Does Classic have more players than retail?

[Shaetha]

no you can't. realm pops are relative to other realms, not to a static high end number.

nobody knows for sure, but a great way of telling this has always been to just watch twitch traffic, it's actually a really reliable marker since a certain % of all players will go watch the game they are playing. you can talk about how many players you see in game but that's pointless because phasing in retail forces you to see people, there could be 10000 people logging in worldwide and you would essentially be grouped with all of them in your region regardless of your server and the world would feel packed.

this again goes back to why twitch viewership has always been a good measure, because it's not anecdotal, there are concrete numbers of viewers and those numbers are a certain % of the people playing the game, and that % is usually reliable.

you can ignore that fact if it doesn't fit your bias, but based purely on that, and even removing outliers such as asmongold... classic certainly has more people playing on a daily basis and it isn't even close. for retail to have more players than classic the ratio of players to twitch viewers would need to be more skewed for retail than they have ever been in any AAA game in the history of twitch. believe that if you want, but i know a lot of people around here made bold claims of classic being terrible and dead in a month and now that they have been proven wrong they want to justify their statements instead of admitting they were wrong.

I mean, you can make anything true if you invent the metric.

[MoanaLisa]

Spoken by someone that does not realize that the particular source used has been spot on every single time in the past.

Well, except for that time they compared a lackluster quarter's revenue to one a year earlier and made furrowed brows over how much lower it was in the latter quarter.

I checked. Turned out that the quarter the year before was in the runup and launch to Mists including all of the pre- and expansion sales revenue. The much lower revenue period didn't have much of anything going on.

So, no. "Spot on every time" with their analysis is not exactly how I would put it. Their analysis is often sloppy and since they don't disclose their assumptions it could be anything from a carefully reasoned analysis of trending data to a wild guess.

I can make a very reasonable analysis that a retail store's revenue's in 4th calendar quarter are much higher than in 2nd quarter but it doesn't mean anything. I don't know if superdata is right or wrong on this but they are often sloppy and since they're impossible to validate it's always well to view this stuff with some skepticism. For all we know some of ATVI's other game data slipped in there as well. I've hunted around and found zero evidence that WoW subscriptions went up by 223%. They went up for sure. How much is really the question.

[Relapses]

Technically speaking, there are real world ramifications, especially in terms of stock purchases and investments going forward.

Ah yes, good thing we have MMO-Champion to help investors figure out where to spend their money. Are you for real?

[Willhouse]

Retail is alot more active and has five-six times more players than classic.Classic is heavily crippled retail,nothing more.

[Doffen]

Subs increased 223% after Classic was released. That is more than tripling the sub count, thus one can extrapolate that there very well could be more playing Classic than retail.

https://www.newsweek.com/world-warcr...elease-1461086

From july to august it says. I know it says after classic released in the title in the article, so what, 123%(lol) of the playerbase started subbing 28th of august? It would be true if the increase came from august to september, but it didn't. Blizzard said they had an upswing of subs in their MAU reporting, for people coming for 8.2 and classic. July is also summer vacation for most here in the EU at least while 8.2 was coming. It's a lot of if and why, did people want to wait and sub for retail again in august so they could try classic too? WoW has a lot of seasonable players.

Though classic made the biggest impact of the sub increase, both directly and indirectly, I think we all know this. Doesn't anything to say about the situation today though. The hype has passed, but it is still thriving from the look of it.

[MrLachyG]

who knows? only Blizzard knows that information. does it matter? absolutely not.

[callipygoustp]

Yes
{10char}

[Rexosaurus]

Jesus. The amount of "facts" and "metrics" that people are pulling out of their asses in this thread is astounding, even for the internet. Is this really the hill that you guys want to die on?

[kaminaris]

I really doubt classic is anywhere near current wow in terms of players. The only statistic I found was this:

https://wowclassicpopulation.com/characters?minLevel=30

Total chars recorder with at least 30 level - 883 502 = 0.8M
Apparently current wow is somewhere between ~2-3M subscribers, and I would say average amount of alts is about 1-2 (so 2-3 chars in total)
That would make it 4-9M total chars.

Realmpop shows 6M EU + 6M US ~ 12M total characters between 111-120

However interesting thing is this activity chart:
https://wowclassicpopulation.com/activity

Not sure how reliable it is but it looks like a steep way to abbys.

[Vampyrr]

You can't do that however, as one classic realm could be equal to 5-10 retail high pop realms.

Blizzard changed the way u see population after classic popularity at launch, i can link u source.

In retail servers show populations in relation to each other.

That means retail could have 10k players and still have more high pop realms than classic

Wowhead have a article posted about this 1 week after classic launch.

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I would say its highely unlikely retail have more players than classic. If you look at twitch as thats the best metric we have atm, you can see classic out performs retail 10:1.

Remember how big classic realms are, and even now 2 months after launch we still have layering on over half of the servers.

If you compare this to bfa launch, people started unsubbing day 5, after they completed all content.

What on earth, why would you think 1 classic server (kept low on purpose even with the cap increase) would be anywhere close to max cap of a retail server that have been constantly raised and raised from expac to expac? Id say its more likely that 5-10 high classic servers = 1 high pop retail

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I really doubt classic is anywhere near current wow in terms of players. The only statistic I found was this:

https://wowclassicpopulation.com/characters?minLevel=30

Total chars recorder with at least 30 level - 883 502 = 0.8M
Apparently current wow is somewhere between ~2-3M subscribers, and I would say average amount of alts is about 1-2 (so 2-3 chars in total)
That would make it 4-9M total chars.

Realmpop shows 6M EU + 6M US ~ 12M total characters between 111-120

However interesting thing is this activity chart:
https://wowclassicpopulation.com/activity

Not sure how reliable it is but it looks like a steep way to abbys.

Well it was broken but that 200k seems like a good number for when it was really active, probably dropped a bit since then but not to the the 0 it shows. That 0 is probably when the addon broke.

[Akasha64]

There's more retail servers overall. I mean I think I counted over 200 retail servers (NA). Classic servers last time I counted had around 37 servers (NA). People invested a lot of time in retail over 15 years, so many might not change over so easily. This does not mean retail is better, but people are still attached to their characters and such, and are forward-looking. If you look at streamers, that's definitely in favor of Classic though.

I have faith though that the Classic scene will grow with time. As people grow older, they aren't going to have the time or energy to learn an entirely new game with each expansion, so playing what you already know gets a higher value.

[Ielenia]

I would say its highely unlikely retail have more players than classic. If you look at twitch as thats the best metric we have atm, you can see classic out performs retail 10:1.

Such a shocker than a game that has been requested for so long, hyped to hell and back, and released barely two months ago is "outperforming" a game that has been released a year and a half ago and is now nearing its "end of expansion" lull.

It's like people don't stop to really think things through before posting.

Remember how big classic realms are, and even now 2 months after launch we still have layering on over half of the servers.

And? I recall Blizzard mentioned that they want to limit server population to the same limit that it used to be back in the day. Remember that max server capacity has increased over the years.

If you compare this to bfa launch, people started unsubbing day 5, after they completed all content.

So you're saying Classic will become a ghost town after Naxxramas goes live and people "complete all content"?

[Craaazyyy]

Well recount got 431k DLs since last update in retail, and 376k in classic. And then you also have skada_classic which got 28k downloads on wowinterface while skada in retail have 657k downloads. Seeing damage meter addons are among top addons that people have, surely retail must have way more players than classic, no?

I don't want to claim that, because using addons as a metric is full of flaws. We can all claim whatever we want, but there is nothing we can use to be exactly sure. Like skada retail was last updated in july. If we are to use anything regarding addons, Recount is the one we should follow. With scepticism, of course.

well, skada hasn't been updating their shit regularly.. that retail update is from july 2nd

other than that most addons that are popular on both retail and classic(and are being updated) are usually have higher download numbers in classic.. and that's considering, as this guy said, that there are a lot of classic players that tend to play without addons

[arkanon]

You can't do that however, as one classic realm could be equal to 5-10 retail high pop realms.

Everything wrong with a fanboi in one comment. What an absolutely ludicrous comment to make - You are so blinded by your bias you have no idea how ridiculous that statement is. Be a fan of retail - be a fan of classic - be a fan of both - just dont be this blind and naive - you tarnish those around you who are having a rational and reasonable discussion.

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If you compare this to bfa launch, people started unsubbing day 5, after they completed all content.

You are the gift that keeps on giving. This is one of the dumbest things anyone has said on here. First off, most of the content was gated, not as badly as classic, which is HEAVILY gated, but still, most content was not even released in the first 5 days. Secondly, dont you think its convenient that ppls sub ran out 5 days in so they didnt have to renew! Because otherwise, your statement would be baseless vitriol from a tryhard troll.




Edit - Amusing side note to the mods "Game vs Game threads are not allowed! - unless they are pro classic, and then we leave them open for pages and pages, and even comment in them ourselves without even a hint of hypocrisy - but seriously though guys, no game vs game threads that are negative about classic in any way - we will close them immediately, and state what we have many, many times before - game vs game threads are not allowed!"

[Gorgodeus]

Except, you know, when they were wrong.

Nothing in that article says they were wrong. Try again.

[lonely zergling]

Classic has more players.

[AceofH]

There's no way to know. Twitch viewership is possibly the worst and most misleading metric imaginable for determining comparative game populations.

Blizzard knows. Personally I doubt that it's even close at this point. What with layering being removed early among other things it appears that a significant draw-down of players in Classic from launch is underway. That's not unexpected and in some cases might be welcome. There was never much love for tourists in Classic from the start. If most of them are leaving then the group of players that appreciate Classic for what it is can get down to business. I don't know that that is a bad thing at all.

layering isn't being removed early. it's being removed late. the goal was never layering during phase 1 entirely.
the initial plan was layering for a few weeks only, and then gone all together. some realms are still layered, at the 2 month point.

[Frolk]

Not a fat chance, too many casuals who still play BFA and ppl who dont want to play Classic.

[Denymeplz]

Retail is dead, i logged in and didnt see anyone, opposite to classic stormwind/ogrimmar crowded by spergs. -> Classic meme player ignoring the fact that almost all retail content is instanced.

[tikcol]

I play in EU and the activity with raids and especially m+ is as busy as always. The impression I have got, is that classic is way more popular in NA compared to EU. Could be just a gut feeling or course. Today at prime time in EU on my medium retail server with sharding it was at least 25+ groups for each dungeon at any given time in average. At the moment at 1.40 am in the weekend its usually 10+.

Rough estimate, but every night these days there must be tens of thousand m+ runs going. I can sit for 5-10 mins just queuing for a m+ and see groups getting full fast af. For a 15 year old game, pretty good. And I hear its buzzing in classic too. Isn't that great.

What kind of nonsense is this? If you're looking for a group in classic you're looking for people in your own server while in BFA you have a pool of players from a dozen servers. How is that even a fair comparison?