Agree with those two statements, but…
How do we know that?
You can look at the total participation of past seasons by looking at the old ladders on xunamate or wherever and compare it to the current ladder. There are at least 330k people on the solo shuffle ladder. The highest participation seasons were s15 in MoP and SL s1 which both had 370k-400k and were pretty large outliers in terms of participation in 3s.
But other high participation seasons were around 300k. Low participation seasons like some of the Legion ones or the middle of BFA had much lower.
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how unfortunate
Can’t find anything so I’ll have to take your word for it.
How far back does that go though? I’m thinking about latter half of TBC/early Wrath. I wonder if there is reliable data that shows arena peaks higher than that era?
As far as historic ladders, the oldest I can find that have cutoffs attached (so you can actually count spots and thus calculate participation) are from MoP. Keep in mind that prior to s14, so the first half of MoP and then TBC+Wrath+Cata all had battlegroups.
Not only would you need to find the ladder for each battlegroup at the end of the season, you’d need to find the gladiator cutoff for each battlegroup too because they varied, each battlegroup had their own cutoff. I think some of the ladders can be seen on the internet archive of the old WoW site if you know which dates to look at, but I don’t think the cutoff data is available anywhere, especially since arenajunkies is gone.
It’s probably safe to say TBC and Wrath had enormous participation though. Especially the final seasons of those expansions.
e: Also, worth noting that participation would still be hard to measure in the battlegroup era because teams also existed and could have anywhere from 1-6 people on them for 3v3. I don’t think there is any way to measure that data at all, you’d have to look at every team on the old ladders and count players which even back then would have been really difficult.
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Season 3 and 4 of TBC, especially season 3. Never seen anything like it and I don’t think we ever saw/will see that kind of interest again.
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I wish I knew actual sub numbers
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Obviously anecdotal experience but i dont remember 8 to 10 minutes queues. Ever.
For random bgs
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That’s an imbalance issue, not participation.
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I don’t remember your faction needs soldiers ever until now either
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If you want lower queue times for BGs you could try mercenary mode (it’s now frequently available for Alliance, for the first time since WoD I think)
Pretty much MoP was the last really good expansion and participation fell from there.
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This game isn’t good anymore. I just afk in Epic BGs to farm Honor points when Alliance is losing 90% of the time. Most Alliance players are not queuing for BGs anymore. They have either gone to another game or just switched over to PvE which benefits them because Blizzard does not seem to care about RMT here.
Alliance wouldn’t have longer queue times if most are not queuing Bgs anymore.
You all have this idea that que times should be instant and they never are and never were.
Im not sure where all the BS that the game is dead is coming from but stop smoking that stuff LoL.
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Is this from your extensive experience playing? The queues on alliance havent been 10 minutes for a random bg ever. I literally cant even recall it. And 45 minutes for solo shuffle. And the 2s and 3s ladder has nobody in it. I dont really care what has to change whether its an imbalance in totality or a lack of people, but it feels dead after an extremely long time playing. This isnt normal for the game. I never ever remember sitting in a 40+ minute queue for ANYTHING in this game.
Even when you had to still walk to the battleground entrance to queue back in the stone age, the queues were only 7 to 10 minutes.
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What about 30 minutes for a 70 brawl, is that too short?
https://imgur.com/a/Nj1xP6U
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Again though, queue times do not represent that the “game is dead”.
That’s because you queued a bg at the same time as the brawl. You staying in the brawl queue and did your bg, got out, looked at the timer and said that’s still taking forever and took your ss.
No I didn’t, I never dual queue anything.
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