Has Legion hit the 'lull period' already?

[Grofatso]

I agree, but I was mainly arguing around the raiding parts. You made it sound like having 7 raiding characters are the norm.

I started in BC, and now I level every class myself every expansion since Cata, but I raid (casually since MoP mind you) barely on 1, 2 characters at most. If you are talking about how theoretically it's easier than ever to raid on the 12 of them, then absolutely it is, but reality is an entirely different thing, you see.

I have always been an altoholic, to experience all the aesthetics of the starting zones and have multiple sides to the story/build-up. On the Horde side naturally :P I was doing some raiding with the guild(s) all the way from vanilla, but in WotLK I started raiding seriously. And I also started running rather successful PUGs weekly on a few alts, thanks to the handy calendar feature. I think I had about 6 raid geared alts back then.

With the introduction of LFR in Cata the gearing of alts got even easier, no need to try to PUG stuff anymore (also PUGing on my server had become such a chore due to population dropping massively), and the number of geared characters got to 10. However I can't say they were seriously raid geared, but geared still.

MoP stayed pretty much on the Cata level, but added 1 more toon to be easily geared with the monk.

In WoD things started to feel painful. The leveling alone was annoying to me on multiple characters. Only saving grace was leveling only when rested and skipping a lot of the stuff you had already done for a gazillion times. Added to that, it seemed like leveling in PVP had become extremely slow. Queues didn't pop fast enough anymore, and even when they did, even winning didn't net enough XP to warrant the time spent in the BG. And that holds true for Legion too.

At least in Legion one can choose the order of the zones. Feels like the story part leading to the Pillars of Creation for each zone still is a thing that must be done, especially before they let you have world quests immediately at level 110. And boy oh boy, there sure is a lot to do at 110. And I'm not even being sarcastic here. It's just that it feels so much like busywork. You do world quests that offer items with baseline item level that is 20, even 30 below what you would need for an upgrade, and pray for the Titanforged proc to happen, and then be high enough to actually matter.

It's tedious. Not rewarding. Even legendaries from caches/dungeons/LFR are just a momentary happiness. Pure RNG doesn't feel even a bit rewarding.

One can sink in hours upon hours on several alts to clear the map of each and all world quests only to receive 1 or two minor upgrades across all toons.

And then one just let's the subscription to lapse. At least I did. It no longer felt fun. In fact, it hadn't felt fun for a while, it just took too long for it to really register. It's not about the amount of content, for me that is absolutely great in Legion. It's all the busywork. Even the professions, crafting feels useless. And all the busywork there too... and RNG.

I know, I know, it's all anecdotal and blablabla, but I'm not speaking for others anyway, just sharing my perspective on all this. More to the point, people on my Battle.net list used to be all playing WoW, after all, that's how I met the people. Now, if they log on at all, they play Diablo 3 or Hearthstone, not WoW.

The world seems full of people though, at least in the WQ areas. But they are not people from my server. And neither are the people in the cities. I would rather see realm mergers than all this artificial CRZ nonsense.

At least for me the activity in the open world feels just like it's only smoke and mirrors.

[Akka]

Wrath increased subs throughout the xpac except for I believe one very minor hiccup in the TOC timeframe. When ICC was released it went to highest levels ever.

Nope.
WotLK was a flat-line during it's whole life, starting at 11,5 M and ending at 11,5 M, and ICC didn't see an increase.
The only increase was at the Cata pre-patch (so after the end of WotLK proper), and it was then that WoW peaked.

The legend of WotLK growing is entirely hanging on from this small pre-Cata bump.

[Zenfoldor]

Here are my thoughts:

1. Legion is the best WoW has ever been. Quality of content is at an all time high.
2. Legion is the only expansion to have true mainstream quality end game content outside of raids(with the exception of a brief period during Cata which had very difficult heroic dungeons).
3. Legion is the best expansion for introducing non-traditional raiders into raiding by adding the mythic+ gateway drug
4. Anecdotal evidence about how many people you see is irrelevant due to shards
5. WoW makes more money now than ever, thanks to microtransactions + increased cost of the xpak, and has a brighter future than ever because of this fact
6. Blizzard stopped releasing sub numbers publicly, so we can't know and can only guess sub figures
7. That said, there is a common behavior that is observed among casual players, which includes re-subing during periods of new expansions, this is natural, and it doesn't mean the players won't be back for the next expansion(see WoD + Legion spike in subs)
8. In the past, the game had very little content and it was distributed incorrectly, in Legion, the game has had a larger amount of content, and it is distributed intelligently. More content to come in the near future with 7.2, which most importantly includes world content outside of raids.
9. An example of greatness is the main "bad" aspect of this xpak, which is legendaries. If blizzard does as I expect, and offers legendary tokens similar to timeless isles, on the new content, they will have successfully spun one of their biggest mistakes in Legion, into a few additional weeks of interesting content in the world.

They should keep up the good work, and not worry about day to day subs. This game is good enough, people will pay for it and play it, and enough people will do so to keep it at least at this level of quality for quite sometime. Of course, his game has more staying power than any game in their library by quite a large exponential percentage.

PS: Having a great time with my guild in nighthold. Since NH came out, guild has doubled, and I have rarely had more fun in this game.

[Marmot]

go clear mythic nighthold and stop your shitposting.

or collect all legion mounts or pets, or max prestige, or get 2.4k arena rating, go do anything i bet if you link your character it's done fuck all.

Never count mythic raiding as content, it's entirely optional and something most players aren't capable of completing.

[Socialhealer]

Never count mythic raiding as content, it's entirely optional and something most players aren't capable of completing.

thats because they're too bust making posts like OP right? rofl

[Grofatso]

Holidays are well over, however activity has not picked up. In fact, it feels like activity has slipped even further. Players logging in less often and for shorter periods. All of this despite the recent release of a patch and a major raid.

Do you feel that Legion has hit the lull period already? And at only 5 months from launch. With no content in sight and still months away from another patch, this could be problematic for this expansion and its success. It feels like we're getting less content slower, and players have picked up on it and are not sticking around. We need another injection of content and fast before numbers are cirtically low. We can't afford another 3+ month PTR for 7.2.

Another metric to compare is the token prices keep getting higher, fewer users. I think the gear and weapon grind are taking their tole on users.

Actually, activity has picked up a bit recently. Dead cat bounce? Maybe, but one cannot truthfully make the claim you just made there.

According to wowtoken.info, the prices are actually going down now. After spiking up prior to 7.1.5.

Seems like
a) More people are playing the game and thus buying tokens.
b) More people need gold due to new stuff from Nighthold being on the market.
c) People hoarding tokens for services have hit the token cap.
d) People realized hoarding tokens with no clear release date for the "tokens for services" is silly (at these prices?), and with no guarantee of it even coming.
e) Combination of all of the above.

[Nahela]

Wrath increased subs throughout the xpac except for I believe one very minor hiccup in the TOC timeframe. When ICC was released it went to highest levels ever.

If Legion were doing well in subs Blizz would want to brag about it. Player activity has shown a steady and precipitous decline although NH did give it a slight bounce, which is to be expected. Now that the Mythic race is over it will start to go back down to end of WOD levels. In the summer months the game will be at its lowest levels of play ever, in my opinion.

And this is the same old argument that completely ignores reality.

The game was 4 years old when Wrath came out. Now it's 12+. The average age of gamers in general has also steadily increased. 12 years ago the majority of your players were in high school or just starting college. Now the majority of those players have careers, jobs, or simply don't have the time for MMOs at all anymore. Anyone expecting subscriber or concurrent player numbers to be as high now as consistently as they were then is living in a fantasy world. The game's population going up and down doesn't mean it's struggling.

Blizzard got tired of people obsessing over subscriber numbers because it doesn't matter. Every time subscribers went up gaming sites would go on about how WoW is the best thing since sliced bread and will never decline, then immediately as soon as subscribers went down the same gaming sites would talk about WoW's end of days and how it will never succeed again. Pretty much the same reason most companies stopped sharing that info, people can't handle it.

It also never ceases to amaze me how many people talk about their being a 'lack of content' while simultaneously saying they don't want to do any group content. It's an MMO, that's kind of what the content is geared towards.

TL;DR - I've never understood the obsession with this sort of thing. Are you enjoying the game? Play it. If you're not, there's literally hundreds of new games coming out every week to play.

[Felaris Stormrage]

Feels like the population on Area 52-Us has declined quite a lot.

Meh, holiday season is over. School is back in session and people are back working more, than they did in holiday season. You'll still see a bustling server, but it'll be after 5ish on weekdays and weekends.

[schwank05]

I personally think I am at the Lull period, I have started Playing SWTOR again and am having a total Blast. WOW just cant make me want to play because I love alts and it takes me playing 2-3 hours a few nights a week over a week to level from 100-110. So I don't play because I get bored of the same class all the time and the Questing sucks ass like it always has. I can hop on SWTOR starting Tuesday and have a 250% exp buff and level via the story missions only in about 2 nights from 0-70. And even without I can buy a boost start at 65 and blow through the 65-70 and be max level in about 2 nights.

Until WOW does what I have been suggesting for years and make you only have to level once each xpac then be able to auto level all your alts I will peeter out on my playing the game after 6-8 months. I have always hated questing and cannot make a connectuion to my characters through questing because the story line is not tied to it but rather Raiding. I dont want to quest or do dailys I want to run Mythic+ on all my characters when ever I want and dont want to level. Im not asking to be max geared I love gearing and building it up. But I just dont want to be forced to level after doing it once.

[ElDoorO]

These threads always go like this:

OP: "I'm seeing a decline"

Person A: "I'm not seeing this, therefore you're wrong"
Person B: "Go do the hardest difficulty or else you're just complaining to complain because everyone loves the hardest difficulty"
Person C: "Go do literally everything else"
Person D: "Go do these other things"
Person E: "Me too, my friends list is shrinking like it did in expansion X".
Person F: "Well make new friends?"
Person G: "WoW isn't dying! It's totally not dying! I don't know why I'm bringing this up but it's not dying!"
Person H: "Do you have numbers?" IF Y: "I don't believe those numbers unless they are official, even though Blizzard has failed to cooperate -- so since they won't cooperate you're wrong and can't prove it" IF N: "You don't have numbers and therefore you're wrong".

These are the groups of people I always see every expansion in these kinds of threads. Almost every single time.
It rarely goes anywhere productive from where the OP was headed and when it does in the few responses they get derailed because people who genuinely enjoy the game (or have a different experience) get hyper-defensive.

To answer your question OP, I'm not seeing this lull in raiding but give it another month and I'll see it. They held out on NH a little too long. We were getting bored with ToV and EN. Due to Blizzard failing to make Mythic flexible with the amount of people, we won't do Mythic raiding. Once we down Heroic Guldan a few times then I suspect we'll just be done for a while again.

As far as anything beyond raiding -- absolutely I'm seeing a lull. About the only time I see other people are during the weekly world boss and occasionally during the pvp world quests. I could speculate as to why and that would be World Quests don't offer much anymore. They don't feel like they scale as I grow. Everything is way too RNG making it not feel like a grind but a gamble. I may get it tomorrow or I may NEVER get something. This is only acceptable for trivial and cosmetic items but is unacceptable for anything else as a game that files itself as an MMO which leads me to...

The last time I felt WoW was an MMO was during the Legion invasion. Since then I jokingly call it a multi-player game that you can do most of the content solo or with a small few players. I no longer call WoW an MMO because it lacks many components to what an MMO should be in my opinion. I rarely see players in the world / wild.

[clevin]

It's so cute the way none of you go to warcraftrealms and at least look at that activity graph (no, its not perfect, yes, it's actual data).

- - - Updated - - -

These threads always go like this:

OP: "I'm seeing a decline"

Person A: "I'm not seeing this, therefore you're wrong"
Person B: "Go do the hardest difficulty or else you're just complaining to complain because everyone loves the hardest difficulty"
Person C: "Go do literally everything else"
Person D: "Go do these other things"
Person E: "Me too, my friends list is shrinking like it did in expansion X".
Person F: "Well make new friends?"
Person G: "WoW isn't dying! It's totally not dying! I don't know why I'm bringing this up but it's not dying!"
Person H: "Do you have numbers?" IF Y: "I don't believe those numbers unless they are official, even though Blizzard has failed to cooperate -- so since they won't cooperate you're wrong and can't prove it" IF N: "You don't have numbers and therefore you're wrong".

These are the groups of people I always see every expansion in these kinds of threads. Almost every single time.
It rarely goes anywhere productive from where the OP was headed and when it does in the few responses they get derailed because people who genuinely enjoy the game (or have a different experience) get hyper-defensive.

God this is perfect.

As far as anything beyond raiding -- absolutely I'm seeing a lull. About the only time I see other people are during the weekly world boss and occasionally during the pvp world quests. I could speculate as to why and that would be World Quests don't offer much anymore. They don't feel like they scale as I grow. Everything is way too RNG making it not feel like a grind but a gamble. I may get it tomorrow or I may NEVER get something. This is only acceptable for trivial and cosmetic items but is unacceptable for anything else as a game that files itself as an MMO which leads me to....

Same here. Fewer people in guild, etc. Of course this is just my guild, my realm... but I'm at that point too. And it's natural I think. I have my lock main geared to 866 which is low level for people farming raids or M+ but is plenty for WQs, LFR, normal or even heroic raids pre-NH. The only reason to gear substantially past that is to raid H EN/ToV or NH Normal or H... and I don't raid anymore past LFR to see the place. So... I leveled by druid alt since she heals and I like healing. But in a couple of weeks now, she's at 860 and again, there's little need to gear her much further (though I suspect I'll end up doing some lower level M+ with the guild since we usually can use healers).

So, if you don't raid or farm M+ past the occasional run, there's not a ton to do, so I can see people logging in less. This is why Blizz is trying to space out content - the player base used to just stay subbed, but now people seem more inclined to unsubscribe for a few months if they're bored... and some percentage of people who do that never come back.

[Averrix]

I think so, my entire guild quit. And I've noticed the class halls I have characters for have gotten thinner and thinner as the weeks have gone on.

- - - Updated - - -

I personally think I am at the Lull period, I have started Playing SWTOR again and am having a total Blast. WOW just cant make me want to play because I love alts and it takes me playing 2-3 hours a few nights a week over a week to level from 100-110. So I don't play because I get bored of the same class all the time and the Questing sucks ass like it always has. I can hop on SWTOR starting Tuesday and have a 250% exp buff and level via the story missions only in about 2 nights from 0-70. And even without I can buy a boost start at 65 and blow through the 65-70 and be max level in about 2 nights.

Until WOW does what I have been suggesting for years and make you only have to level once each xpac then be able to auto level all your alts I will peeter out on my playing the game after 6-8 months. I have always hated questing and cannot make a connectuion to my characters through questing because the story line is not tied to it but rather Raiding. I dont want to quest or do dailys I want to run Mythic+ on all my characters when ever I want and dont want to level. Im not asking to be max geared I love gearing and building it up. But I just dont want to be forced to level after doing it once.

That's exactly how I feel. I hate it when I want to play a new character, but it's like I've never done anything before. I hate having to go around and get all the flight paths again and do all the same quests over again and just feel like wow, I've done all this why do I have to do it again. It does really chip away at the desire to want to keep playing.

[Lycann]

"already"

I can't remember the last time an expansion lasted this long without having a lull.

[rda]

"already"

I can't remember the last time an expansion lasted this long without having a lull.

Any expansion before WoD. For real. Check the numbers to see for yourself.

- - - Updated - - -

If you had any knowledge in statistic you'd know that the bias comes when the pool of data is not representative of the population. You're welcome to explain how blanketly logging everyone connected is distorting the data, but I suppose you'll have some trouble doing it.

(He just thought like yelling "bias" because he heard someone else use the word in relation to statistics. The dialog is this: "that data has a huge bias!1!111 you can't use it!! I know the word 'bias', look at me, 'bias-bias-bias' and that means you are wrong" - "ok, what is the bias?" - <silence>)

[clevin]

Until WOW does what I have been suggesting for years and make you only have to level once each xpac then be able to auto level all your alts I will peeter out on my playing the game after 6-8 months. I have always hated questing and cannot make a connectuion to my characters through questing because the story line is not tied to it but rather Raiding. I dont want to quest or do dailys I want to run Mythic+ on all my characters when ever I want and dont want to level. Im not asking to be max geared I love gearing and building it up. But I just dont want to be forced to level after doing it once.

When they did 0-max level boosts for $60 I thought they'd follow it, by now, with partial boosts for cash. $15 for 10 or 20 levels, to be applied whenever I want (hate Outland? apply the boost at 58 and boom, you're 78 or something).I'm fine with questing to level but not 5x or something. But if I could spend $15 to get to 110 on, say, my rogue? I might do it. A

[Deleted]

*shrug* my little bubble is fine. I've got my circle of friends I do 5 man content with and my guild progressing on NH HC. All that matters to me.

[clevin]

Actually, activity has picked up a bit recently. Dead cat bounce? Maybe, but one cannot truthfully make the claim you just made there.

That chart actually shows very little of January - the bounce is mostly in December with holidays, etc. The Jan trend lines DO point up, but it's hard to say how far into Jan they extend.

In another month we'll see. I also expect there to be a bump due to NH being released - LFR is gated so people who see raids in that fashion will have to stick around for a month or so still and many guilds are progressing through normal and heroic (mythic too, but that's a small percentage). The real issue will be what happens after LFR is out for a month or so (so we've all had a chance to see Guldan). Of course, this is why they are doing 7.2.

[Hashcrypt]

Nope. First five months or so had a ton of content. I was constantly farming AP, doing M+, leveling alts, and dabbling in raiding.

Now that most of the daily grind is done and over with, I can focus all my gameplay towards NH progression.

It's had a nice flow of 'the new hotness" to a now more stable and manageable amount of content.

And just when NH begins to get old, we'll have 7.2 to re-energize the game.

So again, no, there is no lull point in Legion. Quit finding ways for this game to be bad. If you honestly can't find entertaining shit to do in this game, then that is YOUR fault, and not WoW's.

[Marrilaife]

According to wowtoken.info, the prices are actually going down now. After spiking up prior to 7.1.5.

Seems like
a) More people are playing the game and thus buying tokens.
b) More people need gold due to new stuff from Nighthold being on the market.
c) People hoarding tokens for services have hit the token cap.
d) People realized hoarding tokens with no clear release date for the "tokens for services" is silly (at these prices?), and with no guarantee of it even coming.
e) Combination of all of the above.

I mostly vote for d) with maybe a bit of c)

It seemed the token spike was related to:

1) hyping the "tokens to bnet balance" datamining, but we don't know when it will come, will it come at all, and with what restrictions - for example people speculated you could buy hearthstone packs or overwatch lootcrates, and that would be very lucrative for people who quit wow, have their gold there as "frozen assets" but switched onto other blizz games like HS or OW. Now what if the wow gold to bnet balance in the end will launch in a form that restricts those transactions to in-wow only like faction changes and store mounts? That's less lucrative. Or some people even speculated old tokens won't be convertible and we'll have to buy new, upgraded version of those while old ones will only work on gametime. We're all in the land of speculation and wishful thinking, sinking more gold into it seems risky.

2) blizzard stealth-removing the 36 tokens in 24 months cap that was reported by several youtubers, so multiboxers could go and pay for all their accounts with tokens

Btw I expect a spike soon because valentine event is starting and the "seasonal mount farmers" are gonna resub again, same thing is happening before halloween, as those 2 events have low % dropchance mounts people are still after.

[Deleted]

NO.
A new raid just opened.
So your aswer who dont wanna here anyway is: NO!