No, but seeing a change in their earnings numbers would be indicitive to how many people actually joined. Joined as in bought the game and subscribed, not just messing around with the free trial without spending a dime. THAT is what’s important to pretty much all subscription based MMOs.
And we actually do… There are many hundreds of leveling zones and instances. You could merge all of the major MMOs out there and WoW would still have more content than all of them combined.
With the bulk of the content being over ten years old, which is the complaint. Each new expansion is bringing less and less to the table, while gutting previous expansions.
I remember when people just logged into wow when classic was released in 2004, and just enjoyed the systems for what they were. And if they quit, the game just probably was not for them. ANd in future expansions, like burning crusade, it just was not a game for them anymore because of the changes. So they quit.
So seriously people, if shadowlands is somehow this horrible expansion, and you honestly have nothing objective to say about it, what you like for example, then why are you still subbing.
The game changes. Sometimes in ways that you will not like. That is the current age, and no one can be satisfied for more than 10 mins. I know that ffixiv and some other mmos coming out recently are popular atm, but for how long. Hard to say.
If they make changes and add content that no one likes, as that is how the current generation perceives stuff, then it will not last long regardless. But i guarantee by this time next year, everyone is going to be talking about how repetitive those mmos are. And how boring they are or whatever. What used to take 30 years to somehow become nostalgic and old, now takes 2 years. 2 years from now and ffxiv is going to be nostalgic to people.
But seriously, if you hate shadowlands and wow and blizz in general and all the changes, me thinks it is time for you to move on.
Icewind Dale?
WoW has become very polarized. Your either a 24/7 player and then everyone else. For casual players the game goes nowhere. I can easily play every day but dealing guilds omg after 10 years of other peoples personality crisis’s I just play solo. Regardless if you are not a influencer streamer you will never get to do anything worth while in the game. You will never get into a decent guild or a group of people to live on junk food and depends to accomplish end game content.
The game has nothing to do with skill. It is all about item level and always has been, but unlike how it use to be with tier sets and currency ( Justice/Valor & Honor/Conquest ) their is no meaningful rewards for game time played.
You can grind all day playing solo ( whether you want to or not ) and get nowhere in the game
and 6 months for like 2 weeks of content gated behind reps or dailies to keep you from doing all of it. 
Oh boy, mythic+ I just love doing the same dungeons over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over for 6 months.
Raiding can be fun but you do it like once a week and getting trash drops or no drops isn’t fun or worth the many hours sinking into raids. At least m+ has the weekly box.
It almost feels like a phone game with so much repitition. I’m so glad pathfinder doesn’t require reputations too. What an annoying thing to do over and over each expansion until you’re revered/exalted. “Wonder what I’ll do next expansion,” hardly have to I already know it’s going to be dailies. And I’ll eventually have done all the dailies if I grinded them every day. I did in legion and that was miserable so I stopped playing a few months after mechagon came out. I don’t want a daily hub with almost nothing to do.
I’m just upset that they haven’t changed the formula since legion except that some things like covenant campaigns, the mission table, and Garrison/Order Hall type of features all got watered down. There isn’t much to even do in the new zones we received. Once you’ve explored them the first time through there’s not much or any reason to wonder around and it’s just a dredge of enemies attacking you not entirely unlike Argus.
Post is kind of a lie considering most raiders are first to unsub since forever. There’s this huge crowd who only want to do that clear raid wait for next. And most casuals find entertainment in way more things and have fun doing it. Post is straight garbage casuals support this game way more than raiders ever did. Guess you dont realize there’s many people who play hrs and hrs picking herbs leveling professions buying from the shop all kinds of stuff who never unsub and are having tons of fun.
This post is funny because the community seems to think that blizz caters to m+ players and raiders only but I believe this is the COMPLETE opposite. When it takes me 8 months just to get a cosmetic set, only for them to drop 9.1 and then I end up with too much anima that I can’t even send to alts. That is a problem, it isn’t even casual player friendly. The lore is barely good right now too, we literally need a Suramar type zone or half the player base just won’t care about the game.
Not everything in WoW is about gearing, it shouldn’t be that way to begin with. Some people just want armor sets from the end of a quest chain, or for things to not be time gated by renown or reputation. The vast majority just wants to be able to fly the second we hit the next level cap instead of waiting so long to be able to use a convienence. FF14s success does not come from them catering to casuals or letting people play solo or what ever, it literally is only happening because the same m+ players and raiders are salty, and the same casual players like me just want to get the most basic rewards without waiting 8 months to get those rewards. I would never say FF14 is better, its not but there are many things blizz should be doing better but just actively chooses not to do those things.
I don’t want more casual power progression. I want more LASTING casual content that isn’t power progression.
I don’t want power-progression-focused players to feel like they HAVE to do casual content, because then the dev team scrambles to ruin it.
I’ll give an example of what I thought was good casual content that was ruined by power. Island Expeditions (later patch, of course).
When these things had doubloons and a weekly treasure map, I was all over it. It had so many collectibles to hunt or stories to stumble into. It was good side content. But it had the best AP so people who didn’t like it still felt forced to do it.
I was frustrated when the treasure map gave more AP or Titan Residuum, when there were still collectibles I wanted that I didn’t have. It even had rewards that weren’t tied to RNG that I could buy with the currency.
I’d love to see more stuff like that. I was hopeful that Torghast would be stuff like this. But no. Torghast had to be a chore for power collectors instead of a collectible-based feature.
This is where FFXIV is dominating WoW right now. This kind of content is all over the place there. The best we got here is a small selection of items to grind out in our covenant, or we play the slot machine with rares that might drop something interesting. That’s so dull!
I don’t mind the occasional RNG collectible drop or something. But that’s literally all we got that wasn’t power this patch.
Also the covenant sanctum sucks as casual content, because it just starts collecting dust once the new expansion is out.
You aren’t understanding. They never intended to give you what you want. The purpose of game design is to keep elites playing because they’ll fall behind if they take breaks.
They fact is that even if they wanted to “cater” to some demographic, they’re really bad at understanding what makes any part of the playerbase feel good about playing the game. They don’t understand how to design a gear progression system for anyone. They think we’re all so addicted that we’ll never leave no matter what.
As a casual player they could start by giving me more volition over korthian gear. All my crap has mastery, even the dupes, my spec hates mastery. I want crit/haste and I’m yet to see it. These are the sort of things that annoy casual players and it would have zero impact on the higher end if they just made it, you know, right.
Other than that I’m pretty okay, LFR gear is a little low compared to what you can do to korthian, but then korthian sucks when it comes to stats. I’m yet to do anything of any consequence with domination shards, I have like one installed and it does nothing I can tell, seems like you need a three set to get anything from those which is also lame.
Then there’s the problem of alts. If my alt wants a lego, that’s probably a token. If it wants to get into LFR without grinding, another token. And so on. And it’s an alt, I don’t really want to put any money into it but I don’t want it to perpetually suck either. I also don’t want to spend even a week doing trivial callings which seem to be the only way to make 4 figures of gold anymore.
I realize as an MMO player I do seek more of the instant type gratification. I like to level, but I don’t really like to grind. AH markets are soft as playdough there’s no money to be made there anymore. So the token becomes the answer, and all the money floating around is passed through carries and mythic boes. That I buy with tokens. Damn you blizzard you blew it up!
Edit: To clarify, I buy boes, I don’t believe in carries and I doubt that will ever change. Just play the danged game. Tried a “boost” in classic once and almost fell asleep at the keyboard, swear. I’d rather just, you know, play instead of stand in a corner and watch the pretty numbers roll in.
All casual players have to do is grind meaningless reputations and player power.
All hardcore players have to do is grind meaningless reputations and player power, which is in the way of them doing the content they actually want to do (and do well in).
Allied races (more so for Alliance) is a prime example, does Blizzard expect a new player to grind out a character he/she does not want to play for days or even weeks depending on how much he/she can play per day, just to open up the character that they really want to play and will have to level also, what a turn off to a new player starting Warcraft, these devs are ridiculous.
They can’t keep semi-hardcore or hardcore players either. The only thing in WoW right now that’s good is the raiding, and even then I still don’t have my last domination socket because having power tied to terrible drop rates sure is fun, glad we learned that lesson from Legion right Blizz?
Who knew – if you don’t treat a leisure activity leisurely, it turns out to be a pathetic leisure activity.
Do you guys think they will ever bring back master loot? I enjoy rolling in items in WoW Classic rather than this RNG system they have right now.
It felt way more suspenseful lol.
THIS is exactly my point! I don’t give a F about mythic or ranked pvp lol I legit expect more for casual players and this whole loot drought is insane!
It’s very obvious from everyone complaining–Casual players aren’t players to Ion.
I want to play a game. I wasn’t expecting a full time job.
I guess the game is good full time job for some streamers considering the leaked financial reports of many of WoW top streamers. So I guess WoW it’s a good job for a boring game