The same achievement trackers show near-100% rates of completion of achievements for basic Shadowlands content, so even though they might not be 100% accurate or updated they still give me a general idea of what content players are doing or not doing.
Different achievement trackers may have different specific numbers, but they also tend to converge on what content people are doing or not doing, so I trust them to give me a general idea.
They should if certain conditions are met. Maybe once a week or rare spawn or if it requires a resource grind from the whole server
Having lived in China, I can tell you firsthand that most of its servers are riddled with bots, and carries are infinitely larger than anything weâve seen on our servers. It still wouldnât be a great gauge for anything.
Speaking of carries, I havenât even mentioned that. We donât know how many of these are just toons buying carries, both alts and mains alike.
Just wanted to reedit my comments to reiterate that raid participation and M+ see considerable overlap, so again, pointing out raid participation probably wonât do much in the way of proving that most people do raiding and M+ and PvP. I just looked at 3 people in this thread at random. All of them , raid progression and M+. PvP is so different than the other two that it would probably be a viable statistic to point out.
You can continue to trust them, but it doesnât make them right. They are no more accurate then you telling me my data is useless.
Itâs funny because using something like WCL has it at some pretty insane numbers for Classic just for 2 weeks of Naxx. Thereâs more Mage parses in there than all of those characters combined they listed for M+.
The number? 11,084,694, for DPS alone.
14,909,714 if you count in tanks/healers.
Ah, that was for 25 man alone. I forgot thereâs now 25 and 10 man!
5,999,731 10 man parses for a total of 20,909,445 combined.
Using RIO, WCL, or any other available metric is honestly pretty much just as bad as the websites that try to gauge MMO population by social media activity.
The only thing we can realistically go off of, is old sub numbers, because Blizzard doesnât even mention how many active subs there are usually just âwe sold the most day 1â or âweek 1â expansion pack sales stuff which doesnât say a whole lot.
No they should not.
LOL no.
zero difficulty content will never award BiS level gear.
Achievement tracking is more useful to me because I am interested in how many overall players are doing M+, not characters.
Your numbers are high because they include players that bought boosts, players that boost with dozens of characters on multiple accounts, players that love M+ and do it on multiple alts, raiders that do M+ because they feel they have to, and casual players that did keys during the event week.
Here is my agenda:
WoW is an MMO. It needs to appeal to a wide variety of playersâand a high number of playersâover a long period of time by giving them endgame power progression in content they enjoy or feel comfortable with.
Your agenda seems to be to strip away any progress made in Legion and bring WoW back to the dismal state it was in WoD, based on elitist ideals and the misguided notion that forcing players to group up for endgame progression is going to magically restore WoWâs social elements. We saw in both WoD and SL that this doesnât work.
What do you people want out of the outdoor world and what do you people considered content and is it realistic?
In all fairness to everyone in this thread, using achievements for open world engagement is also not ideal because much of the open world/content that exists outside of raiding and M+ is a requirement due to Blizzardâs incessant grinds and often attaches catch-up mechanics to these content avenues.
So naturally, achievements for basic open world content will be inflated. The reality is that none of us will ever actually know how many players do what and how many players do the other thing.
However, I agree with your sentiment that there are players who exist outside of PvP, M+, and raiding. This is important.
As I discussed in my âwar on solo players threadâ, open world players should be able to achieve a full set of Normal raid iLvl gear without having to resort to crafting.
Note: This is actually a compromise compared to what we used to be able to earn!!!
Ideally, we would have a gameplay feature like Torghast, Horrific Visions, or Island Expeditions that is challenging and also rewards gear, but this is off the table for DF 10.0.
I never said they should. Learn to read. 
I have to agree. Look at PVP gearing system for systemlands.
Youâre really keen to gatekeep huh?
Are those parses or characters? Because a single character full clearing naxx once can generate 15 different parses (14 bosses and full raid), and we are in the 2nd lockout of wrath classic.
The one thatâs getting removed? rating locked pvp ilvl is confirmed to be going away, so how does that help boosters?
Snozh sees contradicting opinions and goes into a blind rage because he views himself as the smartest man on these forums (he has essentially stated this himself), so any opinion that isnât his is wrong and bad and out of touch. You would do well to not engage with him any further because all he will do is skew your argument and deliberately avoid your completely valid points.
I am sure that saying such a thing will likely prompt him to call me a troll, too, because any person that disagrees with Snozh is a troll in his eyes.
Also seems possessed to pin all the blame on what he refers to as solo players.
Suppose that would include me then yes? Eh, oh well if that be the case. Life goes on.
(returns to listening to nice tunes and farming the Scarlet Crusade Tabard.)
Itâs why they always bring up how because I donât post on my EU char (Because US/EU forums are separated) that my characters are not my own.
They didnât like their grey/green parses being brought up from their guilds carrying them.
Itâs much more fun to poke at them and then let them spam post because they sure spend a lot more time posting on the forums than anything else (Which says a lot.)
You are still using words like gatekeeping that you dont understand?
There isnt any gatekeeping in this game.