You may be right, I have no data in front of me, but I suspect its a pretty large number players. At least enough that Blizzard would prefer not to lose their subscriptions.
More than, I suspect, people who collect appearances, for example.
In your snide, supercilious way? Yup. Posting as always on a character that hasn’t played the game in many years.
M+ is a gameplay mode with a low barrier to entry and highly variable difficulty. Some people love it and others don’t and that is fine. The same can be said of pvp or raiding or heck, pet battles. I don’t think the game would die without m+, but it would be lesser for its removal.
While I agree that m+ has a negative impact on the player-base of the WoW, and, IMO is an abomination inspired by a failed attempt to turn WoW, an MMORPG, into an esport to milk every single cent they could from it, I’m going to have to disagree that most modern MMORPG fans are fans of AD&D, or any such games to be honest. I also believe that m+ fosters that extremely unattractive gogogo attitude towards WoW in general. It’s my view that if you don’t have the time to run an instance and work with the other people in the instance, including the RL considerations that may come up during the instances, don’t join, or just join with people that share your attitude.
Semper Fi! 
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No offense, but if you meant the gameplay is different, you should have stated it as such. You’d still be off the marker, unfortunately.
Going off of your examples: ‘Transmog’ exists in WoW, because they didn’t design gear for every race and class initially; the game was built in a very limiting way, and that code is still in effect. They’d have to start from scratch to undo it, so…‘transmog’ (say it with jazz hands).
In a pen and paper game like D&D, it’s just called ‘buying/making/ganking clothes and gear’. Just like real life, the only thing preventing you from having Elon Musk’s custom made car (or mount), is whether you’re smart, rich, crafty, and/or murderhobo 
Only in actual rare instances, would you run into something restrictive in usage, like a Paladin’s Defender blade, or a Bard’s Haunting Cloak.
Same with pets, mounts, homes, followers, etc. You want it? Go get it, and hope you can stash it somewhere. If you’re a murderhobo, this isn’t a factor.
That said, the gameplay is different, only insofar that D&D has actual character classes, and a ridiculous number of genres it can pull from. Literally everything you know about WoW, was sourced from D&D, fact. Ever heard of Blizzard discussing their characters? Guess what they were playing. And even if it wasn’t D&D directly, virtually every RPG known, video game or pen and paper, counts D&D as a source.
And, having said THAT, there’s a beast no one wants to wake. Sure, they’ve got a couple of meh MMOs running around with two of their titles…but if they ever got serious and went AAA in an MMO, D&D would own.
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I agree. HOWEVER, I think what would be best is to keep m+, but REMOVE the weekly cache you get from it.
after all the different loot systems since Legion, I’ve come to the realization that the m+ cache is what’s ruining the gear progression and making raid loot meaningless. It’s too op.
Most people don’t get CE in the first month of release lol. But for most mythic raiders by the time we get a few bosses into the raid, pretty much all the loot is negligible aside from the last 2 bosses because we’re already max ilvl from the m+ cache.
Say in the off chance M+ was removed. That would imply that blizzard would need a significant amount of content elsewhere. Such as:
- Something to keep players engaged during downtime
- More options for gearing
- More end-game content outside of just raiding
The game would need content for these critical points to survive longterm.
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Going by Wowhead’s achievement tracker (might not be the best source, but a source) 4% of people have KSM for Shadowlands Season 1, and 12% had it for BFA’s final season (Season 4).
As a comparator, 8% of profiles have completed the 300 mount collection achievement, and 3% of have completed the 400 mount achievement.
So I’d say mount collection and M+ participation are on the same (relative) level.
35% of profiles have unlocked the achievement for completing 10 full raid tier sets, and 52% have unlocked the achievement for 100 appearances in each slot.
Again, not perfect, but worth considering.
I did say that way up when the argument started.
Um, what does transmog have to do with every race and class combination not having unique gear? And how is this relevant?
Obviously, there are huge differences between an online MMO and a Tabletop RPG. There is an open world, a fixed storyline, meeting strangers, pressing buttons to use abilities, a PvP system, etc. You can’t honestly tell me they play similarly. One can easily be a fan of one, but not the other.
True or not, that isn’t relevant.
That is a hilariously bad comparison. M+ seasons are fixed time periods. Mount achievements span an account’s entire lifetime. I have the 300 mount achievement without ever having made it a priority or setting out to consciously do it; I’ve just been playing this game long enough to get coincidentally.
The ongoing fight over comparing WoW to D&D is also a hilariously bad comparison, and I say that while half a dozen minis are sitting under my monitor as a reminder to paint them. While early video game RPGs were heavily derived from tabletop RPGs, the two forms have diverged drastically. Both having character stats and monsters to fight is a ridiculously shallow reading that completely ignores the actual core engagements of either game.
To say that most WoW players were drawn to it by D&D because they both have ability scores is absurd, and if my personal experiences are anything to go by, it’s D&D that owes its surge in popularity over the last few years to media like WoW, GoT, and especially Stranger Things popularizing fantasy in the mainstream.
So come up with a better one.
Both the 300 mount and 400 mount achieve require a reasonable amount of dedication to mount farming- you can’t get them passively given the number in game.
The fact remains that in the current SL season, less than 4% of the population has earned the KSM achievement. I have a hard time expanding that figure to the idea tossed around in this thread that M+ is critically important to a significant fraction of the playerbase.
Well, considering the portion of my post literally says “Going off of your examples…”, I was hoping that you would be savvy enough to recall your own post regarding transmogs. Since your memory fails currently, when you said…
…THAT made my comment relevant. In hindsight, it appears that you were trying to be flippant towards the OP, rather than genuinely curious, but all the same, the relevance comes back to you. So, I thought I’d chime in. You may go back and re–read the awesome with clearer eyes now!
Admittedly, I did miss where you were trying to outline a difference in gameplay. My apologies, but “you said it” kind of ineffectively. The OP was of the opinion that players were fans, and stated as much. You mistakenly took her statement to be a blanket truth, and could have ended this from the get-go with a simple ‘oops, my bad’ when she pointed it out. We’re all on the same page with M+.
Weirdly enough, I actually want to talk with you and a few others in this thread, about RPGs and how awesome they could be in an MMO.
Its really hard to know from the outside, but I do know a lot of people do Mythic Plus and without it they’d stop playing; I don’t know if you could say that about mount collection really.
What are you talking about here? I was referring to your statement that transmog was added because Blizzard didn’t design gear for every race and class initially. That’s a non sequitur. Transmog has nothing to do with making unique gear for every class and race?
No, I wanted to discuss, but the OP was snarky, and I snarked back. I gave examples in a sarcastic tone.
No, I just asked them where they got the idea that most MMO fans were also DnD fans, then someone else said MMO’s were just online versions of DnD, and the rest is history. It’s not a big deal.
I mean, it’s pretty easy to pretend M+ (or any other instanced activity) doesn’t exist, isn’t it?
You could have just asked this 
My reference to transmog was because you brought it up, my intention was to impose on you how vast customization in a pen and paper like D&D can be (as I’ve stated, my mistake was that I missed you were being snarky to the OP, as opposed to curious).
Finally, I was saying that transmog is solely a ‘WoW’ thing, and quite limited still. It wasn’t a review on ‘Unique Gear and the Races that Made Them’. You play the damn game, you know the limitations, this part can obviously go unspoken. There’s no such in other MMOs, and definitely not in pen and papers.
Again, I didn’t realize you were trying to be snarky to the OP. When you said you’d never played D&D, I went into chat mode. Sorry about that.
Um, I think you still don’t understand what I was trying to tell you. Just because I was being snarky doesn’t mean I wasn’t serious about the examples I used. I also was confused about the reasoning you gave for why Blizzard added transmog to the game.
I don’t think this argument needs to continue. I just wanted to clarify what I was saying.
Sure?
My friends list is empty and all of them have moved on to other games, largely because of how stagnant cosmetics have been. We’re in a second expansion with no class-specific tier gear, customizations have been frozen, heritage armor sets are half-finished… and a lot of people I play with were collectors, many among the top across multiple servers.
So you have people who would quit because of M+, I have a lot of people who are quitting because the RPG aspect is slowly leaving the game and who hate the M+ option with a passion.
Just like the whole guilds of people who left when 20m mythic replaced 10m heroic.
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I can’t say I would want NPC parties only but if it’s just an option I see no problem with it!