Where is everyone?

Community General Discussion
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I was looking at Mythic plus data on Raider IO and raid rankings and noticed something.

In the US alone, which is a huge chunk of the millions that play WoW, only 350,000+ characters have completed all +2s at least two months into the season now with 11.1.5 releasing next week (Characters tracked not accounts and the number drops the higher you go). And this is tracking percentage of players that have completed keys as rankings on the leaderboard. Looking at guilds there are 14,000+ guilds that have completed any boss on Normal AND Heroic at this point (during BfA and SL this number was perhaps up to 3x this by the end of a season). Assuming all guilds have on average 20 players in every single one that are active and raiding that is 280k players. With it being very likely that a good portion of those players doing M+/raiding but not engaging in both, say 50% of either, that puts the population at maybe 300k-400k participating actively at least at the lowest level in endgame in WoW.

They canā€™t be all pvpā€™ing as thatā€™s probably the smallest number of players.

So yes this is only the NA, but if there are millions of players in the world and assuming EU that has the next largest segment is fairly similar, then where are the other several million players? What are they doing? Do most just do at most LFR, Delves, and max level dungeons or other things? Is endgame participation super low?

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Two obvious answersā€¦and its probably a combination of the two

  1. Delves have made it so casual players no longer need to do M+ to gear
  2. The M+ redesign has made it unappealing to casual players
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  1. Thereā€™s simply less people playing the game to begin with is also probably a contributing factor.

I know iā€™ve noticed a marked reduction in player popluation since BfA.

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Things do seem quiet of late, my guild is super small as it is, but a handful of the core people that are usually around most days are just MIA for weeks at a time. I spoke to some of them about it and they said they didnā€™t like the new zone, especially the DRIVE stuff and how the reps are set up :woman_shrugging:

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They havenā€™t existed in years lol.

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I mean I guess in the NA alone it is possible that the entire population is maybe 1 to 2 million at most I guess, so if 2 million at best then perhaps only 30%-40% raid and/or M+ maybe idk. Still makes me wonder what the rest do.

Yeah but in a more recent chart from DF Bellular estimated thereā€™s still up to 7 million playing WoW.

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Made up nonsense. Dude said later there were like 500k playing retail.

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Does Classic have most of the population cause I didnā€™t factor that in?

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Probably the same thing I do. Fluff around with professions, cosmetic farming, alts, and the last few sociable people in goldshire before it too eventually becomes a ghost town.

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Youā€™d need to actually do all the dungeons and time them on 2s in order to fall into that demographic, making it a horrible and disengenuous metric to go off of.

Its like saying the only Mythic raiding guilds are the ones that obtain CE

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Everyone is waiting for MoP classic. Retail is the waiting room!

:+1:

:surfing_woman: :surfing_man:

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Well the whole point in doing M+ is time all keys to get KSM at least. You can look at KSM or KSH if you want to see the numbers too, or the KSC title. And then thereā€™s of course filling your vault with all 8 keys.

Iā€™m either tired and misunderstanding or this sounds nonsensical to me. I mean I ā€˜guessā€™ you can pug CE maybe but how many complete the raid in full or just invite someone to do the last boss. And how many even pay for the carry for CE? Probably a very very tiny percent right?

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This. Your mistake is overestimating WoWā€™s playerbase. This game doesnā€™t have ā€œmillionsā€ anymore. Maybe a million? Iā€™d be shocked if the game even had 2 million players to technically qualify for the plural form.

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Itā€™s this one.

M+ actually isnā€™t that bad rn, itā€™s the toxicity that I avoid. I literally never pug anymore

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Eh not really. Point being, the numbers youre pulling are skewed and incomplete.

Like looking at guilds who have touched a raid boss when theres thousands of players out there pugging it

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I was one of the folks that left for a bit when Undermine patch came out, was busy playing MH Wilds.

They both came out in the same week, if I recall.

Iā€™m sure thousands of others were doing the same, lol.

Wilds is kinda short though, so I came back here once I finished that game.

And I donā€™t raid or M+, all I really do in WoW anymore is PvP casually, and world content.

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Well I guess you could look at those who only log in to do one 8 and then log off too, but yeah.

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And why wouldnā€™t we count those people? Is the entire point of your post concerning overall engagement ?

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Thatā€™s by design. They want endgame to be more exclusive, so they keep designing it to drive people away from it. Pixels are only cool if no one else has them.

Itā€™s gonna take a while for the game to rebound from the damage season 1 did. Not to mention goblin theme patch is super polarizing too.

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By making each season easier than the previous? Makes sense

Nope. S2 follows the same trend following S1 as past expansions (better than DF actually)

QFT

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