Around the release of Cata was when League of Legends started to gain a massive amount of players as well. I knew plenty of people who started spending their free time on LoL instead of WoW.
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Basically, there are countless unknowable reasons for why people quit the game around Cata, but the anti-Cata crowd are all about ânumber go down therefore expansion bad!â
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Cata will have raids⌠5 mans⌠and⌠pvp⌠hmm⌠seems like the same game in a different spot⌠if it bad⌠the rest of it before and after is equally bad⌠I mean⌠you know what I am sayingâŚ
Its just personal flavor. If you dont want to play duce out. If you do enjoy your time. WoW communities are so fickle with everyone has to like only what I like its actually what killed the game over timeâŚ
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Itâll be really interesting to see how Classic performs after Cata releases. Will sub count dwindle, will it grow? So many people in Classic are from Retail, itâs possible sub count could grow. Iâd say the Retail players far outweigh people the true Classic players.
Itâs possible that a lot of people who started playing WoW back in Vanilla were fans of Blizzard and Warcraft. Wrath was the end of Arthasâ story and after that was done people were just done with WoW, or at least didnât have as much buy-in.
Similar to the MCU, now that Thanos is gone a lot of people donât have as much buy-in with the current line up of heroes. It also doesnât help that Marvel are churning out content as if their life depends on it, which also parallels the expansions after Wrath.
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It could very well play out differently. From all the evidence I have of playing Classic itâs clearly filled with people who came to the game from Retail. Everywhere people are in a rush to get things done as quickly as possible, tanks rush through dungeons in 10-15 minutes, DPS donât bother waiting for tank to gain threat and just unload immediately when the tank pulls, everyone has a focus on GS and wonât bother helping lift up others with lower GS.
Those people are probably dying to play Cata, MoP, WoD, Legion etc. again, so Classic sub count could remain strong.
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Whatâs funny is they drove casuals away the first time with the âmore challengingâ dungeons. Which by todayâs standards wouldnât be very challenging.
So I could actually see early Cata Classic being quite successful. Yet ironically theyâll once again drive away casuals (if any show up) by adding Mythic dungeons in the next tier. Blizz has learned nothing in 14 years. This game was at its most popular when it had something for everybody, instead of designing one experience for all.
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As Iâve mentioned in other forum posts (unrelated to this topic), Iâve been playing since Wrath 2008. It was my utmost and absolute favorite expansion. I started playing Classic in late 2019/early 2020 and while Vanilla felt like I was questing with an anvil attached to my leg since I mained a Prot Warrior, I learned to enjoy the raiding environment in Vanilla very much. When TBC rolled out, I actually enjoyed that expac much more than I expected to. But my true excitement was for Wrath!!
However, not long after Wrath release, maybe 2 weeks-ish after, my fiance had a heart attack (heâs mostly recovered now), and then in March I dealt with my own health issues that have dragged out all year until recently. Our days and weeks and months were spent around doctorâs appointments, hospitals, and traveling to and from, severely limiting ANY progress I could make in Wrath. I did have really high hopes to go back in and catch upâŚUNTIL the announcement for Cata Classic was released. My heart sank.
I never enjoyed original Cata. The only thing I enjoyed about Cata was professions crafting and selling on the AH. I started making my alt armies back then and I started honing my AH skills. And the ONLY reason I did Molten Front dailies was for the profession recipes. Hated those dailies with a passion! I tanked and healed dungeons, got guild achieves in the new guild system, but my heart just wasnât in it when raiding in Cata. The only raid I actually enjoyed was Dragon Soul up to Deathwing where I gladly skipped out and let others take my place who had more drive and desire for that end boss than I did. Cataclysm as a whole expac just did NOT appeal to me. And it still doesnât. The only reasons Iâd continue with my characters in Classic now are for the same reasons I had back then in original Cata.
I had been holding my breath, hoping they would announce that Cata would have itâs own servers that people could choose to migrate to. I watched all the BlizzCon vids intently waiting for that surprise newsâŚthat never came. My heart sank again. As now I have to break this news to my Classic guild, who have been great supportive friends to me throughout this challenging year. 3 weeks ago now I decided that I am going to ease myself back into Retail. Because playing an expac in Classic that I donât enjoy is harder work than my casual activity I do in Retail.
Maybe one day I will find myself on the private Wrath servers. I doubt it, as I have a HUGE alt army in Retail. And Iâm not entirely certain that I wonât play Cata at all in order to help friends out, or what Iâm going to do with my alt-armies there. I just know that Iâm NOT excited about Cata at all. And with the attitudes of people on Pagleâs obsessions with 5-6k GS, yeah screw that. Unless I end up making a casual, non-guild Blizz Community just for casual weekend runs, no effing way am I adding that trolling and aggravation to my life. Itâs reached far, FAR beyond âfriendly competitionâ (/sarcasm) within the Pagle community since TBC Phase 3.
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Itâs very clear to me that you are similar to me in that we are both passionate Wrath (but also Vanilla and TBC of course), which is why you wrote a long post!
Iâm surprised that someone who started playing in Wrath doesnât like Cata because I would think that if someone liked Wrath and was somewhat new to the game theyâd enjoy Cata. The game changed a lot as the years went on and for the worse.
I personally do NOT understand why the Classic community can be so toxic. I personally believe that Classic has been flooded with Retail players simply because of what Iâve seen in-game.
Classic as a game technically is pretty much the same as it was back in the day, but at the same time itâs completely different and for the worse because of the player base (not all but most) and how the game is being played by everyone.
Everyone takes it way too seriously, people are way too impatient and inconsiderate and selfish. I just donât understand why itâs so bad, but sadly it reflects how people are in real life these days too. For example back in the day if you ran past someone near XR, most of the time you would buff each other. These days youâd be lucky to even get a /y thanks after doing so. Itâs just straight up weird sadly.
Another example I have is that there is an ally mage on my server who will often come to Org and stand near the entrance inside the city and attack people (high level only from what Iâve seen). I love seeing them because a) itâs straight up badass to run into an enemy city on your own and not die immediately and b) theyâre just having a bit of fun. But people absolutely HATE that mage and are extremely vocal about her in chat. Someone even accused me of being their alt once because I was standing there watching them attack people LOL. Like seriously, the players these days are just awfully weird and toxic and it makes the game completely different to how it was back in the day, when most people were actually considerate and supportive and just chill overall.
Glad to hear your health is better now though 
Oh and btw thereâs a petition floating around on the forums asking for Blizz to keep Wrath era servers. It might be a pointless endeavour but probably doesnât hurt to sign it.
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As Iâm responding, Iâm literally doing the Belf Heritage Armor quest line (on toon #35, I have 44 alts) in Retail that takes you back to Tranquilien and the Sunwell, reliving Kalâthelas destroying the Sunwell and WHY he did it. Itâs very beautifully done, lore and all. 
Prior to WoW, Iâd spent time here and there playing Diablo I on CD, lol. I fell in love with WoW the day I started playing it. Being a hardcore Tolkien fan (I own almost all the books and all of the movies), WoW just fit my âstyleâ. The lore around Deathwing kept me intrigued in Cataclysm, as well as the commitment to the online friends and community Iâd found in my guild and in WoW in general. Absolutely none of us were progression-minded back then. As a matter of fact, I didnât even gain that mindset myself until Vanilla Classic. I had always surrounded myself with people of like mind in Retail and didnât settle for less, didnât buy into what everyone else was hyping over, and because of my easy-going live-and-let-live attitude with people while still wanting to progress through content for the greater good of everyone, I ended up taking over the guild when the GM wanted to quit WoW at the end of Wrath. So picking up that torch definitely influenced me to stay throughout Cata back then. But I wasnât the only one who didnât enjoy Cata. 3/4 of my guild members decided to call it quits shortly before MoP was announced, and my guild fell apart. While I still have that guild, and did try to revive it a couple of times, it just didnât come together due to how people were more focused on Challenge Modes (pre-M+) than spending time in a casual guild. And so my journey as a casual WoW player began, as well as making alts on other different realms and successfully discovering other gold-making opportunities.
I believe this behavior we see with hyped GS scores goes back to thenâŚthose Challenge Modes before Mythic+ came out. Of course M+ locked it all in, and the rest is history. All those accomplishments are perfectly fine with me UNTIL people are treated unfairly due to not doing the same content at the same time they did. To me, it seems if you donât have all day to spend in-game and hundreds to thousands of dollars in Tokens to spend to work on whatever GearScore, or even M+ keys in Retail for that matter, you are not âworthyâ, and henceforth treated as if you are a doormat. Itâs become a toxic clique-ish cesspool. For exactly that reason, I faction-changed my Alliance main on Pagle to Horde where that behavior is null and void. Of course those same trolls âjokeâ in Alliance trade chat how Horde on Pagle doesnât have enough people to raid, but youâd be surprised at how many Horde players on Pagle are devoted and committed to raiding. There is a much nicer, closer-knit community on Pagle Horde. 
I still have ALL of my other alliance toons on Pagle (and I have toons on Atiesh and Mankrik, but even Mankrik isnât quite as toxic as Pagle). I hear itâs worse on Benediction and one of the other high-pop PvP servers, where if youâre not grandfathered in or brought in by someone who is, forgetaboutit. But Iâll tell you what. Iâm on high pop servers in Retail and NONE of them have that kind of attitude. Even Area 52 Horde is tame in comparison.
Thank you for the well wishes on my health. Itâs not âbetterâ, but itâs âmanagedâ now with medication, now that we know whatâs going on (cardiac and liver and scoliosis). The year ahead brings lots of diet changes, exercise/PT, and regular blood tests to keep improvements going.
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Cata did great. Only about 20% quit and it had more than 10 million subs. Every video company at the time didnât look at cata as a failure but looked at it with envy. History is no guide in this case but if it were and 80% of wrath classic players went on to play cata classic it would be a huge success.
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People quit cats because it was generally bad.
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Define bad.
By the way, I think the person you quoted hit the nail on the head. They built up this huge casual audience in Wrath. Dungeons were very easy and accessible. Then Blizz decided âwe need to make this game harder!!!â AndâŚbye bye huge casual audience.
I also agree the Classic playerbase is NOTHING like the old playerbase and Cata might actually be more popular than Wrath Classic.
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Maintaining well over 80% of your playerbase and being the envy of every game publishers in the world at the time⌠totally not doing well at all.
Another person who doesnât understand the difference between Causation and Correlation.
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Losing over 20% of your player base is not doing well by any metric. That wow was still so far ahead is just a symptom of how poorly other companies were doing mmos.
It wasnât over 20%. It started at 12 and ended at 10. Thatâs a 17% dip. For an 8 year old mmorpg. At a time when a lot of other mmos started coming out. As well as other popular games. Growth isnât endless. There comes a point where potential playerbase thins out. And players donât play one game forever.
Well to start with the biggest change in the playerbase isnât so much the ration of hardcore to casual. While there are more hadrcore players now it hasnât done a complete 180 from what it was and that change is more a symptom of the actual change in the player base. By itâs nature classic will almost predominantly cater to people who have already played not to new players.
Now as for why Cata was bad? Changes like merging 10/25 man lockouts/loot/achieves or guild perks utterly devastated the guild landscape, that isnât just casual vs hardcore it impacted both in negative ways. Dungeons being harder, I guess they were, but not harder than the ICC heroics, the problem was they just werenât fun. Same reason H+ is bad in wrath, stacking CC classes wasnât fun, especially in RDF where youâd have groups that simply didnât meet the instance design requirements. Even something as simple as changing VP to a weekly cap shared between dungeons and raids had negative impact.
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It ended at 9 million, a 3 million sub loss or 25%.
And while all thatâs true and could account for some of that loss Cata itself accounts for a huge chunk of it.
Iâd agree with most of this. Except saying the playerbase hasnât changed.
But yeah itâs a chicken and egg thing. The playerbase back then hadnât gone through whatâs transpired the past decade and a half. If you could magically teleport players from back then to today weâd see the difference. But obviously thatâs not possible.
But I disagree with Blizzardâs approach by saying, âWell, we canât design for a playerbase who doesnât exist. So might as well meld elements of Retail with Classic.â You just end up with this half-assed mutated concoction with garbage like Heroic+. No one is pleased. Not purists. Not Retail players. They should have just left the game alone. Itâs up to the players to adapt to the old game.
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Because this version sucked.