Yeah the WC 3Night Elves died with WOW, it’s sad. I hate what they’ve become.
Even the Darkspear are way more “nicer” in WoW though.
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I just wanted to draw a circle around this because this demonstrates, better than I could, one of the reasons I didn’t regard the changes in population as something that undermines the usefulness of this information - we’re looking at a brand equity effect, after all.
no thats not was happening, CLassic wow just has horde pop issues retail has which has nothing to do with horde vs alliance, or night elf vs orc or whatever
As always missed the point, next try please, read it again 
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Way to miss the mark.
Sorry WOW really killed the WC3 Night Elves. And no, Zahirwrite didn’t mean battles or whatever you seem to think.
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lol what point, Nelf is still one of the most popular races in the alliance, but the alliance as a whole has seen a massive pop drop, how is that not related?
Yeah wow killed nelves so badly, that nelves have been top 3 most played race forever
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You really can’t understand that WoW Night Elves are very different from WC3 Night Elves? Even their cultures are different. WoW Night Elves are like tamed kittens compared to WC 3’s amazon’s.
Then going further with the War of the Ancients trilogy and how those books changed the Nelfs even more.
Edit: Popularity of a new thing, after a horrible, or big change doesn’t negate the fact they are extremely different form what they were before and a lot of old RTS fans don’t like it.
How is this hard to understand for you?
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It’s about what “feeling”, or perspective, you start with in this setting. Based on WC3 and only the information from WC3 in my head, you couldn’t really do anything wrong with Night Elves. I would say the most far-reaching story of all the races, cool aesthetics, themewise a good choice.
However, in Wow-Classic, this audience was no longer, not so many knew Wc3 and you have all the crap that WOW arranged with the night elves in your head. It’s not about popularity per se in this argument, but with which feeling you pick which race.
In WOW Vanilla, many picked the Night Elf race for many reasons, but one of the biggest reasons was also story.
i miss my old wc3 nelves
Kat, the resident nelf-hating nelf. Like a blue uncle ruckus.
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Saw a Kyalin post and expected a complete essay. I was not disappointed.
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and thats your only reason to write anything here? Really? Uff…what a sad behavior…
I think it’s also worth pointing out, as Katiera noted, Alliance populations have been going down, as has the WoW population generally. The concern here is not in dropping from the #3 spot to the #4 spot. The concern is that issues leading to these interest declines, among other factors, are harming the franchise as a whole.
Also, Grazz is cool. 
That’s mostly because of raiding though.
Also, a general decline is hard to avoid with the current story.
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Eh, it’s a variety of factors.
This thread is here to discuss one of them.
This is partly due to the fact that PVE and PVP are not technically balanced. Keyword raid community and such
You claim one reason why Night Elf players quit WoW is due to abysmal lore, presentation, and framing. I think we can agree that some NE players quit because of that. There’s just one problem as I see it.
We have no statistics for why all those NE players quit playing their NE characters or quit WoW altogether. Those graphs only show overall population numbers. They are not separated by server type.
The story? Sure, some of them did but many more, I would wager, quit because of real life obligations, the game changed (mechanics and look what happened with dungeons in Cata), or some switched factions (my close friend being one) to name a few factors.
The general population declined as the game declined. Not just NE players quit. You just can’t throw that out. People left the game due to a variety of factors and none of us know why because we don’t have access to that sort of set of statistics. On RP servers, yes, I can see many NE players quitting due to the story. I mean, hey, RP Servers. PVP servers? Yeah, the lore and such would more than likely be less of a factor.
I looked at the Scrolls of Lore link provided and I saw something that stood out to me.
“I’ll just put a pin in this as well - Wrath was a quiet expansion for Night Elves. There’s no reason for this increase, but it happens anyway.”
Kyalin, you couldn’t see a reason for the increase for NE players in Wrath? Really? There is one very simple explanation.
Arthas.
Wrath of the Lich King was the final chapter of his story from WC3, a very popular game. People wanted to see it concluded and some - gasp - played Night Elves.
Also, here is another point I saw you make - “It didn’t make sense to me that The Night Elf interest curve went down in 2009 of all places, and frankly, their interest SHOULD have gone down in 2006/2007, but it increased.”
The game was growing in 2006/2007. Again, people started playing WoW and, guess what, they played Night Elves so you would naturally see some growth there.
And as we all know, people play alts. Sometimes people delete their old characters to play a new one. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best.
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I want to address your last two points on the search interest study. One of the first things that I did was assess how much of the decline in interest for the Night Elves was due to Warcraft itself. After that, I looked at the residuals (how much was explained by other factors). So when you’re talking about the parts of the data that I found funny, your objections were already considered. The increases being discussed could not be explained by WoW-level factors (i.e. Arthas, that the game was growing), they were driven by other factors, and the movement of those other factors was what I found peculiar.
This leaves your first three paragraphs for discussion.
Regarding 1 and 2, you’re right - I have not taken a survey with a large enough sample size to assess why Night Elf players left the game specifically. Designing and administering such a thing would take way too many resources, and would need to do things like consider the lore as a contributing factor, rather than THE reason (I doubt that any of us quit for just one) - which means that respondents would be in for a 10 minute plus survey. Unless I somehow obtained the resources of the FBI, I doubt I could get that data.
Regarding your third paragraph, what you’re describing is churn, which wouldn’t matter to me so much because in a healthy situation, as people leave the game for life obligations, others enter it. I wouldn’t expect to see a consistent trend away from the Night Elves through that churn, unless there was something explaining why new generations would be less inclined to pick a Night Elf compared with older ones.
Bad lore is one such reason.
How am i self hating nelf when I love the nelf story as a whole, you are the self hatting elf
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the self hatting elf
Well clearly she’s not doing a good enough job of that. Aki isn’t even wearing a hat!
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