The reason that I raised the issue about the date is that the title of this thread is "Looks like World of Warcraft is still over 12 million" which implies that we're talking about the present tense. Then you link to data from the peak of the population after the release of the expansion as if that somehow proves that the current numbers are at or above 12 million. Frankly, we can't know for sure exactly what the current numbers are, my point was simply that the data point that you linked to was irrelevant.

As far as other data points, there are plenty of other pieces of information that seem to suggest that this expansion doesn't have the staying power that the previous expansions have had. Data from warcraftrealms as well as the traffic on WoW related sites are all showing the same downward trends in activity since the end of the year. Further, the number of high population realms has been dropping and there are many more low population servers than there used to be. Also, there has been zero talk about queue times to log in at all this expansion. My server, a launch day server, had massive login queues during WotLK but I haven't once encountered a queue with Cataclysm.

I don't know what game you are playing but it certainly isn't WoW.

 

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WoW went all casual on us in Wrath and became more accessible by shifting focus from 25 man raids to 10 player raids, and provided a 30% dmg/healing/health buff in the final raid instance allowing more people to see that content then in the past. The game is still in this state, albeit they moved slightly away from it in the raiding area, but while heroics/raiding have been upped, there's a ton of different things to do compared to the state of WoW in the past. From professions, to the random dungeon finder, to the entire new leveling experience for new players, WoW is more casual friendly then it used to be. A example of a recent change catering to more casual players is the change to the daily heroic is coming this next patch to help those people that don't log in every day to get their week's worth of valor points.

 

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Repeated for emphasis due to your last post.

 

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Wow is definitely on some kind of decline although I don't know how much. Is it down 100k? 500k? 1 million? Maybe.

All I know is this...

During WotLK, even a year later (late 2009-early 2010), we had 25+ guildies on every night. We had a ton of guildies on in December when Cat launched.

Now, I popped back in after cancelling earlier this year. No guild members left the guild, but there's hardly anything scheduled on the calendar and unless a Raid attempt is being made, there's literally less than 5 people on and I was one of them.

One night, I was doing some rep stuff and I was the only one on. I can't ever remember it being that low and I've been in my guild since TBC.

Does this mean they cancelled? I don't know. Does it mean they are just bored with WoW in 2011? I don't know either.

All I can say is, everyone I know INRL that played doesn't anymore and my guild membership count remains the same, but hardly anyone logs on anymore.

 

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Graphs are hard, yo.

 

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People are canceling - how do we know? we see guild members/friends leaving. this is hard evidence, not anecdotal.
New people are joining - no hard evidence, but this is a reasonable assumption.

Are people leaving at a faster rate than joining?

This is the key question. I suspect so, but we have no hard evidence.

However, look at the level of sudden overflow of information from Bliz. This is not normal. They are blogging/posting about how they are looking into all things that concern people.

This behavior in itself is highly suspicious.

I think most people here do agree that number of people leaving (for whatever reason, bad xpac, trying new games, just "tired" is significant enough to warrant concern from management and trigger a media blitz to try to mitigate the damage.

I saw a ton of people in my guild (including me) leave to play Rift during the beta/headstart/release. They are slowly but surely migrating back though. I would say that about 75% have returned already.

Whether that is a trend across WoW, I dont know. Just throwing it out there.

There's more discontent now than ever. Blizzard with every blog and forum post is stuck in some weird position of addressing player concerns while at the same time being defensive and saying "everything is fine! we got this".

As for subscription numbers... who knows?... but if things were truly going well we'd have seen the 13 million mark already. New expansions are supposed to keep the current players, bring old players back, AND bring in new players. The old came back and many left already, the current are showing apathy, and I'm not sure the new are enough to replace them. Even these boards are nearly dead.

I don't know when their next expansion is planned, but they better do a much better job on it and put it out as quickly as possible. The general opinion in game and out isn't very positive.

Worth it.

 

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