It’s terrible.
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Looks at the vault and M+. Looks back.
Your only raid achievement is an Aotc is from the first raid of Dragonflight. xd
Talents trees have been hit or miss.
Class design is horribly bloated with some specs having up to 4 different procs (looking at you shadow priest)
Healing is in an horrible situation.
Class balance with augmentation evoker became a meme.
The only big winning point is “not having” something like an AP grind. I wouldn’t call that the greatest victory.
Gearing is so quick and irrelevant that for 10.2 they want to make the difference 39 ilvl instead of 26 because people are gearing too fast.
But the biggest weakness of the expansion is just not having any hype factor, the lore is kinda dead and unexciting. Scalies have been a miss. Whoever wants to praise Zaralek Caverns I want what they’re having.
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When subs dropped so badly and so hard for 2 xpacs in a row that they stopped publicizing their number of subs, that was when retail failed.
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They make more from micro-transactions than from subs. That’s their focus.
Indeed but what good MTX companies realize is the larger your userbase the more chance you have to reel in a whale.
Ok, how do they expand the playerbase?
Not going to say the opposite, but I was curious the other day, and there are 2X the amount of logs from TOGC heroic than the retail raid Mythic+Heroic together.
There are 1 075 071 logs for TOGC 25 man heroic.
45,781 logs for Mythic Aberrus
287,404 logs for Heroic Aberrus.
You can fact check that on warcraftlogs if you want. it’s 3X the amount of raiders. I could add normal and not even come close but I suspect normal raids aren’t logging much.
The difference is that in retail, there are other stuff to do than raiding, but we all pay the same sub and have the same games…
I was surprised when I saw that, was not expecting Classic to be this huge. I suspect we’ll see a drop in ICC because it’s harder, but still.
So maybe retail has more player, but Classic has more raiders, and classic has double of coverage than retail in Google Trends.
So what does this say? People enjoy the game the way it was before any xpac more than any xpac after. I invite you to watch this video, it sums up a lot of the issues with retail going forward and why going backward might be the way to go:
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I quit playing wow around the middle of BFA and went to vanilla classic a few months later. Everyone I played with in classic said the same thing all the way through vanilla and tbc classic. “retail is dead”. I heard it so much I just assumed all of retail was 3 people standing in org exchanging insults and that was the entirety of wow now. I jumped off the nostalgia train at the end of tbc and went back to retail at the very end of shadowlands and I was very surprised to see retail is far from dead. They also made a ton of amazing improvements to retail at the end of shadowlands. So this whole notion classic players have that retail is dead is incorrect. It’s very active and, from someone who has played since vanilla, this expansion is one of the top expansions wows ever done.
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You mean they just didn’t make a toxic mess of an expansion like Shadowlands or BFA were? DF is pretty much the minimum you should expect from Blizzard.
People like to dramatize it both way. While it will probably never die, we all know the game is in a downward trend.
So much that they had to put crossfaction in because Alliance couldn’t find enough groups for content.
With a small amount of 5 Aotc for all that time and 3M+ seasons achievements.
Wrath is dead last… its classic era, retail then wrath. Wrath like we thought was trash
Why would I play retail over any other modern MMO?
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The most accurate way we have of determining which game is more popular is to look at addon downloads between versions released on the same day. Let’s look at Auctionator:
It’s not perfect because the modern AH on Retail means there is less reason to use an addon like Auctionator. Logs aren’t more accurate, nothing I can find is. If there’s more people downloading addons for Retail, that’s likely because there’s more people playing Retail.
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Finally somone with compelling evidence. Thanks for using data and not “muh feelings” i agree looking at addon downloads is probably a better indication then raid logs. Bc well in order to play retail you need 10 addons
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I would actually look at DBM download for each version as a decent estimate
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That’s actually the main reason nobody who’s not into in-depth market playing downloads ah addons anymore.
In WotLKC I need ah addons for basic qol and functionality, in Dragonflight I just don’t.
There’s also no “real” addon to check, as people might use either DBM or BigWigs, but a LOT of Retail players don’t bother with either and use some Weakauras instead.
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I’m wondering what the guy who said WOTLK is dead smoked… never seen so much hype for ICC.
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Keep in mind too that people like me download all of them at the same time… not that it matters much, but people might get confused and think that each number for each game is an individual person who isn’t playing the other game, but that might not be accurate either.
The fact that Retail still exists and is going strong is proof that anyone making this claim has no clue what they’re talking about.
I prefer Classic over Retail… but I do appreciate and recognize the achievements that Retail has made.
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Losing millions of customers to the point blizzard is too ashamed to even publish sub counts was quite an achievement.
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That’s not why they stopped publishing the numbers but you don’t care about the truth.