It’s kind of sad that the cancel culture has gotten to the point that people will report posts just because they disagree with those posts, instead of arguing against them. I do think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the relative popularity of Classic and Retail, so I’ll continue it in a new thread.
I do have to say that I’m skeptical of the previous thread’s numbers, since no specific sources are cited. In addition, it compared “players” with “concurrent players”, which is a very invalid comparison, since the average player only spends a few hours a day playing.
I did find some numbers that are sort of comparable. These numbers are obtained using Retail and Classic variants of the same mod. The results are collected by two different web sides. Classic data is collected at https://wowpop.appspot.com while Retail data is collected at http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php with the following results, at the time I looked at them.
Retail: 778,837 characters found in the past 30 days
Classic: 7,960,237 characters found since launch, which is not quite 30 days
It needs to be kept in mind that these are characters, not players, so the numbers are affected by how many alts players are playing. In addition, there isn’t enough data gathered to provide fully reliable coverage. However, I think we can conclude that there are currently more players playing Classic than Retail, perhaps even ten times more players.
That doesn’t mean that Retail can or should be cancelled, however.
Let’s not forget that BFA had record first day expansion sales. Based on the first month or two, it looked like it was a huge success. It’s quite clear, though, that BFA didn’t age that well, with a substantial dropoff in subscribers over time.
Now, a month into Classic, Classic looks like a huge success, too. What we don’t know is how long that success will be sustained. Will there never be a dropoff? Will the dropoff be even faster than BFA? We don’t yet know.
If I were to guess, I’d guess that Classic play will start dropping off when large numbers of people reach 60, 3-6 months from launch. Most players never raided seriously in Vanilla; Classic is likely to be like Vanilla in that regard. Most players started getting frustrated with PVP in Vanilla when they hit 60, and raiding became necessary to get competitive PVP gear.
At that point, Blizzard can either try to funnel Classic players to Retail, or they can build on the Classic success. Personally I think the high preference for Classic suggests that the accumulated changes that became retail got more wrong than right, so it would be easier to take the few improvements in Retail - easier raiding access, Conquest from world PVP assaults for PVP gearing, maybe - and use those to build on Classic than to figure out what to use from Classic to do the major surgery Retail requires.
Either way, let’s hope that Blizzard takes the best from both worlds for their future path forward, and that they avoid taking the worst from both worlds this time around.