Well, maybe not great, but country miles better than SL. Arthas was a straightforward evil ex-Paladin.
No galaxy-spanning threats, just the good old undead Scourge.
WoW had a large population then too. Today is likely 2-8% of what the peak was, Shadowlands had the biggest player dropoff since launch out of any expansion. The interest is there, but the developers could not keep people engaged. Too many systems are repellant.
The devs communicated with us back then. Now they ignore us completely. Community council was just a way to spread the blame, and I still barely see these yellow forum posters where it matters most.
Metrics can be deceiving. While wrath may be the most played expansion, it’s not the best. Timining is critical in understanding why wrath had the most players.
Around 2010 the gaming market started to change in a very critical way; free to play games were on the rise. League of Legends as a primary example which lead to the many competitors to games like WoW. Since free to play games have a low barrier to entry, it’s easy to see why games like wow would lose subscribers.
Not to mention Arthas for many was the final boss of WoW and many had little interest in playing beyond that as Arthas was seen as the conclusion point.
Through out the decade from 2010 to 2020 the game market place in general became hyper competitive as more and more games started to draw players attention span. It’s pretty easy to understand why there was a population decline in wow from wrath onwards. Though wow numbers often spike upwards significantly around the release of a new expansion.
There are many negatives to wrath that people have forgotten about, which will be obvious very soon here when WOTLKC goes live. There will be many complaints and much dissatisfaction.
According to your own graph, sub count still grew in Wrath, just not by much. Your graph only shows a decline begining in early Cata, not in Wrath. That says to me that Wrath managed to retain, and even grow a bit of what vanilla and TBC had cultivated. Not an inconsiderable feat given the numbers.
The WOTLK section held its own and ended slightly higher than where it started but you say it made the game go into decline? I say the decline started immediately after Cata started, i know who looks wrong here
it tells me that the losses were covered by the gains… WoW had great momentum coming out of TBC. The deceleration is clearly visible since the very start of Wrath.
There’s a thing called market saturation, exponential growth isn’t possible with a product like this, you’re always going to hit a point where you can’t push much higher.
Man seeing the peak and subsequent drop on WoD hurts so much. That expansion held so much promise and players were clearly there for it, but the game let them down.
WOTLK Stopped growth
WOTLK Put the game in decline.
However from that chart we can, clear as day, see the following:
WOTLK had the most stable player base of any expansion.
WOTLK got better as it went on.
WOTLK held peak player numbers for the longest time.
Growth was naturally leveling off. TBC didn’t spike the same way vanilla did.
In fact, if you google it, WOTLK was announced in August 2007.
That’s right when TBC gets it’s first big kick of growth.
i have to agree. and the reason for my agreement is because of how it personally made me feel. being a player that played vanilla and bc and then wrath. the game was fun in vanilla and 10x more fun in bc. then when wrath came out it was fun yes but once there was down time the addition of certain aspects especially achievements was the ground zero of wow becoming a job and the feeling of “needing” to do things.
3d10 was fun pre-zergability.
It sucked when someone couldn’t do the Heigan dance and screwed up an Undying or Immortal run.
Ooladar was cool, too.
No idea where Argent Tournament came in, but if you liked to REALLY GRIND for mounts and whatnot, well…there you go.
It was good to see Arthas go down. (especially if you played the RTS)
Things started to get homogenized after that, for better or for worse. (people can argue this both ways)
Peeps will enjoy the game for all kinds of reasons and dislike it for just as many, if not more. (haters gonna hate)
That said, WoTLK was awesome.
Neat thread. Have a nice day!
I really miss being able to play alts how i liked, i could level a character through BG’s, gathering, dungeons or straight up kill grinding to farm for cloth or whatever and it didn’t matter, i could hit cap and spam some dungeons and within a day or two i’d be ready for low level ICC pugs.
Now you’re forced to do a bunch of crap and deal with systems/unlocks etc and you’ll never get an alt to be fully at its best unless you participate in all of that crap, now i have zero alts for the first time ever.
