Everything from Vanilla to Dragonflight is World of Warcraft. Then there’s when WoW was actually a compelling MMORPG with solid lore, most of which ended about halfway through Wrath with the lore holding on to patch 4.0.
That’s not to say everything from Cata onwards was unplayable garbage (although I would not begrudge anyone holding that opinion) but it just wasn’t as good as what came before it and sub numbers seem to agree with this.
As far as where the “real classic” train ends its with Wrath. WoW owes its world and its lore to the RTS games which ended on a cliffhangar around Arthas whose storyline was concluded (and thus the main narrative arc of the Warcraft games) inside the expansion named after him.
Cata literally wiped most of that away with sweeping changes to the game world and totally revamped leveling experience etc etc etc. Its the most obvious and sensical cut off point, assuming you really feel like you need to make that distinction.
I get that math is hard for some people and instead of considering the complexity of the number of factors that should be considered you’re only able to come up with an insult.
The sub numbers have been linked on this forum at least a dozen times so all you’re proving now is you’re not able to read a graph. Subs reached 11.5 million for the pre-patch of wrath and flat lined at 11.5 million. Subs went to 12 million for the pre-patch for cata. While cata dropped for a short time to 9.1 million at the end for 1 year 9 months it had more than 10 million subs. I get that your mind is incapable of understanding math that is more complex than just a high point and a low point but the average sub count for the whole two years was 10 million subs.
But even the average number of subs for each expansion doesn’t tell the whole story. Blizzard has told us that there were several times as many unique players as the number of subs because many players played for a while and then quit. There has always been churn with players quitting and new players starting. A significant amount of lost subs during cata may have been caused by a similar amount of established players leaving without the large number of new players. Growth stopped with wrath with new players equaling the number of players quitting.
I’m not posting this for you. You’ve made it clear you lack the ability to understand this level of math. But I’m sure some people here can do math and understand what I’m talking about.
Main reason why the story isn’t as good anymore is because Classic to WotLK, especially WotLK ended the story to WC3, something most people who were playing at the time were invested in. The problem with post WotLK lore is that they introduce the villan in that expansion then proceed to kill them by the end of it.
The only character (that I can think of) that’s solely a WoW one, was actually like and made into a raid boss was Garrosh because he had TBC > MoP to build his lore and character. I guess there was also Illidan in Legion (though he’s a WC character) but the point is that Blizzard keeps killing villans within the expansion they’re introduced not giving them time to flourish, they’d rather move onto the next big bad.
It seems that they’re moving away from this with the World Soul Saga being an actual trilogy so hopefully the storyside of the War Within and the other two expansions are better than what they’ve recently released.
Do you think there’s a possibility there will be alternate timelines? Don’t you think that’s such a cool idea? Lol.
Think about it. You have an OG timeline that goes to retail and then you have an alternate timeline that follows a different set of events that is revealed based on fan input and you can switch between the two. Wouldn’t it be cool if the two stories somehow intertwined? Cool stuff!
No it didn’t. Cataclysm’s sub count gradually decreased throughout the course of the expansion, and it still retained more players than both MoP and WoD.
It was actually back at 10 million when MoP launched. Fell again and back to 10 million when WoD launched. Then it fell off a cliff and they stopped posting sub numbers.
And none of this has anything to do with Cata Classic.