Maybe - that’s a valid position to take but hard to prove - how do you determine the saturation point without assuming you have already hit it? I don’t think it was a saturation point - but again that’s hard to prove.
Vanilla and TBC didn’t have the attrition that Wrath had - though Wrath managed to not dip by having high amounts of new previously untapped players. Anecdotally, my guild had far more females in it during Wrath than during TBC and Vanilla. I suspect that Wrath had a wider audience (including wider gender appeal) than the previous iterations. It covered its losses with its gains. I don’t see that as saturation though. I would love it if there were numbers around gender participation. Currently I can just go on anecdote and my own suspicions. But your view is as valid as mine on this as there’s simply no evidence to draw on as to whether Wrath was market saturation point or not. I don’t think it was.
Blizzard at some point came out and said they’d looked at the total number of people who had played WoW compared to what they considered the total gamer market and virtually all of them had tried WoW at some point. At that point the potential for new players is only genuinely new gamers entering the market.
So while it was growing in vanilla and TBC it was easier to cover players leaving(which there were plenty of) but by wrath there was simply less players to market it to.
Market saturation plays a huge role in this as well, on top of the fact we waited soooooo loooooong for Cata to release while clearing ICC for the 50th time, and then Cata tripped at the finish line with its overtuned Heroics and disorienting changes to the entire world.
Somewhere in mid-expansion MoP I think everything got just perfectly pinned down, but that’s entirely personal experience and bias, plus I didn’t play past WoD so I never got to enjoy Legion which apparently a lot of folks really liked.
Legion was a fairly solid expansion in the new design style. The raids were pretty good even though I was only doing LFR at that point and there was actually a reasonable amount to do outside of raids.
And class halls were great, that’s how you do an expansion specific alternate advancement system correctly. In depth and class specific which added a lot of flavor, not the bland whack a mole generic get X points per week junk that they did in BFA and SL.
LOL. MUDs were the best - even to this day. I ran my own player kill mud for like 5 years before I handed the code to someone else. it’s still running to this day. Granted, instead of 200 concurrent players, it’s now like …20 lol.
The way I see it, WoW catered, in general to the players with disposable income. This meant that if you weren’t working or were 10 years old, it probably wasn’t made for you. I’d imagine it’d be anything from post college to pre - parent kids as the average.
When i decided to come back and and play Classic Vanilla - just so I could see the low level dungeons and level to 60, i did so not having played Retail to any significant degree. I thought Retail was all easy mode. But it wasn’t until I hung around a bit when I realized, that there’s a small bit of Retail that was relatively difficult - if you wanted to “beat” the game. Mythic or whatever they call it. The rest of it was for the more casual.
After learning this, that’s when I realized that in general, the majority of what people really want is to zug zug, beat the game, then go on and be able to do other things. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I also realized that’s why Retail became Retail. Blizzard tried to make everyone happy.
Frankly I was one of “those” raider types. And it’s obvious that the raiding community was a small percentage of the original Vanilla community. But I do wonder if what Blizzard assumed was correct - that everyone wants to raid. I actually think they were. Where they messed up was that they assumed that just seeing the raid was enough, and not being able to “beat” without any sort of time investment was ok.
There was some sense of smug satisfaction that I got seeing guilds fall apart when Naxx Classic dropped - even after 15 years of prep. That, I’m not going to lie. But seeing that lack of adaptability people had was equally as disappointing. You’re probably right. An experience like that may not be what your average player wants. It was also clear with the stigma that being a 8/10 guild had and the frustration it caused.
Heh… far more people cleared Naxx in classic than they did in vanilla. And there tons of guilds that fell apart on much easier content in vanilla. So yeah…
The biggest flaws in Wrath show up in the second half of the expansion, although T7 also suffers from a rather lazy copy/paste Naxx raid. I appreciate the idea of bringing Naxx back as the starter raid since so few people experienced it back in Vanilla but there should have been another big raid on its heels like how in TBC folks could move straight on to T5 when they were done with T4.
Wrath’s biggest flaw was the LFD patch. Chain gunning 5 mans with people you’d never see again and the laziest raid of all time in TotC where our “content” was clearing the same 5 bosses 4 times a week. Not to mention how even on 10 man normal that raid gave such good loot that there was no purpose in running Ulduar anymore for anyone not trying to finish out the legendary.
From that moment on, the expectation was established that all that mattered in WoW was the latest content, and the game took its first step to becoming a lobby based game where we’re all just waiting on our queues to pop.
WotLK really is a fascinating combination of so much good and some real bad over its 2 year run. It’s still probably my second or third favorite time playing in WoW’s history, with original Vanilla and MoP being the other contenders.