Alarmingly Low Voter Turnout for Shadowlands Season 4 Mythic+ Community Poll

[Thenatural]

Regarding

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...1&metric=score

it is around 17,164 characters (not players, those are probably even less) per day playing mythic+ dungeons at maximum.

Regarding

https://mmo-population.com/r/wow

WoW currently has 1,119,177 daily players.

which means, less than or around 1.5% of the players play mythic+ dungeons at a single day. It becomes a bit better, if you compare weekly figures, while there is no weekly concurrent player count available to compare to.

And if you wonder how many players play current normal raids per week, here is your surprise:

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...e&difficulty=3

3,704 chars killed normal jailer. Based on the 1,1m players in average per day it is 0.33% if every char was 1 player and even less if you assume the weekly concurrent player count is higher.

And lets not even talk about mythic raids. I wonder it is still an own difficulty considering the few hundred that play it.

First of all, that population website is hardly reliable, but you know that.

Secondly, over 10,000 unique guilds have killed heroic Sylvanas, whereas only ~5,000 have killed the equivalent FFIXV encounter which is currently Savage Asphodelos. The latter is definitely more recent, but the barrier to entry for that encounter is, even now, much lower than Heroic Slv. All of this while a decent percentage of WoW content creators are lauding FF as the most alivest and bestest MMO on the planet right now.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/ra...lty=4&page=220

In fact, if you really start to parse the FFXIVLogs data against the Ironforge.pro data for TBCC, you can make an argument that TBCC on it's own has a raiding population that is just as healthy as FFXIV currently. The breakdown of class parses on FFXIV logs shows that the total number of parses isn't all that much higher than the TBCC numbers.

My point here is, WoW isn't dead, FFXIV isn't dead, and if you're going out of your way to find out ways of saying they are, to the point of cherry picking unreliable data, you should honestly consider just stepping away. I know it must feel like you're vindicated when you don't feel the same way about WoW as you once did and can farm "hate the thing" attention in cesspools like this, but it's not healthy.

[Mendzia]

They should implement those types of votes ingame honestly.
You do hundreds of M+? - Poll about new (old?) ones will show for you.
You focus on RP? - Poll about new events will pop up.
You are high rated PvPer? - You decide about things in new season.
You are active TBC player? - Poll about WotLK shows for you.

[Thenatural]

They should implement those types of votes ingame honestly.

I don't understand why they don't do this. At least add a popup on the login screen or something.

I have to assume they want more focused and curated responses, but the official forums are hardly a place where people have the health of the game in mind.

[Lolites]

I'm thinking it's a mix of people not knowing due to lack of advertisement and people straight up not caring because it's not their preferred content.

i would also add a lot of people will ignore it just bcs its about WOD

[pinkz]

many have been weened off wow forums over the years. plus the player base is imo, seriously low

- blizzard has exercised censorship and diversion over the years
-- censorship thru locking or flatout deleting threads by flagging them as unproductive, refering threads to other threads that eventually vanish
-- diversion which started heavy in WOD with so called twitter integration and DEVs going to facebook, which are unresponsive or heavily also regulated thru blocking, censorship, etc.

if you remember in WOD, it caused mess among blizzard in miscommunication and not knowing what the other was saying on wow forums, twitter, facebook, etc.
- Bashiok said flying was coming after the first patch and would be like previous expacs
- devs then claimed the first patch wasn't a patch
- Ion said later on what supposed to be an actual patch, there would be no flying in WOD and future expacs. later we discovered WOD was set up flying
- depending on where some devs posted WOD was a one patch expac others said two

blizzard allows shills using low level players to derail the threads and set them up to be locked, deleted, and challenging the shills can get you banned

not much has changed.

[CaptainV]

Mythic+ and in general Mythic have become less popular over the years, and that shouldnt really be surpising.

People dont really care about hard content anymore, if you think they do, the active player numbers (not subs) will tell you why they dont.

Right now WoW is hovering at about 400K players in retail, and about the same for classic and classic TBC making the total about 1.2 million people that still play wow.

This is Active Players btw not subs, subs might be closer to 3.5 million but not everyone is playing atm.

This however does tell you, strongly even that only a fraction of the origional 12.5 million people that played wow at its peak actually care about this kind of content, which ironically would be about 10% of the total playerbase.

Frankly? I think this is a wakeup call to stop making hardcores the focus group of content.

If I was blizzard at this point, id just basically stop making Mythic as a difficulty curve, peak the difficulty at Heroic but make it a tad more challenging, remove LFR and make normal more accessable.

And for end game dungeons, make it Heroic+ instead of Mythic+

[Kumorii]

https://playercounter.com/world-of-warcraft/

Did some googling and that site is probably a sham...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming...of_the_gohost/

if you are on the page and refresh you get a new number.

Lets check dota 2:


Refresh:


that's just a few seconds in between.

then we check steams charts. Who actually have the API to do this.


Where did they get 800k players from?

Then we have the "Learn more" page which doesn't teach you anything. Except the PC developers being cocky on how good they are (we have this amazing stat tracking program and we are just half-assed coders) and daring people to do "better than them". They don't explain how it works except "we developed this gohost network protocol". They sound like snake oil salesmen.

https://playercounter.com/about/

This site screams red flags mate. Where they get the min / max numbers from no one knows...but them randomizing the numbers isn't exactly screaming professionalism...even if you do estimates.

I would guess when they estimates steam players they actually grab the current players and peak players and deduct/add to min/max values and randomize between them. Keep track of that and you can give the illusion of having "accurate real time numbers".
How they do with non-steam games I don't really have a guess.

[Lochton]

Mythic+ and in general Mythic have become less popular over the years, and that shouldnt really be surpising.

People dont really care about hard content anymore, if you think they do, the active player numbers (not subs) will tell you why they dont.

Right now WoW is hovering at about 400K players in retail, and about the same for classic and classic TBC making the total about 1.2 million people that still play wow.

This is Active Players btw not subs, subs might be closer to 3.5 million but not everyone is playing atm.

This however does tell you, strongly even that only a fraction of the origional 12.5 million people that played wow at its peak actually care about this kind of content, which ironically would be about 10% of the total playerbase.

Frankly? I think this is a wakeup call to stop making hardcores the focus group of content.

If I was blizzard at this point, id just basically stop making Mythic as a difficulty curve, peak the difficulty at Heroic but make it a tad more challenging, remove LFR and make normal more accessable.

And for end game dungeons, make it Heroic+ instead of Mythic+

They've needed this wake-up call for a long time. In the end, their end-game and main aim has been the minor groups of raiding, rated PvP and M+, the game needs to expand, the instanced content need to evolve on their own path while the world takes the lead instead.

[cparle87]

Grimrail is my favourite dungeon in the game but I didn't vote for it because it would have been a shitty M+ dungeon.

Same here. It's like when they brought MC back for the 10th anniversary and it sucked so bad in part because the raid was designed with no-cooldown dispels in mind. Taking 40+ seconds to dispel the raid from things designed to be dispelled within 10 seconds was so bad.

[Puri]

Personally I simply wasn't aware the poll is already up, also no one from my guild was. Who browses official forums?
So I'd say lack of advertising might be the major issue here.

[Swnem]

First of all, that population website is hardly reliable, but you know that.

Secondly, over 10,000 unique guilds have killed heroic Sylvanas, whereas only ~5,000 have killed the equivalent FFIXV encounter which is currently Savage Asphodelos. The latter is definitely more recent, but the barrier to entry for that encounter is, even now, much lower than Heroic Slv. All of this while a decent percentage of WoW content creators are lauding FF as the most alivest and bestest MMO on the planet right now.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/ra...lty=4&page=220

In fact, if you really start to parse the FFXIVLogs data against the Ironforge.pro data for TBCC, you can make an argument that TBCC on it's own has a raiding population that is just as healthy as FFXIV currently. The breakdown of class parses on FFXIV logs shows that the total number of parses isn't all that much higher than the TBCC numbers.

My point here is, WoW isn't dead, FFXIV isn't dead, and if you're going out of your way to find out ways of saying they are, to the point of cherry picking unreliable data, you should honestly consider just stepping away. I know it must feel like you're vindicated when you don't feel the same way about WoW as you once did and can farm "hate the thing" attention in cesspools like this, but it's not healthy.

Erm... why are you comparing guild numbers? I see you don't play FF. It's not organized like WoW. Guilds, FC's in FF are generally not for raiding, they are for socialising. Raiding is done in groups called "statics" usually not in the same FC.
Comparing guild clears is completely useless.

[exochaft]

Grimrail is my favourite dungeon in the game but I didn't vote for it because it would have been a shitty M+ dungeon.

Yeah, I really enjoyed that dungeon because it was pretty unique. I'd rather them bring it back as a CM than a M+... or maybe just bring back CM's as an alternative end-game activity to M+. I'm certain there's people who would rather try to beat the base vanilla dungeon in as good of a time as possible versus throwing in all the affixes while trying to get the best time. Different strokes for different folks.

If they did bring back Grimrail as a M+, I can only imagine the hell it would be with affixes when they work correctly. Imagine how buggy they probably would be considering the design and structure of the dungeon itself. While it's not as much of an issue with other dungeons, I can already see many mechanics across multiple WoD dungeons that would not work well in a M+ setting, as the infinite scaling could cause some issues along with the design/layout/structure of the dungeons. However, this gets into the concept of Blizz designing dungeons around M+, which is absolutely the case with current dungeons. As a comparison, you don't need to make nearly as many (if any) design considerations for a dungeon to implement it as a CM, while M+ considerations is way more intrusive when it comes to said considerations.

[Paulosio]

I was aware of the poll and I was going to vote even though i'm not currently playing the game. However the link took me to the US version of the website which i'm unable to vote through so that was that.

[owbu]

I wonder why Blizzard never changed their communication to a discord server. Forums just seem so 2010.

[Syegfryed]

As of writing this, there are three days remaining and the total voter count sits at just 15,878.

Do you believe people are merely unaware of the poll, or is this a sneak peak into just how small the playerbase size is now?

Poll in question: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...ngeons/1205558

Most people will try to say this means nothing, but yeah clearly the number of players isn't as high as supposed to be.

This plus the fact the official forums are a shitshow and not many people are interestin in mythic + or this season 4 bs.

[Th3Scourge]

As of writing this, there are three days remaining and the total voter count sits at just 15,878.

Do you believe people are merely unaware of the poll, or is this a sneak peak into just how small the playerbase size is now?

Poll in question: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...ngeons/1205558

Literally don't remember the last time I visited the official forums.

I only voted now because you included a link. If I had to type it myself I'd probably never have voted

[cityguy193]

Literally don't remember the last time I visited the official forums.

I only voted now because you included a link. If I had to type it myself I'd probably never have voted

The correct way to compare is to compare this poll turnout with previous poll turnouts. People that never visited forums are not going to start now. However it is a pretty safe assumption to say that people the frequent the official forums and vote are likely less likely to quit than people that never visited the fourms.

And by all measures, this poll has a much lower turnout than previous poll turnouts. The point that OP is making stands, interest in the game is at an all time low. Thats not good for a newly released final tier of an expansion.

I doubt we will have even half the current playerbase playing in approximately a year from now when we are likely still on the same tier.

[Lochton]

I wonder why Blizzard never changed their communication to a discord server. Forums just seem so 2010.

Dunno. I believe it would be way too many for a discord, even further, can a single discord server handle that many? We have to remember, it has to be able to carry the load of all current and previous subscribers as a maximum. It would be way too crowdy unless you think you can make a swing door discord, "You had your say, rejoin if you want to say something else"? Discord servers already feel cluttered at 2000 users, and I'm even in one with over 40k members, way too much, not enough tools from Discord to make it look right - and that is just 40k, we're talking millions if Blizzard drops by.

[exochaft]

Most people will try to say this means nothing, but yeah clearly the number of players isn't as high as supposed to be.

This plus the fact the official forums are a shitshow and not many people are interestin in mythic + or this season 4 bs.

Also doesn't help that if you currently aren't subbed, you can't post (or vote consequently) in the forums beyond basically customer support. Ironically enough you can like posts anywhere.

Regardless, if you are a former player wanting to come back or just someone who has unsubbed in general, you aren't really participating in the forums because you literally can't. Kind of sucks in general if you still want the game to be good but can't offer opinions/feedback to help in this regard... suppose that's another topic, though. Figure Blizz would like feedback from players who left their game beyond the survey they offer when you unsub, maybe I'm too optimistic.

[Unholyground]

People can deny it but all the legal shit going on has pushed non WoW addicts away from the game. Image is important and with 2 shit expansions in a row there is no more confidence in their abilities either.