If populations fail to meet expectations, I think its because SoD missed the point of classic

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Its no secret that the only real good population metric we have, the raid logs, are showing quite a dip compared to previous season. Ultimately only Blizzard knows the true population metrics and we don’t know how it will look in the future.

That being said.

IF (again nobody knows the true answer except Blizzard), IF the population and performance of SoD doesn’t meet expectations in the long run. I believe its because SoD kind of missed the mark on “Why” someone would bother playing classic Vanilla again. People who have never played vanilla, its a whole other story. But for those who played the OG release. Who played the first classic and SoM. They really have to like vanilla to play it yet again.

Vanilla’s strongest point. Its strongest pro. It has ALWAYS been Azeroth. The entire world. That’s not to say the PvP, dungeons, or raids aren’t important. They are. But in my experience, more people appreciate the open world more than those things. Azeroth really defines their experience.

Season of Discovery doesn’t seem to capitalize on this. Instead they took the “raid culture” from retail and that you will see at 60 and thrust it upon the playerbase every few months. And you see a lot of the more “toxic” and gatekeeping behaviors flooding into the other parts of the game. And with the balance issues introduced via the rune system. These things really brought forth the “meta centric” culture into the forefront. And I suspect this is either scaring away or burning out players who are leveling. You see it in dungeons while leveling. You see it at the end phase raid. That’s not to say that the “bad” players are excused. There is for sure a large selection of players that just struggle with the game and its hard to include them in endgame content with their skill level. But that’s a discussion for another thread.

So what makes “Vanilla”, vanilla? Things that tap into that Azeroth experience. For example, the following. I recommend these are good ways that would tap into that vanilla experience far more than just “raid culture earlier in the game”.

  1. New professions
  2. New materials for professions (and unique/engaging ways to gather them in the open world)
  3. New recipes that use said new materials
  4. New leveling races that are tasteful (goblins, high elves, etc).
  5. New quests
  6. New leveling zones
  7. Open world world bosses

I’d even go so far to say that people look more fondly on the dungeons in the vanilla experience rather than the raids. The strat, the scholo, the BFD. Some like the raids, but I suspect that many more would feel more impacted by new dungeons (or refined existing dungeons) rather than new raids.

WoW in general, its greatest adversary is the community itself. We’ve shown time and times again that we will ruin the game for efficiency. SoD is no different and it needs to be controlled. People start leveling up in phase 2 and what are they met with? Meta focused dungeon groups. PvP filled with people yelling at each other in BGs as usual. Raid focused endgame with just as much meta obsession. Its no surprise people are falling off. Especially when a lot of the new roles (rogue tank, mage healer) are met with a general “meh” opinion in the community.

Does SoD do anything good? Yes. I think the rune system is a very creative way to do new abilities and I like it. I also like the concept of new roles. It just needs…tuning and balance to make sure everyone is having fun. I also think the open world PvP events have been a lot of fun and a great change of pacing for earning reputation. And I hope these events get a new tier of rewards once we reach the last phase to repopulate them with 60s.

But SoD has put a spotlight on issues that are causing us to lose 25-35% peak raid logs per phase. Chances are the peak raid logs once we reach the final phase will be 1/4th or 1/5th of what the peak was in phase 1. Issues that can be defined as

  1. Meta rushing at all levels of the game
  2. Significant gatekeeping on classes and spec because of performance differences
  3. Barrier of entry for raiding leading to a drop off

Those 3 issues can persist, but I think if we’re to counter this drop off in players those 8 things I touched on will probably help bring players back and keep them engaged in the long run. I will also admit that a lot of people could be playing and leveling, then quitting or going to alts at max instead of raiding.

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insert 50 IQ “era is that way ->” comment

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Grey parser confirmed.

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Easier to level alts to level-locked cap → more alts in phase-locked raid → more raid logs existing → harder to level to new level cap → new raid content is harder than last raid content → melee completely invalidated and having to reroll casters to get invited → “omg p2 dead compared to p1 look at the amount of logs” → 100% exp buff → repeat from step 1

Hope a visual representation/flow chart/progression chart helps you understand the problem at work.

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What does population in the long run even matter? We’re literally playing a seasonal experience. The only ‘long run’ in Season of Discovery will be the one or two SoD Era servers they allow us to retire our SoD characters to when this is over.

As for the population in Phase 2 and also Phase 3 and 4, I don’t know why anyone thought it wouldn’t drop from the Phase 1 numbers.

Even then, the numbers in SoD Phase 2 eclipse every other version of Classic, be it Era, Wotlk, or Hardcore, by a country mile lmao. Can’t really call it a failure when it has hundreds of thousands of players.

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P2’s biggest problem is that P1 was fantastic.

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Realistically, what do you expect?

P1 brought in new players, people who wanted to check out SoD, and then go do other things, and it was incredibly easy to level to 25 then hop into raids to show up on WCL.

P2, until the 100% XP buff at least, has been slower leveling to 40, and the raid is arguably a little harder, with some mechanics being necessary. Like you can’t just cheese the boss by having a paly tank, like you could in P1.

I also feel like people went from raiding on multiple toons to favoring 1 (or maybe 2). I personally went from 3 toons to 1 (but this lockout will be up to 4).

On the server I play on, as of 2 weeks ago, there were still over 30K unique characters logging raids! That’s on par with the largest WoW Classic 2019 servers during their peak, iirc. It might even be larger!

Anyway, should we expect seasonal servers like SoD to increase, decrease or stay the same over time? And what are we basing such expectations on?

I think this is a reasonable point, and something that I would have agreed less with in P1 than I do now in P2.

In phase 1, I felt like exploring the world, quests, grinding interesting BoE greens or blues was an adventure. Now, I’ve got a pretty decent amount of gold, can mostly do instanced content or STV (which is practically instanced content - though not exactly), and even though the world got larger, it doesn’t feel as large for some reason. Maybe this is because I’m playing Alliance and both STV and Gnomeregan are practically in our front or back yards…

idk how I feel about new, new, new, but some World Bosses, and/or World Event type stuff would probably be really cool.

Interesting ideas for sure.

:woman_shrugging:

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Indeed. Sod seems to have great retention of players. Much better than SoM. So this approach is paying off.

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Yeah I mean that’s the crux of the issue or discussion, right? Nobody really knows what is represented by those raid log metrics. Are they each a unique player? How many are just alts? Questions like that. Which is why I put in those disclaimers. But yeah if it does end up that populations are falling, which is just a theory from our perspective, then those points i went to is why I think it is.

If it isn’t and everything is going well, then I see no reason for Blizzard to change if this is what the people want.

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It is very weird these high minded entire scope of SoD is failing perspectives, from a player pov I don’t have any trouble running the raid or getting groups or any of the sky is falling statements that are made, mostly it seems to be people drawing from 3rd party info which always leads me to believe they are pushing an agenda, if there are fewer raiders then we wouldn’t be hearing meta maurices complain about raid comp and parses, anyone would be fine to fill the slot if there really was a lack.

So this post runs counter to the other ‘such and such’ can’t get into raids posts but has the same general bad takes of SoD is failing. States that we are missing out on these other things that would have made it fantastic and generally runs with that terrible viewpoint that the devs are braindead and didn’t think things through when duh obviously SoD has been a huge success, just look at all the GDKPeople that are mad they can’t come in to scrape coins.

Sets the goalposts beyond the success already had, this is more about 3rd party window lookers trying to foist opinions that paint SoD in a bad light, when Bliz has done a good job of promoting social interaction, AH/trade skills, world pvp, world pvp events etc.

Ignore the log metrics, those people aren’t here for the love of the game, they are a 3rd party advertisers, I don’t ask the spoon salesman how much cereal I should eat.

I mean did you notice his guild name even? This is almost a free samples stall at the Bigbox.

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I think it’s actually you that missed the point of what SoD is… SoD isn’t classic, its a test of Classic+, a season that has an end. The whole point of SoD is to experiment with how the community would react to an Altered classic experience.

These servers are not Era, they are their own thing. Full classic is still there and available to be played at any time.

I don’t disagree with everything you said, the focus is too heavy on Raids and many of the runes are uninspired but many are also runes that make several Vanilla specs actually viable. (IE Paladins are not just healers/buff bots now. And I know some edgelord is going to say “Prot was viable” or “Ret was okay once you got to AQ” but that kinda screams there is a problem to begin with…)

When SoD was announced I was expecting more world content. New quests, new rares, new secrets, maybe even new caves or locations previously inaccessible like the bluffs of north eastern Mulgore.

It certainly does have it’s problems but this whole thing is a season based on experimentation to begin with and not full on Vanilla.

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my gnomer pug last night had 5 melee and 5 range and it was fine

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This is an issue for me as well. Once you’re 40 there’s almost no reason to run any of the dungeons. I would love for them to have reworked all the drops from Dungeons at least.

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More people are playing SOD than retail and classic era. So, I think it is fine.

Every 3 hours the servers are bogged down because so many people are doing a massive, very fun PVP event and tons of people are still doing both raids available to us. Tons of people are leveling characters, tons of people are running dungeons.

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Yeah I see what you’re saying. But I think even with classic+, the main goal is to expand the game while staying in line with the “classic spirit”. And based on the posts I see, that’s often where the disagreement happens. On what that classic spirit actually means. And those points I gave is where I sorta see the purpose of that classic spirit.

That being said, yeah if I had a choice I would have preferred that runes were mainly focused on bringing less viable specs “up to speed” that couldn’t be fixed via balance changes (and Its important that said changes don’t standardize the classes and keep class identity). There were some classes that were already good by classic standards. And then runes buffed them even more. So yeah runes focusing on unviable specs and making them viable + opening up completely new roles for said class would have been what I preferred personally. Like a shadow priest tank. Or a tank hunter.

But yeah I do agree its all a big experiment (something I wish more people would realize) and I do hope that it will set the foundation for a proper classic+

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Wrath was ahead for three weeks of p2. Era is dead. Wrath is in 8 months of waiting for cata. Hardcore was over as soon as SoD dropped.

SoDs current pop is a joke. It would be pushing 1 mil+ if it was just a fresh with ranking changes and small balance pass.

The cope about it not dying is biblical though. Keep it up.

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For me, its more resignation. I literally said in a post back in Phase 1 that the moment where the most people were playing SoD was day one of the season and it was all downhill from there.

That’s why I’m playing on Crusader Strike and not Chaos Bolt. In Phase 1 at its peak, Crusader Strike had 70,000 raiders while Chaos Bolt has 7000. Now in Phase 2, Crusader Strike has 35k and Chaos Bolt has 4000.

In Phase 3 and 4, I fully expect a smaller server like Chaos Bolt to die off. But Crusader Strike? We’ll be fine. Even if we fall to as few as 5000-10000 at lvl 60, that’s still Classic 2019 levels.

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The fact you think 4,000 is dying is hilarious.

People really have been tainted by this Megaserver nonsense.

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Era is that way -------->

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and that would be right