Classic is in a weird spot

[Mayia]

There are almost no big streamer , not to say there is none.

Almost no new youtube content.

It gets harder and harder, if not impossible to find groups for quests / dungeons while leveling

Many raid guilds seem to have just vanished or disbanded

People dont seem to talk much in all chat outside of the same ones again and again.

forums seem to be mostly empty/ some outrage over a blue post but not over the game

Is there any hope for classic to get popular again? maybe with naxx ? or is it better to just accept for now that until tbc it will be a little more quite?

Ignore the idiots from retail saying "oh classic isn't that popular" the last few months people have had NOTHING BUT classic to play if they play it.. and its burnt out quite a few people who are dedicated to the game, some have left for good finding something else to do, others have gone outside and are making the most of being able to see friends again.

The people will bounce back with AQ and afterwards the drop wont be as big, as AQ requires quite abit more attention to keep clearing.

[Beet]

I don't know what you're talking about OP. They've had to literally keep the big 7 or so realms locked down due to them being at capacity. They don't let people transfer to them or even roll characters on them. It's been this way for over a month now. We had queues so they had to bring layers back. The game isn't dropping players.

But as for finding groups, yeah thats boosting for you. No one wants to do something the regular way when we can pay someone and have it done instantly. It sucks for those of us who like to run 5 mans the regular way though.

>People dont seem to talk much in all chat outside of the same ones again and again.

That's very anecdotal. I play on three realms, all have a World chat that is full of talk. Especially Grobbulus.

>forums seem to be mostly empty/ some outrage over a blue post but not over the game
Goto the Classic WoW sub. Or better yet, use one of the dozens of classic WOW discords. Lot of fun talk to be had there.

I don't know what you expected. The game is 15 years old. It's never going to be like it was the first month after launch because everyone was playing again to experience something that they could never experience again, a fresh vanilla server. The game will have many ups and downs until TBC comes. Then classic is going to die for now. Blizzard is likely going to open up another new server for classic players when TBC drops so the people who play classic can do play it again while we progress to TBC. I think we'll see the game played until the end of Wrath. They won't release a classic version of Cata or the expansions after it though. Not even interest.

Anyways before I'm attacked for the latter half of my post, thats just my two cents. My opinion. Don't jump down my throat.

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Considering that more people play retail, probaly a better spot. Half the playerbase in Classic is bots eitherway, nice community

How do you know way more people play retail than classic? I mean shit, the realms are so dead on retail they've got them all connected to each other just so people see other people. It's been like that for ages and it's even worse now.

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People wanted #nochanges.
They got #nochanges.

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There's a lot of 'casual' players who play retail.Maybe for a bit of PvP, maybe for just hanging out working on professions. Auction house trading, alts.. Maybe you should look harder.

Oh stop it. You act like everyone said no changes. And we didn't even get no changes so it's a lie. No changes would be servers with vanilla realm capacities. Not this god forsaken mega realms with literally quadruple the numbers of the highest pop vanilla realm.

">There's a lot of 'casual' players who play retail.Maybe for a bit of PvP, maybe for just hanging out working on professions. Auction house trading, alts.. Maybe you should look harder."

If someone is playing retail to work on professions that's the saddest fucking thing I've ever heard. Like jesus christ, that's a depressing thought.

[Echocho]

No changes would be servers with vanilla realm capacities. Not this god forsaken mega realms with literally quadruple the numbers of the highest pop vanilla realm.

It's why I switched to one of the dead realms. Everyone has flocked to the same couple of servers and they've become extremely toxic, like private server levels of toxic.

[Celestraza]

There are almost no big streamer , not to say there is none.

Almost no new youtube content.

It gets harder and harder, if not impossible to find groups for quests / dungeons while leveling

Many raid guilds seem to have just vanished or disbanded

People dont seem to talk much in all chat outside of the same ones again and again.

forums seem to be mostly empty/ some outrage over a blue post but not over the game

Is there any hope for classic to get popular again? maybe with naxx ? or is it better to just accept for now that until tbc it will be a little more quite?

I strongly doubt you even play Classic.....

The only true part about this post is forum activity (people are discord now).

Ironically there are tons of players leveling but everyone is buying mage boosts. Scarlet Monestary full boosts are like 5g on my server. Go there and you will see armies of lvl60 mages followed by low level characters going in and out of the instances.

I can't even AoE grind properly on my mage because I am competing with 3+ other mages most of the time. I also can't herb/mine for the same reason.

[Akka]

LOL this thread is so full of cope, nothing but confirmation bias.

Not only that, but even if the OP was right, the fact that it took 9 months to reach this point completely defeats in itself the "you think you do but you don't", as it's already thrice as long as the typical crash in retail.

But of course, OP is wrong, most realms are still at high/locked population, and the downtick in activity is easily explained by a combination of :
- People going out after several months of being confined.
- BWL being farmed to death and around the end of its shelf life.
- Summer coming.

Even then, every evening I have a swath of ZG/MC and sometimes BWL raids filling the LFG channel, to the point that I can pick and chose the ones I want.

But then these forums have always been a cesspool of haters that wanted Classic to crash, so grasping at every straw available to pretend it's a failure even after it's been a huge success can only be expected.

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And I didn't play Vanilla at all, played Classic from launch until a couple weeks ago because I realized how the game has evolved mostly (not entirely) for the better and Classic is primitive and now ruined by the constant min-maxing and metagaming of everything which makes it have almost no resemblance to the game everyone claimed they really wanted.

I fully agree that the annoying min-maxing mentality is shit (I'm regularly bitching to my guild that they complain about the game being too easy but that they still wastes a lot of time using consumables and grabbing the world buff, compounding the problem), but if you played nine months before "realizing" the supposed improvement in retail, maybe it means your conclusion is questionable, because nine months is already far longer than what a retail expansion is able to keep an average player.

[Drusin]

If Classic is in a weird spot, how is the retail situation when more people play Classic than retail?

:O Blizz released sub numbers again!?

[Akka]

Shhhh you can only bring up what blizzard says when it favours classic players. You should be perma banned for bringing up the fact that china is carrying classic on its back.

Shame.

Before Classic was released, the haters were all about how Classic would see a spike of maybe 100 000 people and then crash the next week to at most 10 000 basement dwellers.
Now, NINE MONTHS after release, the haters hold as a proof of Classic being a failure that it might not be above retail in numbers.

That's simply hilarious

If you look at addon downloads everytime an addon updates in both Classic and Retail, the downloads in Retail will usually be about twice that of Classic. Of course the biased Classic fanboys will come in and try to claim that less people use addons in Classic despite the mentality of gamers in Classic being just as hardcore or even more hardcore than Retail.

I'm saying this as someone who only plays Classic and has done so for the last 9 months. I despise BfA but facts are facts.

It's fairly consistent across all addons. I'd say the Classic playerbase on NA/EU is roughly half that of Retails.

As said above, if Classic population can actually be compared to retail population on the same scale, and not only at release but after nine months, that's the sign of an unbelievable success.

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Right now, on NA, Classic has 2 locked servers and 8 High servers. High servers capping out around 10k players.

15K actually.

[Master Factician]

Full Classic servers cap out at 5k per layer. There's currently two layers enabled on a few realms. Those realms are reaching concurrent player population counts of about 6,500 (queues were 1,500 or so before the layer was enabled).

Not 10k, not 15k. That's all bullshit and there's websites and addons you can use to prove that. Stop spreading misinformation.

[ArenaDk]

I don't know what you're talking about OP. They've had to literally keep the big 7 or so realms locked down due to them being at capacity. They don't let people transfer to them or even roll characters on them. It's been this way for over a month now. We had queues so they had to bring layers back. The game isn't dropping players.

But as for finding groups, yeah thats boosting for you. No one wants to do something the regular way when we can pay someone and have it done instantly. It sucks for those of us who like to run 5 mans the regular way though.

>People dont seem to talk much in all chat outside of the same ones again and again.

That's very anecdotal. I play on three realms, all have a World chat that is full of talk. Especially Grobbulus.

>forums seem to be mostly empty/ some outrage over a blue post but not over the game
Goto the Classic WoW sub. Or better yet, use one of the dozens of classic WOW discords. Lot of fun talk to be had there.

I don't know what you expected. The game is 15 years old. It's never going to be like it was the first month after launch because everyone was playing again to experience something that they could never experience again, a fresh vanilla server. The game will have many ups and downs until TBC comes. Then classic is going to die for now. Blizzard is likely going to open up another new server for classic players when TBC drops so the people who play classic can do play it again while we progress to TBC. I think we'll see the game played until the end of Wrath. They won't release a classic version of Cata or the expansions after it though. Not even interest.

Anyways before I'm attacked for the latter half of my post, thats just my two cents. My opinion. Don't jump down my throat.

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How do you know way more people play retail than classic? I mean shit, the realms are so dead on retail they've got them all connected to each other just so people see other people. It's been like that for ages and it's even worse now.

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Oh stop it. You act like everyone said no changes. And we didn't even get no changes so it's a lie. No changes would be servers with vanilla realm capacities. Not this god forsaken mega realms with literally quadruple the numbers of the highest pop vanilla realm.

">There's a lot of 'casual' players who play retail.Maybe for a bit of PvP, maybe for just hanging out working on professions. Auction house trading, alts.. Maybe you should look harder."

If someone is playing retail to work on professions that's the saddest fucking thing I've ever heard. Like jesus christ, that's a depressing thought.

sorry iam not to good with numbers. But dont server get to high really quick? Like with only a few player ? In my opinion bfa is dying but even that weird game has a few full server:

At the moment of this post in EU :

Classic : 15 Server on high

Bfa : 23 on full

50 on high

and I think bfa server are bigger or ?

[Akka]

and I think bfa server are bigger or ?

No, they are smaller.
Also they are often grouped together, so you might see four servers with different names, but it's in fact a single one.

Full Classic servers cap out at 5k per layer. There's currently two layers enabled on a few realms. Those realms are reaching concurrent player population counts of about 6,500 (queues were 1,500 or so before the layer was enabled).

Not 10k, not 15k. That's all bullshit and there's websites and addons you can use to prove that. Stop spreading misinformation.

I'm interested in your sources. What you say sounds credible, but it also somewhat contradicts other informations, so I'm keeping an open mind about it but I'd like to see some hard (well, hard as possible) facts.

[Ludvig]

It's been dead for a while. Nostalgia wore off

citation needed

[WaltherLeopold]

If you look at addon downloads everytime an addon updates in both Classic and Retail, the downloads in Retail will usually be about twice that of Classic. Of course the biased Classic fanboys will come in and try to claim that less people use addons in Classic despite the mentality of gamers in Classic being just as hardcore or even more hardcore than Retail.

I'm saying this as someone who only plays Classic and has done so for the last 9 months. I despise BfA but facts are facts.

Weak Auras:

5 days ago
8.3.0
266,803

5 days ago
1.13.3
101,611

Bartender:

Jan 27, 2020
8.3.0
1,059,414

Jan 27, 2020
1.13.3
430,734

DBM:

Jun 12, 2020
8.3.0
507,096

Jun 12, 2020
1.13.4
245,231

It's fairly consistent across all addons. I'd say the Classic playerbase on NA/EU is roughly half that of Retails.

Interesting stats, it doesn't at all align with WCL which has classic player engagement and total players in the raiding scene being more than double than that of retail.

The addons you looked at aren't as useful in classic as they are in retail, Leatrix Plus an incredibly popular addon, has 5,188,388 downloads, Questie an addon that just about everyone uses has 19,421,772 downloads, AtlastLootClassic another one of those supremely utilitarian addons that most classic players use has 12,824,143 downloads.

[Master Factician]

I'm interested in your sources. What you say sounds credible, but it also somewhat contradicts other informations, so I'm keeping an open mind about it but I'd like to see some hard (well, hard as possible) facts.

https://wowclassicpopulation.com/activity

You can also download the census addon and perform a fresh scan of both factions with two accounts. The way I determined the server caps was logging in to Herod at prime-time on Sunday a while back and scanning both factions after sitting in a queue. I tallied the two factions and the number was right around 5,000 (give or take a few to account for people logging in and out while the scan is ongoing). I also did this on Incendius before it died off and both servers gave me a 5,000 number.

Anyone can do this:https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/censusplusclassic

EDIT: It's possible they raised the cap from 5,000 to 6,000 before they put layers in, as I haven't scanned in awhile. They did say the cap is dynamic and they could raise raise or lower it as they see fit.

[chilipopper]

"you think you do....."

Are you actually insinuating J Allen Brack was correct in what he said?

I look at Orgrimmar at 19:00 server time on Wednesdays and I realise that this game is still fucking massively played. Sure people are raid logging but that's understandable, classics Achilles heel was always that there wasn't much to do in between raids but dont take that as classic is dieing. People are passionate about this version of WoW because its unblemished and true to itself unlike the crock of shite retail has become.

[ArenaDk]

No, they are smaller.
Also they are often grouped together, so you might see four servers with different names, but it's in fact a single one.

I'm interested in your sources. What you say sounds credible, but it also somewhat contradicts other informations, so I'm keeping an open mind about it but I'd like to see some hard (well, hard as possible) facts.

I couldnt find anything about them being smaller, you have a source for that?

And also about them showing the numbers for the connected ones and not for the individuel ones

[Master Factician]

Interesting stats, it doesn't at all align with WCL which has classic player engagement and total players in the raiding scene being more than double than that of retail.

This isn't true. Warcraftlogs doesn't have Chinese uploads for Retail. If you sort by US/EU, then Retail has more guilds clearing Ny'alotha Heroic or Normal than Classic has clearing BWL or ZG. There's also likely a lot more pugs clearing raids in Retail and if you go to the page that shows the uploads being made, Retail consistently has more logs being uploaded at all times except for maybe Tuesday. There's also multiple paths of progression in Retail, in Classic you can raid or grind R14.

US/EU BWL: https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zon...s=-1&region=-1 = 8,261 guilds.
US/EU Ny'alotha: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/ra...1&difficulty=4 = 11,842 guilds.

BWL is also a 40 man raid, whereas Heroic Ny'alotha has a max of 30 players. If you look at ZG though the number of clears are lower and it's also a 20 man raid. You can say that ZG is casual and less people upload logs, which is likely true, but you also have to consider that's true for Retail and there's also guilds that only raid Normal Ny'alotha as well.

All in all, looking at raid logs isn't an accurate way of determining which game has the higher active playerbase. I think addon downloads is the best we have and it's consistent looking at most of the downloads that are used in both games.

And before anyone shouts off that I'm a BfA fanboy or whatever garbage, here's my Classic character:
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/cha...eker/delimicus

Classic is the only game I'm really playing right now, besides a crappy mobile game I spend 10 minutes a day doing chores on.

[Dalinos]

Are you actually insinuating J Allen Brack was correct in what he said?

I look at Orgrimmar at 19:00 server time on Wednesdays and I realise that this game is still fucking massively played. Sure people are raid logging but that's understandable, classics Achilles heel was always that there wasn't much to do in between raids but dont take that as classic is dieing. People are passionate about this version of WoW because its unblemished and true to itself unlike the crock of shite retail has become.

Same thing on my server, Dreadmist (Deadmist lolololol) EU. Stormwind is PACKED on Wednesdays and Sundays, the 2 main raid days of the server. Like, we're talking so packed you can't even see the lightning bolt of the Ony/Nef head buff appearing, because of the amount of people.

What people fail to understand is that in Classic, if you wanna do good, you don't need THAT much mechanical skill per se. Fights are simple, mechanics that were new back then are easy to grasp now. The point is, you can't do well in Classic if you don't have certain character attributes, as a person.

1) You won't go far if you're a dick.
2) You need to be social, make connections with people.
3) Your server is YOUR world, with the same people, with the same enemies. None of this cross-realm bullshit. Reputation MATTERS.
4) You just have to be a decent person that focuses during raids and doesn't fuck up - no need for 600 APM gameplay as if you're an Asian Stracraft pro.
5) You are expected to help others when you're a member of a community (read-guild), just like they help you.
6) You need to be LOYAL. None of this guild-hopping bullshit. You join a guild, you raid with a guild, you stick with that guild till the GM types /gdisband.
7) The more of a fun person you are (sense of humour, sense of teamwork, etc etc) the more stable your raidspot will be (people enjoy raiding with fun people, not grumpy people).

Being a top-end raider in Vanilla/Classic basicly meant you had good, genuine people skills and was/is a fun person to play video-games with. Skill came second, because you can teach someone to be a better raider, you can't teach someone to be a better person (that was their parents'/primary schools' job). I understand that in today's anti-social, egotistical, Politically Correct world we live in, these attributes are very rare to find in an individual.

[ArenaDk]

1) You won't go far if you're a dick.
2) You need to be social, make connections with people.
3) Your server is YOUR world, with the same people, with the same enemies. None of this cross-realm bullshit. Reputation MATTERS.
4) You just have to be a decent person that focuses during raids and doesn't fuck up - no need for 600 APM gameplay as if you're an Asian Stracraft pro.
5) You are expected to help others when you're a member of a community (read-guild), just like they help you.
6) You need to be LOYAL. None of this guild-hopping bullshit. You join a guild, you raid with a guild, you stick with that guild till the GM types /gdisband.
7) The more of a fun person you are (sense of humour, sense of teamwork, etc etc) the more stable your raidspot will be (people enjoy raiding with fun people, not grumpy people).


okay this is funny as hell. The prime example of stroking your own ego while making stuff up

or to be more clear. Why do you think this is specific for classic ?

[Greengrim]

Are you saying that Classic died few months after its release, just like literally every sane person predicted it would?!?!?

Man, that just can't be true... I swear I can recall hundreds of smartasses spamming everywhere that it will kill retail...

[Djuntas]

Most people quit...I had some friends who barely play it now, and seem to already quit in december or so. Back then they had farmed and geared up etc. Im still lvling lol...