Doesn't anyone want to play World of Warcraft anymore? The numbers paint a bleak picture, but are sheer nonsense, explains MyMMO demon Cortyn.
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The player numbers of World of Warcraft are in free fall. People are tired of WoW. Once again, the game is dying.
These and similar statements can be found more and more on various news sites. What would be an exciting topic in principle if you had reliable figures to prove it, but is often misrepresented. This is because the underlying statistics are massively distorted by many factors and must be seen in the context of what both WoW: Dragonflight and the other WoW versions are up to right now.
The statistic that is used is the number of "Mythic+" dungeons completed in the respective week. A trend can be seen here – basically, things continue to go downhill every week. But in the current Season 4 of Dragonflight, this crash is particularly drastic, after an already low start.
But first take a look at the graph for yourself:
The orange line for the current season looks really scary, doesn't it? It has the lowest entry of all seasons in Dragonflight and now also reached the absolute low.
If you just looked at this statistic, you might think: Oh dear, WoW must be doing really, really badly right now.
But several factors are completely disregarded.
The Many Factors That Gnaw at Mythic+ in WoW
First of all, probably the biggest change, which has still not reached some:
World of Warcraft has drastically changed the system of mythic dungeons with Season 4. The difficulty of all "M+" dungeons has been massively increased.
- A Mythic dungeon ("M+0") is now at the level of a previous "Mythic+10".
- A Mythic+2 level dungeon would have been equivalent to Mythic+11 in the previous season.
This means that basically all dungeon visits that would have previously fallen into the range M+2 to M+10 no longer appear in this statistic. Because these are now the visits that take place in Heroic and M+0 dungeons. This massive number of dungeon visits is missing from the statistics because they are not recorded and no longer belong to "Mythic+" due to a change to the system.
The second factor is WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria. Many fans of WoW are just romping around in this mode to unlock numerous transmogs and mounts. Many guilds have canceled their "M+" dates for the time being in order to raid together in Mists of Pandaria instead and thus secure a lot of bronze. Of course, this gnaws at the numbers of "M+" visits, but the players are not gone. You're only on Pandaria.
The third point is WoW Classic. "Cataclysm" started there a few weeks ago. While fans of the "old world" are skeptical about this addon, the expansion has always been praised for exciting raids and hard dungeons. One reason why many veterans are playing Cataclysm again and reviving the old days. Since there is "nothing new" in Dragonflight until patch 11.0, you can easily switch to Cataclysm for a few weeks and leave M+ behind.
The last point is the start of the beta of The War Within. Unlike previous WoW addons, you can "buy into the beta" by pre-ordering the more expensive Epic edition of The War Within. Some have done that and they are now on the beta realms to check out the new story or the hero talents - often together with several friends.
Bad numbers because people play a "different" WoW
I don't want to deny that the "the addon is over" mood also contributes to some players pausing or quitting. This happens with every expansion. The last season is always a reason to take a break from WoW, devote yourself to other games or simply do something else before continuing with the new addon.
But the whole thing is not as pitch-black as some draw it. The circumstances simply do not allow for that.
Yes, the absolute numbers of "M+" visits have plummeted in recent weeks. But there are many reasons for this but mainly because World of Warcraft is currently providing a lot of incentives to do something other than Mythic+.
Ultimately, it can be said: I don't know the official player numbers. Only Blizzard knows them. But taking the metric of "Mythic+" dungeons visited and deriving supposed player numbers from it, when there are so many factors that are tugging at the numbers of M+ visits, especially within the WoW cosmos that's just nonsense and, in my view, intentional misinterpretation. Xal'atath would certainly enjoy such things.