Again, I don’t care about some other game, we are talking in the context of WoW not industry standards. This dataset is measuring WoW’s performance. Some of you are claiming that this steep drop off in subs is “normal” so provide your proof to those claims that we have seen such drastic drops in prior expac same window.
I think the takeaway isn’t that after a few months it dropped back. It is true that this almost always happens. it’s anywhere from three to six months…
The real takeaway should be how many more people are going to leave in the future? I’ll take your guys’ word on that this is reputable because I really wouldn’t know; the problem is the player account keeps dwindling and it gets lower and lower each expansion rather than staying at some steady number throughout the years.
The quandry blizzard should be having is is this because:
the average user has changed?
The product has moved in a direction that is unappealing to its base?
Are they being too esoteric with their contenr emphasis in regards to who makes up the majority of the player base?
Or have times changed and people aren’t interested in the genre?
I’ve seen people debate on any one of these or more reasons but if they can figure that out they might be able the fix it but it doesn’t look like they have.
Universally torghast has been mostly received lukewarm or negatively. Blizzard insists the people like it and the way that it looks; that they just have to put finishing touches on it… it is opinion on my part but I think they’ve lost touch with their player base. You only fix that by having a serious discussion or reflection…or changing the people in charge of making decisions
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Superdata has been splitting China from the World of Warcraft West data for years.
That country is an outlier in many ways.
I mean did you know that Outlaw Rogues in China always roll two Roll the Bone buffs so they have no RNG compared to US/EU regions?
Why can’t BlizZard be so nice to us on our turf?
Cries into a bucket
The thing about succeeding with the first patch. Considering they did the ultra-expected with Anduin says that we shouldn’t expect a good story.
The fact that they’re introducing us to new parts of the Maw (and no talk about giving us Riding) in the Maw isn’t looking good. I mean, there’s been a lot of hate for the Maw, so they need something to spice it up and make players WANT to go there. I know its some time before the patch hits, but what they’ve pushed is already leaving me leery that it’ll be anything except “tolerable”.
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Didn’t know that. About them splitting data being a normal thing for them.
So basically people leveled a couple of characters to 60, fiddled around with some covenants, and saw the writing on the wall that everything they wanted out the gate in SL isn’t coming until 9.2/9.3.
But hey Blizzard got to publish that their 4th quarter looked good for 2020 and Activision Blizzard stock price went up since December. Sounds like everything is going to according to plan. Just sucks that instead of players being able to play a game they ended up becoming the game for corporate and shareholders.
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Yeah I was confused by that at first but then read it in the body of the intro on the site as well as the “west” tag next to world of warcraft. It’s good that they do it this way.
The story can’t be salvaged because they didn’t finish up the BFA story properly. And now they are introducing so many plot threads that are unlikely to be resolved as well.
The focus on the MAW is indeed not a pull factor for players to return. But the focus on new soul binds/conduits might drive interest for players to return or engage again. But time will tell.
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WoD was way way way worse in that department.
They had like a 55% decline by this point and after a little under a year reached such a heavy decline (like 67%) that they stopped reporting sub numbers.
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Yea it definitely is the fastest drop even legion and wod kept the bulk past first 6months.
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Nice Mog 
Yes captures the moment I noped off wow and didnt look back.
I know. I guess I’m pickier about story right now as I’ve actively resumed working on my novel. Don’t know what got me past the block, but its like “Can I go play a game for awhile?”
“No! Must Write!”
As to the Maw, if they give us a basic easy quest with the patch to get riding, I think that’ll help. And to the people who’d whine, well, they got the achievement early on, the mount would still be an achievement reward, and they got the benefits early on! Won’t be the first time they changed things and made the “first group” upset.
That same group, when its time to level alts, is more than happy to use the catch up systems of course.
From your own article that you didn’t bother reading and tried to use as clickbait
This roughly matches the pattern seen for the past several expansions, though Shadowlands had a bigger launch.
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The fact that BFA started because a huge sword left an enormous wound in the planet, and ended with the sword still stuck in the planet told me everything I needed to know about the WoW story as it stands.
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I am sorry.
WoW sucks.
Everything sucks.
My appologies for taking information in context. I will not derail your WoW-SUCKS train.
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While that is true the percentages can be misleading.
A 55% decline of over 10 million players still puts WoD at a higher population number than what is currently on live servers
But the margin of error for the current expansion has shrunk, because smaller percentage drops are more impactful if we are talking about less than 5 million players.
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A majority of 9.0 content is done bar whatever grinding you want to do for endgame.
People asked WoW to take more inspiration from FF14; and they did. They just also took their 3-month antiquation of content with it.
It’s a big company not a small indie developer. Just imagine being a big investor and you see a drop, it would make you raise an eyebrow for sure. The first question would be “what are you planning to do to fix this?”. I’m guessing the response was “We’re working on several mobile games”. It’s such a dark future we’re heading toward.
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