The meat riding is going hard here.
That was the “Start” when the expansion had blizzcon Hype.
Look at wrath’s numbers, They peaked and flatlined at the same consistent level, Cata’s began to fall not even halfway through Firelands.
Theres the difference between the two
Sure, Wrath was the first expansion to flat line and Cata was the first expansion that lost subs. But a 15% loss of subs over 20 months doesn’t say drastically to me. A 15% loss of subs seems small to me. 85%, 10.2 million people paying $15 every month for over 20 months is a pretty successful game that was liked by the overwhelming majority of the player base.
For over 20 months wotlk had more than 10.2 million players, fix it for ya
Fixed it for ya
I’ll rephrase drastic, to more of a Beginning of the end scenario.
Sure most of the Poor game design that came with cata, The long patch cadence, Questionable changes such as the Activision merger can be blamed for this time, However it feels like Blizzard pushing Cataclysm into Classic feels more and more like a Cash grab rather than their quote “Love letter to the community” that they stated at Blizzcon last year.
Its no secret, And this thread is proof that Cata is a nest of controversy. I neither Liked or disliked cata myself, Yeah I prefered wrath, but in the End it feels contradictionary to return a product that was a source of a lot of controversy.
EDIT: Because if they can push Cataclysm, What stops them from pushing something like WoD or Shadowlands in the future?
ROFL, Nope sorry mate but it’s not BS - Cata pre patch just went live, I’ve been playing Wotlk for the past 20 months not Cata.
You’ve been playing wotlk classic and it didn’t have any where near 10.2 million players. I can see you’re just a moron trolling.
I mean, not to play Devil’s advocate, but at least try to have something meaningful for a debate
Everyone has their own list of things they like and dislike about every expansion. And it was a popular meme to hate on Cata on the forums. But the forum tells us nothing about what the far larger player base thinks about anything. I look for data to form my opinions and the sub numbers tell a far different story than the forums did. If someone is paying $15 a month for 20 months that’s evidence to me that they liked the game and 10.2 million, 85%, did just that. 85% counts as an overwhelming majority to me.
I think the answer to that is obvious. If a classic expansion makes a sufficient profit the next expansion will be released. When they loose money on an expansion the classic train will stop.
Lets see, 12 million players from launch of Cata.
9.1 million players at the lowest point in July, 2012.
Back upto 10 miillion for MoP…
Yeah, nothing there says drastically. Plus, people could’ve quit or stopped playing for all sorts of reasons. I mentioned my partner quit during Cata everywhere, and he didn’t even quit because of the expansion, but because of life reasons. Stop assuming everything is because of the expansion, and stop making out that everything is because of Cata.
I mean, if you want Drastically decline for subs, look at WoD, how it went from 10 million to 5.6 million, and that was within what, 6-7 months?
It’s hard to compare. And this time around it is different. Back then we had no choice. Some crazy challenges were made to partly make up for Cata’s shortcomings. We had guilds we had been part of many of us since early Vanilla …
I think most of us who returned for Classic did so because we wanted Classic. Not because we wanted it to progress to Cata and once again smach “our” home world.
There’s a tendency among the uneducated to think that most people think the same things they do. Education tends to broaden people’s horizon and they become aware of the diversity of opinions in the world. Then they look for objective data and stop relying just on their fee fees.
I think most people actually returned for classic for the experience of what it was like when it was live. Though everyone is different. Hey, if you want the classic experience of the old Azeroth, the RNG grinds of searching for boar meat in westfall, the mob grinds to help with levelling, guess what, there is still Classic Era. There is still Season of Discovery. Nothing is stopping you from playing those. It was made evident that Blizzard was going to keep classic moving along with every expansion right after the release of the Burning Crusade classic and Wrath of the Lich King classic.
I mean, it is kind of Ironic when people want WotLK classic era servers for the “old Azeroth” when the old Azeroth was quite dead at times. When WotLK zones weren’t even updated, and still to this day on retail, haven’t really been updated yet either…
The only true classic is vanilla, we’ve been playing retail 2.0 for like 3 years and that’s okay
If you think you are the majority, you have said enough to prove you aren’t worth listening to.
And this if where I’ll go; or rather stay, as I have been playing there (and HC) since the launch of Cata was made public - as I love exactly this 
- and as I did not want to get any more attached to a character, I knew I was going to stop playing with Cata pre-patch aka yesterday.
Yep, these 2 were evident with the launch of TBC-C. What was NOT evident was the lack of Era servers and to a lesser degree the launch of Cata.
It’s litteraly 2010 all over again vanillataur. I should have joined a wrath private server in 2019. I legit feel like I wasted my time. Playing a game that is turning into the same game that I was like, man. Can We get classic servers blizzard.
This is part of why I am frustrated. I put alot of time into my wrath classic toons. And moving over to a private wrath server. Don’t really care about how illegal it is. But I would have to start all over again. Maybe I can find some hack that will transfer all of my classic wrath toon status over to the private wrath server client. But I doubt it.
Makes no sense. I don’t recall the average player when wrath was the current expansion from 2008-2010, asking for classic servers at all. Or maybe they were and I missed it.
But yah, cataclysm is when people started heavily asking for classic servers. Not before. And then someone asked a blizz con Q and A in 2013 if we could get classic versions of classic expansions.
Like this feels like such a spit in the face.
Cata is THE BEST expansion Blizz ever released other then MoP and Legion. I considered the minority that left whiny brats who wouldn’t know an awesome game if it bite them in the butt.
That’s not to say Wrath was bad but I struggled to get into it back in the day. It finally clicked with me a few weeks before Cata’s launch and I finally got to max level.
I truly think there should be at least one wrath classic server. I wouldn’t use it but it would make some people happy.
Yah I mean, it’s like. We were never going to play cata to begin with. So what’s wrong with the split. Well, I was going to play cata if I had the option to play wrath also, because there were things about cata that I liked.
Cata is litteraly the expansion that divided the community in the first place.
It’s not a spit in anybody’s face. You invested your time knowing there was a very distinct possibility that Blizzard would be moving on from Wrath to Cataclysm.
Not really. Cataclysm came on the heels of WOTLK’s content drought and maintained ~10mil players throughout most of its lifespan. Seems pretty successful to me, especially if we’re being honest about the fact that WOTLK was a sort of sensation where WoW became an actual mainstream game.
You can’t keep the game on the same release forever without it becoming stagnant. Blizzard is pretty well aware of that.