The data available is skewed by the fact that players who don’t like mythic+ have disproportionately left the game, thus increasing the percentage of remaining players who do mythic+.
That data is just keys completed, how does that track players that don’t engage with M+?
Blizzard doesn’t post their population numbers anymore, so that data is rather useless.
Here is a breakdown of DF season 1 https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/72175-interesting-dragonflight-mythic-season-1-data/
Still doesn’t show any numbers that show non-partcipation.
31 million keys divided by the entire length of the season.
Season 1 lasted 19 weeks I think, so that breaks down to 1.6 million runs per week.
Legion came out 7 years ago (first expansion since Wrath to grow the player population). At a certain point you have to say, anyone who quit WoW during Legion is not worth diverting resources on the hope of pulling back when you have a core stable population of players consuming your most popular content (M+).
You’re asking for data that can’t exist. Blizzard doesn’t list sub numbers anymore now that theu can’t boast like they used to be able to.
So anyone posted completed M+ key data doesn’t have the full context. It is all conjecture.
They don’t, however we can draw conclusions.
People who weren’t interested in raiding or mythic+ are a big part of the people who are gone now. But I would propose that raiders who aren’t able to keep up with progression because they aren’t spamming mythic+ (because they don’t like that content or don’t have unlimited play time available to do that) are far more likely to leave than those who can or want to do that.
It appears that Blizzard designed the game around the people who play like they think players should play, including several prominent youtubers/streamers whose gameplay is mythic+ and heroic raiding. They took extensive feedback from those players, who are now very happy with the game.
However, Blizzard was surprised that initial sales were so low. Apparently hype doesn’t sell as well as it used to. They were expecting player numbers to pick up when players saw they had fixed the game. And this didn’t happen, according to insider reports.
If you spend a lot of time in different zones, as I do, you see player participation falling there more than ever before. Classic is booming, and a fair number of those players have either left retail or play it only part time now.
Targeting one player demographic didn’t convert casuals and players into that one. I would propose that making mythic+ mandatory for raiding has hurt both.
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I’m seeing this same trend on my server MG, which is a very populated server.
The game does feel like it has been moving in the direction of Wildstar 2.0 for the last few expansions. I don’t understand this push to turn the game into a sweaty e-sport? Is it the suits at the top, or is out of touch developers trying to turn WoW into some bad seasonal AARPG lobby game?
Same tactic every time. Move the goal posts.
This is sadly a common thing.
Friend was having trouble in their N Sark pug. So I joined on my 408 SPriest and was keeping up with the 420+ geared players and even beat a 433 Ret who somehow managed to get themselves killed.
My first Heroic kill of Assault/Rashok also being in a pug that had the raid lead being a 10k DPS Warlock. It was a mess.
Minus you’re arguing content that a billion dollar company bothers pouring time and money into something that isn’t popular.
Hence my ‘silly to argue the obvious’ statement.
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The game grew during Legion. So if we accept your premise that some portion of the population left because of raiding changes… that means the number of people who came back to the game because of M+ was massive enough to not only offset that loss but to grow the playerbase.
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I don’t know how these people think Blizzard, having massive data streams to look at for over 7 years, and who are continuing to commit to growing M+, think that somehow M+ isn’t extremely popular. Ignore the polls, ignore the engage, ignore Blizzard’s statements, ignore /who, ignore everything and somehow convince themselves that M+ is not content people enjoy playing.
It’s actually derangement. Like some of these people played WoW too long to admit that this feature is more popular than the thing they like.
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Define the problem, though.
Yea, another thing that puts me off from raiding.
Joined a normal “AOTC” lead group; lead was a 420-ish ilvl shadow priest. I was on my 410 ilvl Unholy, a spec I have never raided on, and was keeping up in dps with everyone except the super geared guys (430+).
Basically one-shot everything to Sark where we began wiping; I hadn’t bothered to check dps meters other than my own for the other boss kills, but began to do so for Sark. The lead was dead last, thousands of DPS below the tanks. He then begins booting people with “bad” dps who were doing multiples of dps he; if he just wasn’t in the group we probably would have cleared it.
Read the thread.
You really have to spam the hell out of M+ to make this a problem.
M+ will always have the advantage cause of how much better it can fit into people’s time tables.
How are they doing anything different with dungeon creation than they did in the past? We used to get way more dungeons in past expansions. According to your logic, we should be getting double the amount of dungeons if M+ is as popular as you say it is.
If anything, we’re getting a lot less content than we used to get as far as 5 man dungeons go.
Citation needed.
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That is the thing with these M+ defenders. They just pull numbers out of their butts or link data that doesn’t have a lot of context. They just see big numbers and just assume that everyone is participating because there are millions of keys being completed in a season.
Edit: Oh, I forgot how they used that recent poll as some kind of gauge as well. I think there were something like 12k votes, how is the a good representation of the player base?
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