You’ve all seen that popular clickbait video lately about how WoW lost 50% of its player. It sounds almost like the title of a post apocalyptic game, but does the amount of subscribed players really have an impact on your ingame experience? Do you really notice the difference between 10 million subscribers, 5 million, or 2 million? The answer is no. You don’t… and never will.
The game uses AI controlled cross-realm sharding that automatically adjusts map instances based on how many concurrent players are online at that time. It’s simply resource efficient and prevents “dead-realm” syndrome that plagued a part of the games history. We also have automatic queuing tools for raids, dungeons, and PvP activities. Also, the LFG tool is populated nearly 24/7 with people looking to do M+, raids, quests, Torghast, and PvP. (And no: I’m not memeing about the boosters)
With raiding there’s a near endless supply of guilds for you to apply too (I’m talking 100s on both factions). I’ve been in 3 guilds since I came back in 8.3 and it took me minimal effort to actually find a new guild (less than 1 day for 2 of them).
To me it just felt crazy how diverse guilds are though. You had CE, AOTC, 2 day, 3 day, 4 day, late night, morning, etc. guilds to choose from. I’m personally more a 2 day casual CE player because I don’t want to burn myself out because I knew how rough it was doing 4 day during BC/WOTLK.
When does subscriber and population counts really matter? The term is called going “critical mass” and that’s when a multiplayer game has reached a low enough population that multiplayer activities can no longer function. Instead of waiting 5 minutes it would be 5 hours to do certain game activities. Usually when a game has reached this point is when they’re shut down.
I notice that nobody I enjoyed playing with was logging in anymore, so I stopped logging in, too. Feels incredibly bad in an expansion where the only rewarding PVE experience comes from premade group content.
Wouldn’t really matter as much to me if there was enough interesting things to do by myself or that I could just queue into and feel rewarded. But it would still matter some.
I don’t really care about sub numbers, but they do help me feel like I’m not alone with this experience, and that’s humbling in a way.
Less groups listed in the LFG raid and m+ queues = less options, availability and opportunity for grouping
less people online means waaay fewer people playing at non-prime hours as they were less common to begin with (my prime play time)
less groups forming leads to everyone clamoring into the few that do exist which increases competition for spots which means I’ll never be playing dps and I’ll never be able to group my alts into anything (and yes I do leaf my own pugs, but it’s not always my 1st choice)
the time it takes to do anything is damn near doubled since there are far fewer tanks and healers than before. 30min healer m+ search? Yea I’m sure that group is starting the run off happy… Leading to less patient and more easily frustrated teammates.
less mats being farmed mean prices for materials increase as the supply dwindles
less people means less effort put in, yields less people multi-spec playing, less flexibility.
7);Half the game pop gone means half the guilds are also broken, crushing communities that have existed for decades.
I could go on and on but I’d beging just repeating myself
Yeah, the sub numbers don’t matter…until you don’t see players in zones anymore.
Yeah, the sub numbers don’t matter…until your friends list is all greyed-out.
Yeah, the sub numbers don’t matter…until you spend forever waiting for Timewalking to queue.
Yeah, the sub numbers don’t matter…then why did Blizzard stop reporting them?
Yeah, the sub numbers don’t matter…until guilds start falling apart.
All of these things have already happened on my realm Caithyra. There’s just 1 guild recruiting nowadays, because they’ve all fallen apart due to people who’ve left. Those who want to continue raiding have merged with this one guild now. I remember back in the day when IF was so full of players, it was the place to hang out back then. Today it’s a ghost town.
Keep telling yourself that the subscriber count doesn’t matter. It’s fun to be delusional I guess.
I personally stopped playing video game with a “I’m playing with a group of friends” because 99% of the time they stop playing. I’d literally buy a game, we’d play for 2-3 weeks, and then all of a sudden they’re on-to the next game leaving me sitting there already half-invested into something. So now I only buy and play games that I play solo… and if playing with others grants me benefits, that’s great.
Yeah. I couldn’t care less about how many people are in a shard with me, as far as I’m concerned the fewer people stealing my quest objectives the better. But sometimes I feel like I want to do raiding, and I don’t really want to torture myself with another round of PUGs.
I played on a low pop server for 8 months and outside of it being hard as heck to find legendary crafters, it’s not any different experience that playing on high pop servers.
Well, power to you for finding something fun to do in this expansion solo. I couldn’t find it, personally. I’ve been primarily a solo player since vanilla and raided, occasionally doing things like dungeons on the side until LFG, then I did mostly LFG.
Again. Maybe people leaving wouldn’t matter so much to me if 1) they weren’t people I enjoyed playing with and 2) the game had any sort of solo progression experience that I enjoyed. But it doesn’t.
People not playing this game isn’t the problem with WoW right now. The rest of the problems with WoW right now are just why people aren’t logging in as much as they used to.