The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Khaza-R]

That's WoW Classic's uptick, not 8.2 - Rise of Azshara released almost 2 whole months later (and it sucked.)TWW is the best expansion ever. Hope I get to see it one day.

No. Rise of Azshara was released June 25th 2019. WoW Classic was released August 26, 2019. You can clearly see subs stop declining and actually increase slightly before the Classic explosion.

[PenguinChan]

I'm just going to have to accept this is how you people are going to talk about "slightly lower subscription figures than Legion at it's lowest point," huh?

This isn't accurate (obviously) and not at all something to take serious but this is how I see you viewing Shadowlands and you can understand, visually, why I think it's extremely hard to believe Classic is just 500k of that number.



Realistically if Classic never came out, the sub-losses from BfA would've been continual, even if probably reduced just because of how many people would still dedicatedly play WoW. Which would only UP the massive spike to shadowlands launch.

[Chickat]

But that's the issue, world content is inherently not good content because if it wasn't for the rewards, no one would do it. Would you do a Hunt if there wasn't a satchel? Would you do the Keep raid if there wasn't anything to gain? Have you done a Keep since you got the achievements and the max renown?

Torghast was the first big and good step in the right direction, but the playerbase screwed the pooch by not voicing their complaints properly and making it seem like Torghast was the problem when it was the rewards.

Raids and M+, you could remove the rewards (and once again, Mythic Raiding has no real rewards outside of some trinkets for some classes because gearing through M+ is just so much better), and people would still do it, because people genuinely enjoy the act of raiding itself.

I dont think thats true at all. 95% of raiders would quit raiding with no rewards.

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If Zaralek would be that popular at least 2-3 weeks we wouldn't have this conversation. It was really dead after people finished campaign. And nothing stopped Blizzard with Zaralek being rewarding too with just giving slightly better account-wide gear.

Zaralek problem like most of DF world content problems, is that the rares were too hard to solo. It became harder to fight them because less players needed them, and then it started rolling downhill fast. As more players left because players before them left, more players left again etc. Rare difficulty is 100% the reason the zones died. It has never happened in any wow zone in history that quickly. Hopefully Blizzard learned their lesson.

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I felt like it was a case of overrewarding.
You were done with the rep pretty quickly and the zone basically showered you with good gear that you really didn't need to spend much time in there.

ED had mostly the same issues.

Thats true too to some extent, especially during Season 2, but there are always 20-30 players in ED even late at night. Zaralek had like 4 players after a month. At least from my experience.

[Ersula]

This isn't accurate (obviously) and not at all something to take serious but this is how I see you viewing Shadowlands and you can understand, visually, why I think it's extremely hard to believe Classic is just 500k of that number.

No, I'm saying Legion fluctuating between 7 mill subs & 5 mill subs is not much different from shadowlands fluxtuating between 8 million & 4.5 million subs. Especially when expansions between wrath & WoD steadily lost subscriptions on a profound level - a level that doesn't exist in modern wow. In your little headcanon here BFA alone apparently has less of projected decline than even Legion did: a ridiculous assertion. My projection, that BFA would have been far lower than Shadowlands without classic is more accurate based on typical expansion trends.

No. Rise of Azshara was released June 25th 2019. WoW Classic was released August 26, 2019. You can clearly see subs stop declining and actually increase slightly before the Classic explosion.

You understand a declining slope declining slightly less but still going down is not an uptick, right?

[PenguinChan]

No, I'm saying Legion fluctuating between 7 mill subs & 5 mill subs is not much different from shadowlands fluxtuating between 8 million & 4.5 million subs. Especially when expansions between wrath & WoD steadily lost subscriptions on a profound level - a level that doesn't exist in modern wow. In your little headcanon here BFA alone apparently has less of projected decline than even Legion did: a ridiculous assertion. My projection, that BFA would have been far lower than Shadowlands without classic is more accurate based on typical expansion trends.

No offense but if you're going to blindly follow that same logic it means Classic wouldn't have bled down to 500k, which contradicts your claim from the past about it lol. Also I clarified about the BfA trend below, it probably would've kept losing subs until the shadowlands pre-patch and launch. You're literally implying Classic lost 90% of its subscribers up to that point.

What.

[Ersula]

No offense but if you're going to blindly follow that same logic it means Classic wouldn't have bled down to 500k, which contradicts your claim from the past about it lol. Also I clarified about the BfA trend below, it probably would've kept losing subs until the shadowlands pre-patch and launch. You're literally implying Classic lost 90% of its subscribers up to that point.

You seem to be under the impression that players can't play both retail and classic, when in actuality that's the majority of classic players. Not to mention if WoW loses nearly half its subs after a new release on the regular, so does classic.

[Worldshaper]

Alpha week is here!

[Scyth]

Alpha week is here!

More talent previews this week too, please!

[Vakir]

Im okay with one less person requesting Zereths every other comment.

So I think we're down to zero.

[PenguinChan]

You seem to be under the impression that players can't play both retail and classic, when in actuality that's the majority of classic players. Not to mention if WoW loses nearly half its subs after a new release on the regular, so does classic.

Well yeah, but Shadowlands never at any point gained enough subs to counter-act the bleed from both Classic and itself. That graph shows it, the rolling average it has means none of the major Shadowlands patches actually went positive for both for a meaningful amount of time. Yet TBC release did. TBC 2.4.3 into WotLK pre-patch, into launch, up to ICC and then DF pre-patch into DF launch did.

Yeah I'm not buying that Shadowlands did jack shit for subs lol. If you enjoyed Shadowlands that's cool, and it had some nice systems I'll admit but I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that Shadowlands wasn't fucking awful for subs. At no point did it gain and maintained them, it always lost subs.

[Hitei]

Have we gotten any firm indication of map size from the material released so far?

Always an awkward thing to try and gauge without proper maps. This time especially because Azj-kahet and Ringing Deeps seem built out of sprawling interconnected cave systems and the footage/press release screenshots were all focused on specific set pieces, which makes getting a sense of the full space difficult. In the airlock demonstration Hallowfall looked like it might be on the order of Azure Span in terms of size, but in the rough blocking map they showed it seemed like Isle of Dorn and Ringing Deeps were quite small, more like Legion zones.

[Jaggler]

Have we gotten any firm indication of map size from the material released so far?

Always an awkward thing to try and gauge without proper maps. This time especially because Azj-kahet and Ringing Deeps seem built out of sprawling interconnected cave systems and the footage/press release screenshots were all focused on specific set pieces, which makes getting a sense of the full space difficult. In the airlock demonstration Hallowfall looked like it might be on the order of Azure Span in terms of size, but in the rough blocking map they showed it seemed like Isle of Dorn and Ringing Deeps were quite small, more like Legion zones.

I don't think, we have any confirmation in any ways, but I think it is safe to assume, that map sizes will be similar to DF, though i would guess there would be more verticality.

[Skildar]

last I checked the numbers on Bellular's graph are pulled out of a hat, only the curve is of official sources. So maybe we ought to ignore these numbers for a while, don't we?

[Hitei]

I don't think, we have any confirmation in any ways, but I think it is safe to assume, that map sizes will be similar to DF, though i would guess there would be more verticality.

Here's hoping. It's just so hard to tell with what they provided. All of the Ringing Deeps screenshots are of like two small specific questing areas so who knows how big that zone is, and Isle of Dorn could be anything from Forbidden Reach sized to Stormsong Valley and Tiragarde Sound combined.

At least with DF you could immediately from some of the outdoor shots that Azure Span was going to be absolutely massive and there were long distance outdoor shots to give a sense that the overall scale was big.

Maps are always one of the big highlights of initial builds, with the weapon/armor models and mount/creature stuff.

[Makorus]

I wonder what statue will be included in the Collectors Edition, seeing how it's the 20th Anniversary one as well.

My guess is Anduin, just makes the most sense with it being a combined CE, and Anduin is both relevant to the entirety of WoW (one of the few WoW exclusive characters who has been in since Vanilla) and him showing up in TWW.

[Hitei]

I wonder what statue will be included in the Collectors Edition, seeing how it's the 20th Anniversary one as well.

My guess is Anduin, just makes the most sense with it being a combined CE, and Anduin is both relevant to the entirety of WoW (one of the few WoW exclusive characters who has been in since Vanilla) and him showing up in TWW.

I mean, wouldn't modern Thrall be the more obvious choice in that regard? Relevant to the entirety of WoW, Vanilla origins, shows up in TWW, and is also the subject of an older statue to be brought forward.

I think Alleria or Xal would actually move more boxes though. People like waifu statues.

[Makorus]

I mean, wouldn't modern Thrall be the more obvious choice in that regard? Relevant to the entirety of WoW, Vanilla origins, shows up in TWW, and is also the subject of an older statue to be brought forward.

I think Alleria or Xal would actually move more boxes though. People like waifu statues.

Dunno, they already have a Thrall statue, and I am fairly sure the 10th anniversary thing was a Thrall statue/figure.

15th Anniversary was a Ragnaros statue. Meanwhile, there is no official Anduin statue yet, which is very strange.

[Mahcake]

No we arent getting less. We have 10 times more content than TBC,Wrath,Cata at launch these days. There are so many systems and features that it would be dumb for them to add more than 1 or 2 new things per expansion at this point. If they did, people like you would be complaining about feature bloat.

TWW has everything DF has plus more. Really dumb argument I keep seeing around imo.

You know TWW is an expansion you pay for, right? So having the same features doesn't make it an expansion. It should EXPAND the game, therefore ADD more/new features, which TWW has only like 2.

- Dynamic Flight is Dragonriding for everything. It isn't new, should be a patch.
- Warbonds aren't new content, it's just QoL features. Nothing you can really "play".
- Hero Talents will be just color skins for spells or smth.
- Earthen are reskin of Dwarves.

+ Delves is the only "new feature". And even that sounds like smaller Torghast or something.
+ New continent (only 4 new zones), new dungs etc.

Oh my god. Warcraft andys at it again. Defending undefendable.

[Makorus]

So true, Blizzard should re-invent the wheel rather than reinforce the base features of them and add new features every single expansion like ...?

Anything that is remotely power-related will have the playerbase shit the bed and boycott the expansion, so there's not much they can do.

I still don't see how BfA or WoD or SL added more than TWW feature-wise. If I word it right, everything can be dismissed.

[Nymrohd]

Btw with Warcraft relaunching in China, I hope they give them a chance at a fresh SoD.