On IF.Pro if you chart the playerbase for Classic you can look back up to 1-2 years and see this steady rise in players from Vanilla to TBC, it ended up peaking and averaging around 300-350k consistently which is incredibly good for a 15 year old MMO reboot.
But if you check the chart for the last 30 days alone, we dropped almost half of our playerbase during a time where Wrath is being advertised and we have a Pre-patch going on and even with a 50% XP Buff AND people running more raids than before to gear up we have lost an insane amount of people.
My guess is that:
Long server queues with no viable solutions
Changing Original Wrath into this bastardized version with no RDF/BG queue from anywhere/iLevel Changes/etc
Heavy handed boosting bans/ selling their own boosts
I think all of these things have left a sour taste in peoples mouth and we’re seeing the outcome of all these short sighted and bad decisions.
Blizzard needs to get a handle on their game before we bleed even more players.
Arena ladders are in the off season (so 0 results) and raiding is basically useless at this point because gear will be obsolete by level 73 - so less total people are raiding.
There isn’t a player drop off, there is a data drop off.
Literally does not make sense. How could the population go DOWN as the queue times go UP? As others have said, IF.Pro tracks raid lockouts and arena ladders, not actual population
yes there are indeed
but not as much as before ergo , the drop off
i have 2 characters 100% bis way before prepatch and im not touching any raids
im getting alts and other stuff
and im sure many are just doing that too, specially DKs
IF.pro will not be accurate again until two or so weeks into Wotlk itself.
It tracks WarcraftLogs and PvP leaderboards.
All of the raiders who care enough to use WarcraftLogs are not raiding at the moment. The PvP leaderboard doesn’t exist because the Arena Season is over.
IF.pro is not an accurate representation of Classic WoW right now.
