Serious question.
Are you actually not aware that it hasn’t failed and has more subs/activity than classic? Or are you just misspeaking and you mean that it failed…to keep YOU playing so now you play classic?
Serious question because I keep reading on the classic forums that retail failed…As if it doesn’t exist anymore or something.
It doesn’t.
Cata was the last WoW expansion. MoP is when Retail started and it’s when the game drifted away from being World of Warcraft. WoW hasn’t made a decent expansion in nearly a decade.
A game can still exist, continue to put out content and be failed or considered dead.
If an expansion losses over half it’s player base it’s a failed expansion. Doesn’t matter how many are still playing just the fact the majority left means it failed.
With that said SL killed WoW, Shadowlands, aka System Lands was a death blow to the franchise. It drove away millions of players, content creators to other games. (actual die hard WoW players finally left) One of the reasons Dragonflight is doing so bad is due to the damage the previous expansion did. Blizzard made their bed now they have to lay in it.
This is what happens when you put out terrible content and 
on the players for years. Retail isn’t salvageable at this point. They lost their vision and soul.
Retail absolutely has more players than classic does.
I disagree entirely. MoP was amazing and other than the change to the talent system there was very little that fundamentally made it different from Cata. While Cata was fundamentally far different from Wrath.
MoP is closer to Cata than Cata is to Wrath.
With that being said. I haven’t liked Retail since MoP ended/WoD began.
Retail is now being made for twitch streamers and whales, not for us plebs. Also its just not fun anymore.
I play them both… but with classic I have to “schedule” my play time. There just aren’t enough players to just hop on and start raiding on an alt 24/7 like you can on retail.
Also the requirements to get into any PUG raid in classic is soooo much higher.
I like them both equally, but retail is my go to when I have some unexpected free time, at a random time, and I want to quickly get into a raid on a random alt that isn’t well geared/hemmed/enchanted/max profession’d and just have some fun playing the game(which for me is 100% about raiding and a little dungeoning)
Trade skills/auction house/open world questing etc could not exist and I really wouldn’t care. That being said, I wouldn’t lobby to get rid of any that, as I respect other people’s enjoyment of those activities.
I think they mean that in their minds, retail failed them. They may or may not realize that they only speak for themselves.
You SAY that, but I’m not sure it’s just retail that is over influenced by streamers/whales. It seems like several classic decisions were based on riding that streamer attention train, with the most recent one devoting so many resources to the creation of hardcore mode classic.
I feel that retail isn’t over influenced by streamers as much as it is by theorycrafters and the top players. I feel the retail devs are truly dropping the ball by doing this because the goal should be to make the game more enjoyable for everyone. The influencers aren’t any more informed on what makes the game fun for the average player than…well… the average player. In fact their ideas often make the game LESS fun for average players.
It’s called an echo chamber for a reason.
Some of these people in the past have gone off wcl reporting. its all they have since we have no sub data since WoD.
A couple things about that.
Retail does not use wcl much, raider io is used. and not all use raider io. A true content to be normal only raider may not even need to install raider io.
The running joke about retail is Normal raid can be easier to run than LFR, if all 25 people have a few brain cells.
CLassic has padded wcl data. In tbcc they said look…3 times the raids of retail are run.
Yes, tbcc didn’t deprecate gear. People were still running BT up the end. SWP + BT + etc…padded wcl totals. retail no one ran CN after SoD dropped. Then season 3 no more SoD or CN runs.
And Gdkp. classic hammers out some extra wcl numbers from people going I don’t even need the raid. But its 7500g + off the pot split. Not turning this into one of those gdkp threads.
Its jsut a basic fact say even 10K people running gdkp are at least 10K logs extra per week on wcl. Per raid. They run 3 raids…that gets to 30K potentially.
You are spot on!
i find it funny that people who hate on retail aren’t even playing it, i dunno how they hate it something they have no idea about. fun fact is that if they played dragonflight they’ll find it more fun than classic in every aspect.
for me, Wotlk-C feels like a duty while dragonflight feels like pure enjoyment.
I’d be a SL then DF refugee.
its the wrath pvp. far from perfect, but to me better than retail.
and the story. retail has lost its way story wise for me. When one has to ignore the story its not good for a RPG (MMO or otherwise). wrath story while dated is better.
At some point we rerun everything. In wrath I get connections. My DK’s rush to server the ebon blade. retail? remove the story and I can pick up vampire survivors and enjoy it more. and I paid like $10 on sale when newer.
the link? remove story and retail becomes run around kill things facing rng on drops. No rhyme or reason. Just like vampire survivors lol. I am not sure why I am in the field killing hordes of undead. I just kill them till I die just works then. for $10? A very nice deal that.
No argument here that I have no idea what’s going on in vampire survivors, but I’ve played it so much that I’ve unlocked like 50% of the things.
Not sure if that’s my fault that I don’t care too much about the story or theirs, because admittedly, I’m just not too interested in a detailed complicated story at this point in my life.
Raid logs tell a tremendously different story.
Raid logs have never been accurate for population.
I raid on 6 characters in Classic. So I count as 6 different people on WCL.
And even if more people are raiding in Classic than they are in Retail; tons of people do M+ which does not show in that metric.
I like Classic and I don’t like Retail but I won’t try and say more people play Classic than Retail as that’s just not true.
Both versions of the game exist and neither is the threat to the other. Play what you like, and let others play what they like. Why is this so difficult?
I agree, but is anyone saying otherwise?
The topic is asking why people say “retail failed” as if it were true. That it has failed. Because it objectively hasn’t failed yet.
People play all kinds of garbage, doesn’t make it not a bad game.
Mkay but again that’s not the topic.
Bad game in your opinion doesn’t = failed.
I’d love to tell you that Nickelback failed, but I don’t say it because it isn’t true, even though they are bad.
Classic players do not say it has “failed.” It still has an audience and is profitable. It won’t “fail” until it can no longer bring in enough revenue to pay its bills. We simply do not like retail and don’t play it.
This thread however; it has definitely failed, at whatever it was trying to accomplish.
