They say that, because they wanna justify their decission to commit to a 15 years old game again.
Its a fomo on steroids.
Retailed failed misserably.
- Blizz does not report sub numbers because it went down dramatically so retailed failed.
- Went from individual servers to CRZ because population went down since CATA release. Retail is a failure.
- Blizz brought back classic because their numbers are going down so much because of their failure PERIOD.
- I can go on and on but I will stop here.
the truth is, we failed retail.
We’ve been the failure all along?
it failed because the game’s popularity was on a sharp incline, which was projected to keep rising, and then came to a screeching halt when they started implementing bad features in Wrath of the Casual King. Now the game’s player base is a small portion of what it used to be, as well as what it could have been. That’s dropping the ball pretty damn hard. It’s tough to call that a success.
I think I stated this before (but with 322 replies I’m not looking) but I think retail is a fail because it has gotten way to stupid in trying to be all things to everyone. Too many factions, too many one-off stories, too many currencies, too many “let’s throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks” tricks.
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Fake metric. Sure it bolsters your defensiveness about a failed game, but that’s not the point. The point is that you are even needing to fall back on that metric, that there has been a huge abandonment of retail for classic for very real reasons.
It came to a screeching halt due to the playerbase aging and the market becoming more and more saturated. WotLK numbers stopped any meaningful increase way before the dreaded RDF got released, pointing towards 12mil as the upper cap, that’s just how many people would be ever interested in playing the game. Then it fell down due to people getting older, losing interest, alternatives more suiting their tastes and so on.
Next on, retail is a much faster paced and complex game than Vanilla-TBC-WotLK and oldheads simply wash out, unable to keep up even with the button presses and, in pre-Dragonflight expansions, also the time commitment required to keep your characters up to date. For those people Retail offers more casual experience, but it hurts their pride too much because back in 2008 or whatever they were “good” and now they can’t keep up with high end content.
WoW also lost the appeal it had with younger audience simply because they have alternatives which cater to them better and nobody has to stay logged in a game to communicate with friends.
Meanwhile WotLKC, a very simplistic raid logging simulator, is populated by old people as this is what they remember and what they can keep up with, both gameplay wise and time commitment wise. Many of them aren’t used to software like Discord too.
For me Retail is not the WoW I loved. so yes it failed if the criterion of success is to keep us happy and playing. I never phrased it like this before, but you asked.
I gotta be blunt. This is an idiotic interpretation of events.
Just no. Every single year that passes, there are more and more people entering into the pool of potential players. More than leave it. FFS, aging playerbase? The game had only been out for like 5-6 years during Wrath. Someone who started playing Vanilla on release when they were 21 would only have been 26, lol. I have no idea how you settled on this explaining how the game drastically shifted from being on a steep incline to a complete flat line over the span of a single year.
You’re right, that’s because WotLK changed the way the game functioned, and it wasn’t good. That’s why numbers stopped shooting up early on.
If Blizzard had not done the following things, then WotLK would have seen a player increase that matched vanilla and TBC.
- They should have stuck with one raid size/difficulty. Two or three raids that are 10 man only, and five or six raids that are 25 man only.
- They should not have expanded the availability of welfare epics.
- They should not have allowed such a large gap in power between tier 7 and tier 10.
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The numbers were steadily rising from TBC throughout WotLK until it settled at 12 million and stopped there. Which means the same amount of players came in that left, which means that’s p much as many people as would ever play the game at that point in time.
If Blizzard had not done the following things, the aging Vanilla pop would stop playing and nobody “new” would pick up the game, as at this point there are competitors and the players shifted from accepting drawn out time wasting garbage like Vanilla or EverQuest to actually respecting their time.
WotLKC being populated mostly by oldheads is a fact, I am the youngest person in my Classic guild and everyone else is just 28+, same goes for other guilds I know some people from.
My Dragonflight guild is only slightly “better” which points to aging playerbase and people having commitments which prevent them from playing the game as they did in whatever fabled days of yore you might be thinking were good.
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Correct analysis but something you can’t say otherwise all the raging boomers will come at you. Not to mention, 2010 was the year League of Legends released, the game that is still the most populated game out there. League had a major impact in WoWs population at that time. We used to have a very healthy pvp side in our guild and I remember people saying “nah im gone, wow is too expensive, league is free and better pvp”
Because Retail is garbage and not a good mmorpg.
It’s an action game played through menus and interface panels.
IF there is more or less players on Retai than there is in Classic, i don’t know.
But we can’t deny we see far more Player “Activity” on Classic servers than we see on Retail.
In classic we actually see people wandering around, doing things, having a chat, you know, mmorpg stuff.
In retail, all we see is bots Advertising boosts or selling gold and people afk in player hubs waiting some random queue.
Retail just don’t feel like Warcraft anymore.
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where in classic is that? i play on hm 5x different servers and i never seen people chatting in /say anywhere, never seen them chatting in dungeons, never seen people wandering around doing things…it’s just bots farming things in the world 24/7
classic have more bots in the open world/in dungeons/in bg’s, classic have more boosts for selling items via gdkp’s and even on 3rd party sites classic have much more advertisement for selling all type of service including gold.
in 2023 both retail & classic are total failure
Classic is an immersive rpg.
Retail is an interactive calculator built as an e-sport.
Sadly, Blizz is turning Classic into Retail. Wrath Classic was a huge step in that direction.
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It has nothing to do with it being 2023, same thing happened back in the day. There’s always been very little to do at max level in the open world.
The only reason vanilla seemed more populated for longer was because the game was still massively growing early on vs classic that had all of it’s population front loaded.
No? Wrath Classic has nothing to do except raidlogging and buy gold. Activision Blizzard did everything possible to increase player activity (MAU).
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How to say you don’t play retail without saying you don’t play retail. People do even “old” events such as the Dragonbane Keep siege, usually there’s someone doing the WQ you feel like doing and more recent events are pretty much alive all the time except maybe for Suffusion Camps as those kinda suck. Maybe they’re all bots, who knows. The point is that compared to WoTLKC or TBCC it’s a completely different experience.
Classic maybe at one time was that. Currently since the playerbase moved on it’s more metagamey than Retail is unless you’re actually pushing for top 100 or more.
The year is 2023.
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I disagree with this. Mapping out zones with cliffs and trolling terrain is purposefully wasting the player’s time. Systems on top of systems is wasting the player’s time. Requiring ground mounts and placing numerous packs of mobs everywhere is wasting the player’s time. Playing WoW is, by definition, wasting time, but is that time spent having fun or does it feel like a chore?
There has always been a certain amount of tedium, but it became excessive. There was a lot to do, but it was plodding and repetitive. Optional content became mandatory for you to progress. For instance, when the Argent Tournament opened, your character lost nothing by totally skipping it. And if you did choose to do the content there, you certainly weren’t required to use your ground mount. Torghast anyone? And Torghast wasn’t the only problem. Wasting time doing tedious, repetitive chores became the design.
As Massively Overpowered puts it: "The first problem that Torghast has is [something that I’ve touched upon before: It’s mandatory. If you want to get legendary items, you have to do Torghast. Not “if you want the best item for this particular spec,” either. The content is not optional, and it’s part of a larger problem that WoW has had for a while where nothing gets to be optional.
". . . One of the fastest ways to get someone to dislike something is to make it mandatory. "
Instead of being creative and innovative, Blizzard took the easy way out with crap like this. And mandatory, tedious, unfun content is exactly the opposite of respecting a player’s time.
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