It seems WoD didn't do that bad

[analmoose]

Then you didn't play vanilla because most classes were broken then. Almost as if blizz has always had the problem of tuning toons

I'm not disagreeing with you because generally only one spec and role was acceptable in vanilla, but things were still pretty good if you had the proper build. Also I beartanked everything, and enhanced the fuck out of everything, and it was glorious and new and shiny. WTB more WF procs proccing procs proccing trinket procs that procced procs and shrekt people in one shot in AV

[Pull My Finger]

No surprise. It had a Blizzard logo on the box.

It had garrisons, Mr. non-expert.

[Osmeric]

Sorry dont trust 3 party sites like that.

In WoD the graphs accurately reflected the trends, both the initial decline and the later flattening. Given the track record one cannot just dismiss it now.

[Teebone]

This community is the worst ever in mankind.

It has its... moments... but pretty sure LoL is still the worst.

[ShiyoKozuki]

Legion content is superior to WotLKs

WotLK launch raids were pathetic for example

Naxx and EN are both absolute garbage.

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In WoD the graphs accurately reflected the trends, both the initial decline and the later flattening. Given the track record one cannot just dismiss it now.

Why do you have GC quotes in your sig? That man killed an entire genre all by himself.

[Osmeric]

Mythic EN is easier than LFR SOO.

Please stop.

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Why do you have GC quotes in your sig? That man killed an entire genre all by himself.

You are being a very silly person. When you say things like that it doesn't do anything but impeach your own credibility.

[Wondercrab]

I'm sure it's been pointed out by now, but WarcraftRealms is not an accurate measure of overall player numbers at all. To name but one example, it suggested an increase in WoD activity between Q1 and Q2 in 2015, a time period in which the game actually saw a huge net loss of 1.5 million players.

[Sylv_]

Naw, WoD was shit, think about it.
Just because numbers say people played, doesn't mean the content was not shit-- it was.

I've played shitty games before. Don't ask why I continued to play them, I just did. Even though I knew it was shit, I still played.
Just because you put lipstick on a turd does not turn it into not a turd.

[Bad Management]

Legion is good, until 7.1.5 or the Death Patch, as it's rightfully called.

[lazzy]

Sigh. I understand your love with WoW but, as i said, you will never ever have 12 million players costantly for 2 years of expansion regardless of quality of the said expansion.
Maybe with a new kind of game? Sure, but it's no longer the case with WoW.
WoW IS OLD. Unless you change WoW completely, and if it was the case, you could still call it WoW?
To adds this, i don't really see why someone MUST have 12 million players. I mean right now i don't have any issue in plaiyng wow, i can do raid, i can do bg, i can do arena, i can do dg, i can do wq. The longest queue is max 25 min for a dps.
Now if you bring the "dead servers" into this, i can agree with you, maybe some more merge is needed, but it's not the actual topic.

As I said WoD went back to 12 Million and the people who came back didn't come in expecting to quit in 1-3 months. Yes WoW can get back to a consistent 12 million if they made the game good. Has nothing to do with WoW being old, It has to do with every xpac since Cata being a disaster.

The only thing preventing WoW from being a huge thing again is Blizzard. They may of burned all the bridges though after the disaster WoD was when everyone gave the game another chance.

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Legion content is superior to WotLKs

WotLK launch raids were pathetic for example

Legion content is okay. Problem is you burn thru it in a week and shit gets boring.

PvP is garbage In Legion, WOTLK PvP was godlike.
PvE is boring because it has 4 different difficulties in Legion, WOTLK had two.
WOTLK had good Raids and Instances so I don't know what you're talking about.

[ShiyoKozuki]

Rorcanna knows absolutely nothing about Vanilla, and how people who didn't raid seriously spent their time. Probably because he/she didn't find it fun enough (which is subjective and perfectly fine). You shouldn't bother, it is pointless since people have had 10 years of myths about Vanilla (for the good and the bad) and had been alienated by plenty of Vanilla players who like to crap on the newest iteration of WoW. He/She is just a part of how antagonized the WoW community had become over the years and there is very little we can do about it anymore, since it is a black vs white discussion with no end.

I love how the guy literally talks about vanilla when he's probably some WOD/MOP player and doesn't actually know anything, lol.

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Haha, dream on. It's not like it's all veiled in the mists of mystery.
We know things about civilizations that lived 3000 years ago and further back. Knowing shit about a game from 2004 when the Internet was already around is not that prestigious. Especially considering the pirate servers running that version of the game.

Even admits to it! Glorious.
You shouldn't talk about things you didn't actually experience.

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You are being a very silly person. When you say things like that it doesn't do anything but impeach your own credibility.

No?
The guy literally admitted he made LFR, and it was a mistake.
He constantly talks about all the shit he did to the MMO genre and how he regrets it all, but ok.
Added to ignore list

[lazzy]

Am I the only one who remembers WOTLK being flogged like a dead horse due to "welfare epix"...? And didn't this start in TBC at that when vendors with epix were introduced?
And as someone who leveled through the content to 80 before the 1-60 revamp, I can only recall "challenge" ever coming from my own inexperience and rookie mistakes. It's not as if it was horribly complex to figure out that I shouldn't run straight through an area as it would aggro too many mobs... It took me 2 months to get to max level and the journey was excellent, but it was also entirely new. Future characters = I zipped through the content in a matter of days as well.

Sure you could level alts in a few days but the leveling still took awhile it wasn't done in literally 6 hours like it is now which is hilarious.

Welfare epics did start in TBC when isle of quel'danas was launched but it wasn't that big of a deal like it is now.

Heroics/Raids were still a pretty good challenge and some of the best more enjoyable raids/instances came out of WOTLK such as Ulduar/ICC for example.

WOTLK was also pre-LFR so the community was still intact and people had to travel the world so world PvP still existed because Heroic dailies required you to actually go to instances and not use LFG.

PvP was at the most relevant point it's ever had been in WOTLK since Blizzard balanced around it. I still remember PvE players crying they got nerfed because of PvP but that's part of what made WOTLK so great every single spec was literally balanced in that xpac.

WOTLK was just a godlike xpac and Blizzard will never manage to get back to this point. They've dug the hole to deep with Class pruning, LFR, 4 raid difficulties, ignorance of PvP and refusal to innovate WoW. We've had the same overall end game since TBC - Arena - Raids.

[OperationFerret]

The only conclusion we can really draw from these graphs is that there are way too many people playing hunters.

[Deleted]

Only game that can compete and is actually stealing players is

League of Legends

Thanks you League of Legend for taking our 12 year olds.

[TriHard]

Let's face it, WoW is 12 years old now, there's not a ton of people who truly sit day in and day out playing it anymore, instead they treat it as any other game, they play it when it launches and come back when there's dlcs / updates. It is the game that is getting old and the players have other things to do in their life.

There's not really a "new" player base to tap into anymore, the young peeps go for Minecraft over WoW these days, and more people than ever are getting into FPS games. Only reason why wow is somewhat "up there" on twitch atm is thanks to Sodapoppin and Mitch. There'll always be a steady decline, every single expansion no matter what they do.
There are several factors weighing in on it, age of the player, the game, the change in the industry itself, more competition, etc.

[Thimagryn]

My personal interpretation based on experience and history of gaming trends- Everyone vastly underestimates the sheer volume of players who buy an expansion only to play through story content.

Whether it's Starcraft, Diablo or World of Warcraft, a majority of the sales go to people who will play through the campaign once and rarely touch the game ever again. We always think that it's because of multiplayer that these games get their massive success and popularity, but it's the complete opposite. Even with an online-only MMO like WoW, there is an overwhelming demographic of people who will quest to max and leave after that.

[Otaka]

And also maybe the early design of Vanilla and TBC was more immersive and more involving, and felt much less repetitive and artificial.

Well it certainly was harder. You couldnt just breeze over quests, elites and all mobs in the outdoor world... they actually presented some sort of a challenge, be it either powerful individual or in groups. (elwynn murlocs, never forget)

In WoD and now in Legion the content consumption is in hyperdrive because its so easy... how long did it take to get the first leveling done? world record was less than 12 hours, most people who started at launch were done in a week. Then dungeon grind was done in a month or however long it was until raid opened.

They are supporting 5 mans better now... but they made it more of a chore instead of an alternative, if a mythic raider wants to join progress raids he also needs to do keystone mythics... otherwise you will be 20 ilevel behind everyone else in the team.

So tough luck for those who ONLY want to raid... you are forced to do dungeons aswell.

The only thing that people remember from the questing experience are the cinematics. Oldschool memories of a hard encounter or a place of death dont exist anymore... its too bad, those were the best.
A place in the world that everyone remembers being an absolute deathpit brought the community closer together.
People helped eachother in such places... the satisfaction of finishing such area was immense too.
I remember giving a hand to a random group in the Hinterlands elite area for example.

Suramar is trying, but its designed to be soloed. Some rare mobs might not be... in the storyline i got a 3 man group quest, oh well, i soloed it... no issues, just nuked the crap out of that giant "elite". I even tried to look for a group for it first but then i realized he had so little healthpool i can just nuke it in 10 seconds.
Thats how difficult our outdoor world is now.

Only things left are specific instanced dungeons with multipliers and raids. So no wonder people wont play long...

[lavaalamp]

legion had the worst class design ever!

many classes are totally broken.

their class fantasy was a classic fail. i bet we will not more read these words in blue from blizzard.

we will, about 1-2 years after the expansion is over and when it's PR safe to admit it.

[lazzy]

It happened IN WotLK. Also, WotLK didn't add two millions sub, it stayed flat up to Cata release - TBC ended with 11,5 M, WotLK ended with 12M after Cata was announced.
My empirical experience in WotLK was that there was a MASSIVE flight from veteran players and a MASSIVE arrival of new players. It certainly seems confirmed by how WotLK is now flagged as "best X-pack", and when you dig you notice that it's because most people playing today started then and after.

Just flat out disagree. Played since Beta all the way till now. TBC is still my fav xpac but I'm not going to act like WOTLK was a bad xpac because it was probably the best, I just enjoyed the time I had in TBC more than WOTLK since TBC added everything I loved that moved to WOTLK and got perfected.

The entire veteran players leaving because of WOTLK is just flat out not true. As someone who's played on Tichondrius (first popular server from Vanilla to now) for the last 12 years I pretty much knew all the veteran players since I raided up to Naxx/Sunewell/ICC was high rated in PvP they didn't start quitting WoW till mid Cata when Talent trees got gutted, Heroics got nerfed into the ground after the first month and LFR was added.

WOTLK is considered the best PvP xpac by a mile by anyone who is actually good at PvP. PvE was also loved by the PvE community outside the entire ToC patch which a lot of people still enjoyed. If it wasn't for the year content drought at the end of WOTLK it would be by far the best xpac Blizzard ever made. Best part is even during the let me make this clear a YEAR CONTENT DROUGHT sub numbers didn't plummet 5-6 million like they do today in 1-3 months.

[Darkguyver2020]

Legion is good, until 7.1.5 or the Death Patch, as it's rightfully called.

Gotta love some of the hyperbole these morons like to spew out.

Infracted