That’s exactly why they stopped publishing the sub counts 
they don’t care about the truth.
But it was genuinely impressive watching them lose millions of subs in WoD and refuse to fix the situation. At least in Cata they addressed the problems eventually.
It was impressive going from Ion saying, ‘No flying in WoD!’ to ‘ok, we’re bringing it back’ like a week later. Someone got a talking to.
The game’s been going on for nearly 20 years. Are there any other games that are that old and still kicking as well?
Well and then bringing it back in a super passive aggressive way that they’ve persisted to date.
Why I’m still not that excited for RDF. Blizz has a history of being resentful of players not going along with their wishes and ‘punishing’ them out of spite by sabotaging systems.
It’s not.
Why would they publish a drop from 10 million to 5 million in a single quarter? If your conspiracy theory held any merit, they never would have published such a devastating drop in the first place.
Umm… yeah no duh, why would they keep publishing sub counts when they show a massive drop?
That’s obviously a huge embarrassment.
I mean, technically “retail” has started with EVERY current expansion.
But I see what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to establish roots, which is absolutely fair game. But by THAT standard, WotLK would be the origin point.
Much of what drives modern design principles in retail IS WotLK designs that have naturally been iterated on!
Cata, ironically, was the expansion that TRIED to curb things back towards some TBC/Vanilla era traits BUT those were the things the majority of players hated. Harder raids and bigger jumps from lower to higher content was perhaps THE most “classic” experience we could go back to and THAT marked the peak and decline of WoW, outliers removed.
While people like to point to MoP or WoD for such roots, those people also miss the systems and designs in place as of WotLK when looking through their rose glasses!
The reality is that “retail” is ever really a snapshot of “current” WoW, but the “middle” and “modern” WoW eras are what you’re lumping here.
If we grouped expacs based on count, then we could lump Cata in with “Classic” and start the mid era with MoP BUT that still means the early WoW era made up LESS of “what WoW has been” than the majority of expacs.
Cata is also an outlier among the first three end games, as it was more iterative and loose than WoTLK which was already the grandfather of retail; Cata probably shouldn’t even be lumped with the Classic Era of WoW, and more accurately marks the middle era’s start in terms of design AND systems iteration!
If we go with JUST design? That’s WotLK.
If we go with JUST systems? Then MoP had the bigger jump BUT because of the design, which started in WotLK.
Either way you slice it, Cata was the biggest departure from a given era of WoW any given expac has seen, until Shadowlands. With the exception of SL, basically EVERY expac since Cata had smaller bits of iterative designs specifically to address problems of the expac before it.
Much of those problems also date back to…WotLK!
WotLK addressed Vanilla and TBC design issues but sprung up others as it did. And that’s just the nature of iterative designs in a seasonal model of play.
Thus, the point at which the “retail” mindset of iteration begins is the point at which it was first incurred; WotLK
Are you not able to comprehend what I just wrote? Why would they PUBLISH the 5 million drop in one quarter in the first place?
You are literally answering your own question, no freaking duh they don’t want to keep publishing numbers that only make them look bad.
Ziryus, this is sad.
You’re claiming they stopped publishing numbers because the subs dropped really low. They published the drop of 5 million subs in a single quarter. Why would they publish that drop in the first place? Why would they publish it if that was the reason they stopped publishing subs?
Are you not able to understand what I’m saying?
Different people will have very different answers.
Are you unable to understand that that’s exactly why they stopped?
Unless you are claiming retail WoW is back to 12million subs or have at least gained subs since then.
They saw the drop and stopped reporting it after once they saw the feedback from it. It’s not like even 1M subs would be a bad thing technically for a business.
Ziryus, I don’t think this conversation is going anywhere because you can’t understand simple concepts like how to properly gem your gear. I don’t think I can help you understand why it would be illogical to think that Blizzard would stop reporting subs because of a huge drop in subscriptions… that they reported.
lol
They have a lot more than 1 million subs right now.
And you realize their subs kept dropping after that right? Is that confusing you?
You don’t even know how to use the +10 stat gem. I’m not going to discuss something slightly more complicated with you.
They had a strong pushback from releasing that information. It’s obvious they would change it then. Even if it drops and even if it was 1M it would still make a lot of money.
I don’t really care to try to estimate, but the funny thing is no one can prove it.
/shrug you don’t understand why a company would not want to continue posting a stat that can only embarrass them, but i’m sure you are an expert at gemming 
Well it’s almost certainly lower than the last time they posted it, we just don’t know how much lower.
Since you know too embarrassed to publish it.