WoW bled subs like crazy back in vanilla-wrath, it just had a HUGE supply of new players coming in.
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pvp was more fun. the physical layout of the expansion was better. you didnt have pathfinder bs. Arthas is a HUGE part of warcraft lore. the raids were better. thats my opinion.
There’s no data to confirm that other than word of mouth.
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this is a very technically deep issue. you have to look, not only at wrath itself, but also what came immediately before it, immediately after it, what was happening in the rest of the market, the state of the global economy before and after wrath, and about a thousand other individual pieces of note. for example -
tbc preceeded it and was the impetus that propelled it forward. tbc was the key to the whole thing. however, its meteoric rise was cut short, when the global economy crashed, and it has been a downhill slide ever since.
At the end of MoP wow had 100 million accounts created. Even if we try to say that was evenly divided (20 million an expansion) which of course isn’t true, most of those 100million were probably created during wow’s heyday, that means that by the time wrath was over there would have been 60 milion created acounts, which means for 12 million active subscribers, 48 million had quit.
And again, this is probably a lot higher because more people were coming in vanilla-wrath than Cata and mop
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The fact that so many equate wotlk with WoW’s success shows that I don’t think many here seem to know how to read graphs properly if you think Wrath contributed the most to the rise of subs.
From the release date of Wotlk in 2008 at 11.5m subs to nearing its end at 12m in 2010. Wotlk only saw a growth of 500k subs.
Burning Crusade appears to be the biggest contributor to sub growth between its release date and the end of the expansion of around 3.5m subs or so.
The greatest growth of subs was seen from the start of WoW to the very start of Wotlk which means Vanilla and BC were the greatest contributors to WoW’s sub growth and success.
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You’re right, but a lot of the raid badges were also very easy to get.
I don’t think I knew anyone who didn’t do VoA every week (RIP to those on horribly-balanced servers though), Ruby Sanctum was also incredibly short, and you could do them on both raid sizes and get their badge reward a second time. Most of the time the weekly quest wanted you to kill Malygos, someone in Naxxramas, or one of the first bosses of Ulduar, which were all trivial at that point.
They were super easy to find groups for and knock out in like 2 hours if you played during the afternoon. The difference between getting 14 badges and 33 badges per week really wasn’t that much, unless you played on a dead server.
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That may have partially been due to China not allowing Wrath to be released until like 2 years later.
Accounts created is not a very useful data point. Anyone can create an account and not use it, or create multiple accounts.
Back in the day you needed a code to create a trial account, you can’t just dismiss things because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
WoW was extremely popular in vanilla-wrath, but it also had a lot of people quitting, hell, half my raid team quit between vanilla and TBC launch because of the changes TBC was bringing. And many people HATED how casual Wrath made wow.
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agreed. that was my take on it as well. then it started to do the downhill slide when the global economy crashed in 2008, as a result of the housing bubble burst. during that event, the usa went from over 90 different banks, to 4. alot of people’s life savings went with it. jobs were lost all over the world. the only industry that seemed to be surviving were game companies who used loot box type financing and free to play costs. even wow joined this by creating more and more shop items. people with jobs would buy. people without jobs could buy tokens for game currency and play for free. the economy made a huge difference in the evolution of wow.
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You’re drawing a conclusion from a misleading sample size. You’re running on the notion that because such accounts were created but are unused, it means there were waves of players coming in, playing through most of the content of their respective expansions, and then leaving. And then even more players were coming in than there were leaving in order for the sub count to trend up. That’s just faulty.
Maybe you and people you know didn’t like Wrath, but no matter how you spin it, it was successful because it was just that good of an expansion.
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It’s not that complicated. Wrath was just more fun. The classes were a blast to play, creating/gearing alts was easy, amazing raids which included 10 mans, and no lame systems upon systems.
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And you’re dismissing data because it didn’t fit your agenda.
Notice I never said wrath was bad, i said it was good, it’s one of my favorite, next to mop and legion. But yes, i’m sure that 48 million people created accounts and never used them.
the game lost something when a clear path of progression and success was muddled up in too many RNG and overly complex systems
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oh and 1 other thing…the old style talent trees were better design imo
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If that were the problem it wouldn’t have lost most of the subs and new players in cata/mop/wod when there wasn’t all those systems.
okay but opinions
and i do include all the confusion with how they messed up with raid groups and adding another raid difficulty
Groovy. In the meantime, I’ve been in game publishing for 25 years and I can tell you for a fact that game sales go up during recessions. They went up in the post-9/11 recession, they went up in the 2008 recession, and they’re up right now. So I dunno what the guys at Auburn are up to, but everybody who actually works in the game industry knows that game sales go up when unemployment does.
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Can sort of agree with you there,
Nostalgia is a “once lived moment” of your own Golden era in which it was “gifted” to have lived through it and worth remembering, yet to some it leaves people enfeebled with yearning for it and cannot cope much with the present let alone deny the future of WoW and so forth,
The past is best left for worth remembering and being “honoured” to have experienced and lived through it,
It is something the modern MMO gamer of this age cannot come to understand yet we cannot condemn them for it either,
Nostalgia happens in those rare occasions where you personally & most of the community experiences it alike and its profoundly joyful to embrace its beauty of it, and that’s a good thing,
To re-connect back with the past it does no good at all,
Nostalgia is a great memory in my honest opinion, not a poison, though I can understand your view in it