Originally Posted by
rogoth
you just proved my point with your first topic, the game saw exponential growth during classic, it saw slower paced growth in TBC, and saw little actual growth during WOTLK but it did see huge volumes of people play the game enough to replace those that left, this is true, this didn't happen at all after that time, meaning that the game had changed for the worse and was no longer approachable to new players, and was no longer good enough to keep retention high, so it failed on both counts, and yet you're trying to posit that i'm reading numbers wrongly?
your second comment is laughable, why?, because that's not how 'popularity' works, which has been a point of contention in recent times with people looking at the massive hype that surrounded new world and the 'cataclysmic' drop off of player numbers because of how bad the game turned out to be, the same principle exists with WoW, people were happy enough with the content through the initial launch until cataclysm expansion release, new players were plentiful enough to replace those that dropped the game meaning that player turnover was positive, after the cataclysm expansion period the game consistently dropped players because of bad design decisions and even more egregious issues as time went on, to the point now where using best available data that exists the estimated player count globally is sub 1 million players on the current iteration of the game, with yet more and more bad design decisions being made and desperate attempts to recapture the lightning by pandering to people's requests months/years after they were initially made.
i never said cataclysm didn't make money, i said it was a commercial failure relative to what came before, blizzard went from making more than $3 BILLION a year during WOTLK to around half that during the cataclysm period, when the entire point of your company is to make money, making less of it after showing you can make a lot more is a bad thing, not sure why this is news to you.
i wasn't aware that rag sites were considered 'majority' of the player population, i must have missed that important memo, as someone who played the entire expansion cycle not missing a single daily quest during the entire expansion life cycle, and who was very invested in keeping up to date with the miniscule changes that happened, it was abundantly clear that the majority of players were unhappy with the expansion, mainly due to the fact that the devs changed so much of the content during the expansion life cycle, cutting huge amounts of content out in order to work on the changes and updates needed to keep the majority of players engaged and interested in the game at that time, giving an access media representative a beta key and asking them to do a review of the game based on a tiny sample of the entire whole does not a good game review make, but you seem to be someone who doesn't look to in depth on things much to notice.