The vast majority of raids are logged these days and more players raid than ever. This isn’t the first go round where 1% of all players saw the content.
And that loss I’m talking about is from 1 phase peak to the next. And then to the following phase. I don’t care how many people weren’t raiding when everyone had to level from 25-40. I care about the peak raiding pop at 40 being 33% lower than it was a mere 2 months prior at the last peak. Or being FIFTY percent lower only 8 weeks after that.
You cannot argue that SoD wasn’t marred by failures. What you can argue, and is infact, very easy to prove actually, is that GDKP’s cause higher player activity and retention.
More likely than anything is that the bulk of the loss between P1 and P2 was alts. For any variety of reasons, having to level, farm new runes, not having GDKP’s, whatever the reason they were strong enough reasons that players did not feel compelled to maintain alts. This is the only outcome where Blizzard can call the GDKP ban a success. If the majority of population loss is alts, then they wouldn’t see it as an actual loss since they didn’t lose subscriptions. If they HAD lost subscriptions, and SoD had actually lost 30% of it’s playerbase in 8 weeks, that would be considered a MASSIVE failure. A failure to the tune of about 5 million USD by the way.
So yes, I do think the ban impacted alting more than actual players. I think it had a massive impact on the game, and anyone that logged into SoD during Naxx/SE would know exactly what I mean when I talk about how hard it was to find pugs for old content. I couldn’t even reasonably find a pug for SE to get my boost during NA primetime. For multiple days.