No it didn’t. It got a huge surge of players June 2021 due to streamers ‘quitting wow’ (they’ve all been back for a while btw) for views. Those players have been back on WoW for a long time too.
Endwalker didn’t manage to sell half the amount of copies Shadowlands did. FF14 is a summer 2021 meme. It’s a boring game featuring awful combat and a boring, linear story that unfolds of multiple hundreds of hours.
Source please
Source please here, as well if you will.
Only Blizzard has the official metrics, and even if I had them, I wouldn’t be able to just post proprietary data here.
But all available third-party data points to the fact that fewer and fewer WoW players are raiding. Even devs have hinted at this in interviews, and you can see devs scrambling to prop up raiding in their design decisions.
On the contrary, can you prove or find evidence suggesting that more and more people are raiding, or that the majority of the playerbase raids?
By the way, any data that only targets raiders or raiding guilds doesn’t prove anything.
It should be pretty obvious that WoW is in crisis mode.
Factions are being merged for organized instanced content. Auction houses are being merged for stackables.
Blizzard MAUs were dropping rapidly despite WoW patches being released.
Retail players are being bribed to do Classic content.
You are really good at coming up with strawmen arguments, aren’t you?
Normal raiding was never truly invalidated, due to always having higher iLvl and other bonuses in relation to open world gearing.
And Normal raiding is already invalidated for the hardcore raiders and M+ players who already start each season in Normal iLvl (previous season’s Mythic is current season’s Normal).
Even if open world gearing eventually gets to a cap of upper Normal, the real raiders are already way past that and won’t be affected. The sanctity of Heroic and Mythic raiding is still preserved.
If raiders can still get upgrades from open world gearing weeks or months into a patch and are still clearing Normal, then they need those upgrades and could actually benefit from it.
Translated:
Trust me bro
In every MMO that features raiding, there are always less people clearing the raids than there are people clearing the raids. News at 11.
No, and it doesn’t matter if ‘the majority’ of the playerbase raids or otherwise and the inference made by this question is silly. Should they stop designing competitive endgame content because a majority of players don’t engage in it? Of course not. It’s an MMO, and raiding has been integral to WoW’s design since inception. It’s something they do far better than any other MMO past or present.
Translated: Data I dislike doesn’t count.
It isn’t.
This is a bad take. Remember when CRZ was implemented? People were saying the same thing. ‘Game’s dead look CRZ!’ Yet here millions of us are, here 10 years later.
Another bad take. Blizzard requires people to raid to get a mount, people get pissed off. They want a mount just for playing the game. So Blizzard does that, they implement a mount just for playing the game-and all of a sudden it’s a bribe. Wow
I’m good at making arguments period, strawman or otherwise.
Sure it was, in the same way that heroic raiding and mythic raiding have become obselete in terms of gearing by M+. If content is approachable and easier than raiding and rewards gear competitive with a given raid tier, it’s going to invalidate raid gearing. Attempting to split hairs over a couple of ilvls is intellectually dishonest.
See above.
They’re not going to bother with this idea in the current design iteration of wow, because of M+. Further, forcing boring, meaningless gameplay in order to optimize our toons due to the ‘solo player’s’ complete aversion and intolerance to any form of difficulty or social interaction (gasp!) in an MMO is a ridiculous demand.
I personally have no time for forced chores for gearing, and what you’re advocating for is that. I’m a casual. I only have a couple of hours a night (if I’m lucky) to jam keys and I raid once a week.
The people sitting around farming trivial content for 60 hours a week claiming the title of casual due to their perception that it ought to be venerated being upset that they don’t get rewards for being bad at the game frankly isn’t my problem, nor should it be.
M+ is incredibly popular because it’s so incredibly casual friendly. Blizzard should expand upon M+ more than anything else because of it’s popularity and casual friendly nature.
Nope. Data that doesn’t cover the entire playerbase doesn’t count when you are discussing the overall health of the game.
Nope. Titanforging and secondary power systems from the open world are gone, so you are not forced to do anything.
If you actually need sub-Normal iLvls weeks or months into a season, then perhaps open world content would be a good time investment for you.
But you know what’s even more popular and casual friendly? Open world content, and so Blizzard should expand upon that.
Your statements prove that players like you and devs like the current ones have this irrational agenda against solo players. You want to punish solo players and deny them of rewards even though it would objectively be healthier for the game to let solo players have their lane again.
Players need more ways to progress their gear in this game. Get it done Blizzard.
No, I want solo players in an MMO (lol) to stay in their lane and not force me into theirs by being forced into boring, meaningless chores.
I want to play other games sometimes if I want to without fear of falling behind in optimization. I can play real well in short bursts in group content in an MMO and have that suffice.
Hot take, but you could accomplish the same effect without adding knock-on effects for other players by simply nerfing the mobs.
Then let solo players have their lane again. It’s OK if it’s not the fastest lane or it doesn’t go the furthest, but it needs to go somewhere.
If you are a Normal+ raider, would you mind explaining why you would have to do world content for downgrades in post-9.2 WoW without secondary power systems?
And if for some reason you still need upgrades or haven’t cleared Normal months into a patch, why would getting upgrades from the open world be such a world-ending travesty?
Congrats, you have described exactly how it works right now. It’s not the fastest lane, nor does it go the furthest. but it is there.
Nope. Right now in Season 4, there simply is no lane.
In DF, there is only a partial system that doesn’t even cover all gear slots. What if raiding, PvP, or M+ gearing systems left 5 gearing slots out of their loot tables—could you imagine the hardcores raging?!
The only recent patch with a full open world gearing gearing system was Korthia 9.1, and it wasn’t even made a reasonable grind until 9.1.5.
9.2 Cypher gear left out trinkets and weapons at launch, and in the end never got trinkets. Devs are clearly trying to send the message that they don’t want the open world to qualify as an endgame.
Why argue against what actually exists right now?
You denying that ZM gear exists as a solo gear pathing is not helpful for your argument. It absolutely exists. When new-ish content got added, it simply did not get extended.
Because it doesn’t exist right now in Season 4, and we don’t know if it will exist in DF.
ZM gear is not Season 4 gear. It’s Season 3 gear.
Season 4 is an experimental season they gave us instead of a fu on content drought. S3 is the last actual content season and it gave exactly what you’re asking for.
But maybe Blizz will look at these complaints and realize that they should just have left us another 5 months of S3.
and? That road just so happens to end a little bit above S4 heroic dungeons.
By insisting to remain solo, you decline all the new S4 stuff. Not just in part, in totality.
Normal mode raiding was flexible raiding. Made for friends and family guilds. Having item outside that competes it makes doing them more accessible. Raiding still has unique looks and mounts and raid gear.
Heroic is the old normal mode.
Mythic is the old heroic difficulty.
Heroic and mythic are where you should be if you want competitive content.
The solo content I am doing rn… is getting dungeon gear and using my season 3 15 gear to solo legion raid runs for transmog. And that’s going to get nerfed in prepatch when they get rid of soulbinds and stuff. It would be nice if heart of azeroth and shadowlands borrowed power systems worked in legacy loot mode. Soulshape would be missed greatly on old transmog farms. Sadly it’s slated for removal and only to be used in shadowlands content.
I mean, we knew this would happen. It was this way on SL beta for a week (All covenant powers only work in the shadowlands), then it was reverted with a note saying it would be changed to work this way in DF. The counterpoint is that all old content will get substantially easier to solo in DF, as we are expecting to get a much bigger damage spike going from 60 to 70, than we did going from 50-60.
Yea I am not looking forward to releveling my characters and having solo progression nerfed with stuff like that. Waiting for prepatch to be over. Then releveling all my characters. Nope.
Can’t even test soloing old stuff in beta >.>
They should keep legacy loot enabling old expansion borrowed power systems for soloing purposes. Soulshape and the shield will be missed. Those help certain mechanics like soloing mythic KJ as a mage.
So, I soloed M KJ on a geared S3 mage, and I don’t think I ever needed to use soulshape. (actually, now that I think about it, I was probably playing venthyr at the time) Just barriers, blink and alter.