Does Classic have more players than retail?

[Snorri]

I'm hearing people saying that classic has more players than retail. How do you see that? How do they know? Is there a way to see classic and retail populations?

[GrumpyNugget]

I'm hearing people saying that classic has more players than retail. How do you see that? How do they know? Is there a way to see classic and retail populations?

Yesno /10chars

[Misuteri]

For Blizzard ,yes, they would know.

Everything here is just speculation.

[lagiacrux]

I'm hearing people saying that classic has more players than retail. How do you see that? How do they know? Is there a way to see classic and retail populations?

there are no reliable ways to say one way or the other. unless blizz comes out and publishes data, all you get is anecdotal evidence

[Deferionus]

I'm hearing people saying that classic has more players than retail. How do you see that? How do they know? Is there a way to see classic and retail populations?

I just logged into retail for the first time since classic came out two days ago. I am just logging into classic now for MC raids and trying to get a few loose ends related to this expansion tied up before I quit retail until the next expac. I plan to continue playing classic actively alongside league of legends.

[LorDC]

I'm hearing people saying that classic has more players than retail. How do you see that? How do they know? Is there a way to see classic and retail populations?

As a rough metric you can look at number of high pop realms. Retail has twice as much high pop realms than Classic. So I have hard time believing such claims.

[avitush]

There's no way for us to know.

As for people who keep saying that, either they work for Blizzard and are posting stuff they're not allowed to publicly talk about (very unlikely, as any Blizzard employee with access to that information would be smart enough to know what an NDA is and why violating it is a very bad idea), or they're pulling numbers/data out of their asses because they just want Classic to be more successful than "retail" (more likely).

[Ange]

Just login to retail in the middle of the night 1 day before the weekly reset, basicly on the worst day to do anything and...

... you see multiple raids still doing the pvp evens (IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT)
... you see everywhere players doing WQ's (PARAGON)
... you get N/HC/M raids running (IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT)
... you got like 9 pages long scroll for M+ keys 10-20 running (IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT) as ALLIANCE (small population)

I am not sure how people can even come to the conclusion that the population is even comperable, I guess they log in to stormwind and decide nobody is playing?!

If even the classic streamers are clear about the huge decline in classic population, what gives you even the slightest hint it could be otherwise?

But just login yourself in both version and tell me what you see.

[unbound]

I'm hearing people saying that classic has more players than retail. How do you see that? How do they know? Is there a way to see classic and retail populations?

You can't see it. People claiming it don't actually know. There is no reliable way to see classic and retail populations.

In fact, even the question of "what is the current classic / retail populations" is actually more complicated than it may seem. Do you only count accounts that have paid for the month (or purchased a token) or do you only count accounts that have been active during the month (some accounts are set to auto-pay and people forget)? What about WoW time cards (yes, they still sell those)...do you count those (Blizz actually always has counted those in their financials when they claimed total numbers of subs)?

Depending on how you answer those questions, WoW has never been to 12.5 million subs, so you can get several different, yet accurate answers to the number of players or subs. Therefore, even the ones who actually "know" may not be providing you with the information you think you are getting.

[potis]

Just login to retail in the middle of the night 1 day before the weekly reset, basicly on the worst day to do anything and...

... you see multiple raids still doing the pvp evens (IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT)
... you see everywhere players doing WQ's (PARAGON)
... you get N/HC/M raids running (IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT)
... you got like 9 pages long scroll for M+ keys 10-20 running (IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT) as ALLIANCE (small population)

I am not sure how people can even come to the conclusion that the population is even comperable, I guess they log in to stormwind and decide nobody is playing?!

If even the classic streamers are clear about the huge decline in classic population, what gives you even the slightest hint it could be otherwise?

But just login yourself in both version and tell me what you see.

Confirmation Bias.

Many people need to know that others agree with them, so they create this echo chamber (basically WoW Classic fanboys the last few months even before release) mostly to make sure they wont be wrong once more on something they are so passionate about.

Some people simply dont understand how the majority of WoW Classic players are literally already active retail subbers, bored with 8.2 or BFA , and Blizzard did exactly what they planned, to keep people spending money on subs, instead of unsubbing till 8.3 , or even 9.0.

But it has to be Game vs Game, cant use marketing and logic for anything, because "Blizzard heard the fans", rofl.

I mean, there are already complains for a few weeks now about "What do after the 1h of MC" from the faster players, and the answer is instead of "What did you fucking expect?" its this Confirmation Bias echo chamber "DONT LEVEL SO FAST, PLAY THE GAME AS I PLAY IT, BAD AND 2H/WEEK".

They only thing i actually hate about WoW Classic, is how i decided to level a new mage instead of transferring the old one and at the same time get the transmog, why not, and because of this massive influx of returning players, that got bored of Classic, or giving the game another chance, the skill level is so atrociously low and horrible, compared to leveling before the release of it.

[bloomy]

As a rough metric you can look at number of high pop realms. Retail has twice as much high pop realms than Classic. So I have hard time believing such claims.

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.

[Ange]

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.

Many viewers on twitch dont even understand whats going on in classic streams, thats why nearly all popular classic streams are clown-streams that could be put into the "Just Chat" chategory, you musst know this I guess.

Gamecontent viewers were never high, even casual m+ players have a hard time to follow high-m+ streamers or MDI players. It was the same issue with PVP streamers before LEGION brought raid/m+ into the mainstream.

If players of the game can hardly follow the content and see the playes its nearly impossible for non-players without commentators.

TLDR: twitch watches clown shows and boring content because thats easier to understand if you dont play a game. WoW is not made for streaming and retail is way to complex at high end to understand by just watching it.

[justandulas]

I'm hearing people saying that classic has more players than retail. How do you see that? How do they know? Is there a way to see classic and retail populations?

It’s impossible to know other than the initial stock investor report post launch at the end of sept when they stated wow classic had “tripled” wows total player count

Now, surely a lot didn’t stick past the 30 days and others probably quit over queue frustration

We know it started 3x the population of retail but no one but Blizz knows where it’s at today

It doesn’t help tho that bfa is the most unpopular wow expac ever and they continue to show they don’t get why with corrupted gear

[Echocho]

No they have exactly the same number of players, you can't subscribe to one without subscribing to the other

[justandulas]

As a rough metric you can look at number of high pop realms. Retail has twice as much high pop realms than Classic. So I have hard time believing such claims.

That’s because they skew the numbers on retail so that it shows high when in reality it’s probably only medium

My realm shows medium and it is so beyond dead it isn’t even funny. You can’t even find another person in the capital or groups anymore. Classic killed off what was left of the bfa population on skullcrusher

Meanwhile my classic realm still has queues that can be an hour or more long and there’s more people in each city than exist total on my retail realm

[Trend]

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.

This is quite terrible logic. There are a lot of obvious things that contradict your theory which is completely unproven at best. This is an example of someone wanting to find confirmation for their point of view and not letting facts get in the way.

As to the question there is no way to know even if the question is better defined. Only Blizzard has the info on account logins per time interval or player hour metrics, etc.

[MoanaLisa]

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.

[hans07]

As a rough metric you can look at number of high pop realms. Retail has twice as much high pop realms than Classic. So I have hard time believing such claims.

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.

- - - Updated - - -

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.

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.

[McNeil]

Its impossible to know, only Blizzard has the real numbers and I doubt that they are willing to show them. Realm pops and Twitch stats are both very poor metrics to use.

[Annelie]

As a rough metric you can look at number of high pop realms. Retail has twice as much high pop realms than Classic. So I have hard time believing such claims.

They are counted differently. Classic "medium pop" is retail "high pop" or something like that maybe it was classic low pop is retail high pop because of how the servers work.

But the classic pop have seriously droped off. Atleast on my server on EU. We still have Queues on primetime but it is not as much as it used to be.