Yeah - this is a fair point, they gained about 8 million subs between release of Vanilla and TBC and another 4 million going into Wrath. However, I remember TBC being far more multi boxing and bot-farmy than Wrath.
It felt like Wrath they started culling people selling accounts that had farmed up max level characters with full raid gear sets. So I don’t know how to factor in that confounding variable.
Agreed but the economic crash isn’t an excuse for sub numbers when the vast majority of the subs were gained during a completely different expansion. It’s the same thing that people use to justify Shadowlands and it’s initial sales because of Covid yet, BFA only had 300K less in sales lol.
I think some people have bad days and like to go off here lol. We’re all human.
But some repeat offenders… idk
Anonymity. People know they can say anything that would get them punch in person and get away with it.
I always find it funny that people say this like its normal to be unhinged enough to assault people over words.
I know toxic people definitely exist ingame, but before I started the forums made me scared to even talk to anyone in fear that they’d beat me with a stick and call me ugly and bad and dumb.
Most people I run into are really nice though!
I have played a lot of games over the years and been a member at many forum sites and I have personally never seen the negativity in other games that I see in WoW. I honestly get apprehensive about posting legit questions or opinions on the forums. Don’t even get me started on getting a straight unbiased answer. Every class forum is doom and gloom about how their class is garbage and needs to be fixed. I don’t feel personally like my class is overly broken. I feel like some tweaks could be made. But I don’t think mages are hot garbage…except for Arcane rotation. That thing is a mess lol. I just joined a new gulild last night and it has shown me that there are very good and very helpful people in game. It has been a game changer for me. I think with the right group of people i can overlook the negativity of the forums and just go on living my best mage life.
My anecdotal experience at the time was that I was running into people all over the place playing WoW. It was a cultural phenomenon during wrath, but the transient mainstream crowd following the trends was never going to stay forever. This isn’t knocking those players, either. Everyone has the right to try something out and not stick with it forever.
There is always going to be perceived negativity. That’s simply the nature of life. In a world of negativity, show some positivity. 
If the motivation for positivity is simply to counteract negativity than wouldn’t that be relative negativity? 
I see more weirdos with pixel fetishes than overt toxicity.
It’s all relative, anyways. My point was that life is about balance, at least in my experience. So, if one feels inundated with darkness, bring forth some light.
The spicy take I was looking for.
That’s very true. I just remember how many randos would get a character to level 70, then buy 3 accounts, multi-box and speed level those 3 other accounts. At that time, when you ran lower levels through dungeons with a higher alt, the lower level got full experience and gear. That made leveling alts stupidly fast. After getting the extra accounts up to 70, they’d get the character raid geared and then sell the account on Ebay. You can still do it supposedly, via a couple work arounds.
But back in TBC, it was a massive money making deal. They nerfed the dungeon system in Wrath because of it. Players getting run by high levels would only get like 1/3rd of the dungeon experience points. It slowed account leveling down a bit, the players switched over to PvP multiboxing until they caught onto that too.
These forums mirror the game, if Blizzard wants these forums to change then they would have to first fix in game by removing all the toxicity and gatekeeping systems, but they don’t and instead they cater to the 1% of players with raider io/logs and other gatekeeping metrics from the majority of their playerbase.
I remember seeing people with the green linen shirt or horde or alliance backpacks all over the place IRL. I think i still have my green linen shirt…it definitely probably has experienced some closet shrinkage though. It was a great time to be playing wow. Random people in Walmart you would hear…FOR THE HORDE or other in game catch phrases. Good times.
I don’t really have specific expectations other than enjoyment. I always look forward to new expansions and new content. It means I have something new to try out and enjoy. I find that if I don’t have specific expectations, I take what they give and either enjoy it or not. So far, I have always enjoyed the game and I’ve been here since before Cata. I can and do always find something to do in game. It may not always be current content but there is always something I can enjoy while I’m online.
People come to the forms to vent. It’s just like a yelp review. People no longer go out of their way to express the positivity towards some thing. It’s always being a hyper critic about the negative things.
You have to take it for what it’s worth. Constructive criticism at best. The problem with the game is everybody has a different vision on what game should be. With countless opinions being tossed around, there’s gonna be some disappointment with a small demographic of people that aren’t heard. And a small victory for some that are.
The problem with Wow fundamentally is Blizzard is now reacting instead of being proactive.
Gone are the days of innovation with wow.
It’s too much cut and paste.
Not enough creativity.
It’s let’s create a system that we can re-implement every expansion and it will work temporarily.
Instead of, let’s take a few chances. The chances that they are willing to take, they fail to react quick enough to criticisms about.
Take tourgast for example. The biggest mistake it was made about it was it was tied to player power instead of aesthetics. We told them these concerns in beta and they ignored it. We’re constantly being ignored and treated like they know better about what we want because they had some metrics meeting. newsflash is: they need to be more proactive = the healthier the game will be, and they seem to be moving in the right direction albeit very slow.
The negativity breeds more negativities. You have to come to the forums for strictly entertainment. I just hate how people have the worst reading comprehension possible and start Internet fights with Randos because they need to vent. It’s actually comical if you look at it that way.
I wish the forum didn’t feel like verbal PVP.