history. High populated realms had limited number of players in each shard and low populated realms had more players added.