Midnight: The MOST PLAYED Expansion in the LAST 10 Years

[00:05] How big do you think World of Warcraft really is? Retail at least. Probably bigger than you think. Well, the numbers are in and World of Warcraft Midnight is the most popular expansion since Legion. And that is only because

[00:19] the data that we have doesn't go further back in time for us to compare. Let's not pretend we don't know what's going on. World of Warcraft Midnight has released with a lot of extra systems that we haven't had in the past 10 years

[00:34] almost. And people have been very critical about the expansion and it's not that easy to figure out exactly how popular it is since Blizzard hasn't been releasing their subscriber numbers since Warlords of Draenor. It's also hard to

[00:49] pretend that World of Warcraft hasn't had its best days behind with Wrath of the Lich King allegedly having the peak in terms of subscriber numbers in the game's history. We can assume that we haven't had those numbers ever since

[01:02] because we haven't had those numbers being public for a very long time. But the best thing that we can do is to actually look at aggregate data related to dungeons and raids cleared during the last couple of expansions and draw the

[01:16] last couple of expansions and draw the most educated of guesses without ever knowing the reality until Blizzard decides to publish those damn numbers. First of all, let's put the biggest of disclaimers out there so that we can all

[01:28] rest assured and continue understanding exactly what the numbers in this video will relate to. There are a lot of players playing World of Warcraft that we don't know anything about. Players that enjoy casually doing quests,

[01:41] leveling characters, collecting transmogs and pets and mounts. Players that actually like doing delves a lot and now rituals on top of it all last couple of months. Because this segment of the player base exists in

[01:56] obscurity, we can only assume it's fairly large. And the segment that never has contact publicly with platforms like forums, YouTube videos, streams, will never really be able to be analyzed so that we can know for sure what the

[02:11] numbers are. But we can assume that the numbers that we do have access to are smaller than the actual number of players that currently play World of players that currently play World of Warcraft.

[02:26] last couple of years has been purely related to Mythic Plus numbers. By the way, just to clear the air, all of these numbers come from logs. And if you don't know what logs are, or if you've heard about them and never really understood

[02:40] what they mean, World of Warcraft and most applications and software these days logs your activity through that set application. In our case, it logs your dungeons and raid runs. Maybe more. And people have been posting

[02:55] these online on websites such as warcraftlogs.com for the purpose of analyzing game data related to different things regarding combat, like spells used, damage done, enemy skilled, and so on and so forth. And because of websites

[03:11] such as warcraftlogs retaining their databases over the years, we have some information about the number of dungeons and raids attempted and cleared. From which we can speculate as to how big the player base is compared to other

[03:26] expansions. First of all, let's look at Legion. Legion introduced Mythic Plus as a concept, and we can probably understand that with it being a new system and all, and people having not yet figured it

[03:38] out, not a lot of people might have engaged with it at the time. Not to mention that when it's first inception, things might not have been that smooth. things might not have been that smooth. Affixes might have been overtuned. Specs

[03:50] might have been poorly balanced, etc. Leading to discouraging players that would otherwise love to play Mythic Plus. On top of this, we just don't have all of the numbers for Legion because websites such as raider.io and

[04:04] a little bit later or their database is a little bit shorter. Again, with Mythic Plus being a newer system that initially wasn't supposed to survive the expansion and move on to Battle for Azeroth. As such, the best data that we have for

[04:19] any amount of dungeons cleared in the Legion expansion has been from the 7.3.2 patch, which eventually would end up being 7.3.5. This one has seen a resurgence in players with a peak of over 560,000

[04:34] dungeon runs. As an example, to put this a little bit into perspective, the last Ghosts of Karazhan the World Within, started its season with over 4 million

[04:46] dungeon cleared first week, while week 10 of the same season saw about 1 million dungeon runs with a big drop-off already having happened since then, doubling the numbers of Legion. Moving on to Battle for Azeroth, Mythic Plus

[05:00] has already set itself in stone as a new system that relates to end game that people can enjoy, especially people that are not that fond of only rating. With that being said, season 1 of BFA started in week 2 with 1.7 million dungeons done

[05:15] or at least attempted with a drop-off to around 600,000 in week 9. because that's kind of where we are right now. We're currently in the week 10th of the season, probably 11th by the

[05:28] time you are watching this video, but the data for this particular week, at fully out yet, so we're just going to use week 9 as a benchmark. 600,000 dungeons done in week 9 is more than the peak of Legion, at least as far as we

[05:44] know. Moving to Shadowlands, the expansion had a very promising start and let's not kid ourselves, we were all excited about the prospect of going into the afterlife and potentially seeing dead characters that have been a part of

[05:57] the story for so long and finally figuring out what was going on with Sylvanas and that mysterious Jailer character. Until the dust actually settled and we realized the expansion sucked,

[06:09] Shadowlands had a very promising start of a season with week one reaching all the way to 3.1 million dungeons attempted. While in week nine, the drop

[06:21] off ended up at around 1.79 million dungeons ran. every patch of a World of Warcraft season, we see some of the largest drop offs in terms of player base after the first month. The game is very seasonal.

[06:37] This is not anything new and people come and check out the content and do a little bit of it and then just drop off and do other things. So it is only natural that going forward into the season, whichever week we end up on, the

[06:50] season, whichever week we end up on, the player numbers will always be smaller. numbers to get bigger, but that's the World Within story. Dragonflight is also a very hard expansion to judge because it came out right after Shadowlands,

[07:04] right after people had swallowed the most bitter of pills in terms of World of Warcraft content that we have had in its history. As such, the expansion probably wasn't as popular as it should have been since a lot of people just

[07:18] didn't have the desire to come back to the game and this is what we believe might have skewed the numbers. Season one started with week one and 3.2 million dungeons cleared moving towards week nine with 1.8 million dungeons

[07:32] cleared. Usually the drop off is about 50% by the time we reach week nine, week 10 or so on for every expansion. These numbers are clearly still larger than Shadowlands, but our educated guesses would say that if Shadowlands never

[07:48] existed, these numbers would have been even larger. The War Within had probably the worst Mythic Plus season in World of Warcraft recorded history in terms of player reception. With its difficulty being

[08:01] the same time the barrier of entry for a lot of people in dungeons being raised way high. Despite all of that, week one of The War Within had around 2.4 million dungeon runs with week nine ending up at 1.3 million. We know the rest of the

[08:18] story of The War Within with how season two started to revolutionize Mythic Plus and lowered the difficulty altogether for dungeons, and season three being an absolute success in terms of those numbers, which we already covered a

[08:34] minute ago, and would all culminate in the current design of the Mythic Plus season. Because that is also a bit unusual and hard to put into perspective with all of the other expansions, we're not going to touch those numbers, but

[08:47] rest assured that they will probably be relevant once Midnight also reaches its final season. Speaking of, let's look at Midnight. Obviously, the season isn't fully over and the way the content is being released will definitely change

[09:03] how our numbers will eventually look like over the course of the patch. Even so, week one of Midnight saw 5 million dungeons cleared, or at least attempted. This number is unprecedented. It is incredible how much larger it is.

[09:20] Not only compared to past expansions, but just as a number in a vacuum. Week one had 5 million dungeons attempted. [music] This is just dungeons. This doesn't mean the number of players, but if you put it

[09:33] into perspective, you could arguably say that the number of players has doubled in Midnight than in previous expansions. It's probably not really double, but we will never know. So, we can probably say whatever we want. Week nine of our

[09:48] season currently sits at about 2.5 million dungeons runs, and I have to point out that 2.5 million dungeon runs is almost the same number that some of the previous expansions have had in their first weeks of the season, and the

[10:02] Midnight season isn't even over yet with 1207 bringing in a new mini raid, item 1207 bringing in a new mini raid, item level increases, and reasons to play.

[10:16] to World of Warcraft raids, it will be a little bit more difficult [music] since, first of all, we don't have access to that much data to begin with. Second of all, it's very skewed and very relative to the respective raid. For instance, if

[10:29] there's a particular boss that has very desirable loot, a large bottleneck of players towards that boss can be formed. [music] Instead, we should look at the first boss of a mythic raid. That's because the first boss is the one that

[10:41] most people will attempt and the first one they will attempt. If that boss is then usually people don't come back to it, and instead just focus on doing later bosses. Not to mention if there is a last boss that's particularly

[10:54] difficult, that boss would have a larger number of attempts to be able to just looking at Shriekwing from Castle Nathria in Shadowlands. The peak that

[11:06] this boss has seen in terms of attempts on mythic, of course, has been on week on mythic, of course, has been on week eight with a total of 30,000 attempts. of Vaults of the Incarnate had a peak in week 10 of about 16,000 attempts. This

[11:21] is an example of a relatively uninteresting and very easy boss that a clearing [music] despite it having a good ring and generally more desirable loot than Shreekwing.

[11:34] >> In the world within, the first boss of Ner'bar Palace was Ulgrax, and it sat at Ner'bar Palace was Ulgrax, and it sat at around 26,000 attempts in week four. Dragonflight, but still a drop off from Castle Nathria. And finally, we reach

[11:48] Midnight. Here, I'm going to be a little bit cheeky and choose Khimerax as the first boss because Khimerax is essentially the almost easiest boss to approach from a Mythic raiding guild perspective. Coupled with probably the

[12:04] best loot in Gaze of the Onseer. That would make Khimerax a first Mythic raid boss with close to zero lockout restrictions and the lowest barrier of entry for any guild. And also, the most desirable raid boss. Khimerax saw a peak

[12:20] of 95,000 attempts in week six of the patch. This number is almost triple that of any previous first bosses of a raid, and you might think, "But Khimerax isn't the only first boss if we're going to be following that logic." Baleron is also

[12:36] such a boss. So is Imperator. And I'm glad you mentioned that. Considering the third raid of this expansion has been released way later into the season than any previous Mythic raid, we can assume that Baleron probably hasn't seen its

[12:50] best days yet. So for week 10 of the season, we have Baleron at about 38,000 attempts. This is still way more than previous first bosses of any expansion, and if you really want to be fair with all of this, you would add the Baleron

[13:07] attempts on top of Khimerax and on top of Imperator, which are not really relevant to mention anymore since the number is already so ridiculously high.

[13:23] any number of ways until we figure out exactly what is the actual number of players, but we can probably all agree that the number is way higher than in previous expansions. And not only is it higher, it seems to have doubled, maybe

[13:38] expansions. [music] And we're only halfway through season 1. This is an incredible feat that Midnight has done and will continuously do, and a the content has been released. The cadence is something that we haven't had

[13:54] before, and this is very interesting because a lot of people have been complaining that there's too much content right now. Although that might be true, the amount of content is indeed higher and that kind of devalues

[14:09] undertake when it comes to your World of Warcraft gameplay. However, it does keep the game rolling and more or less fresh. The introduction of the 12.0.5 system,

[14:21] of course, to upgrade your gear and to roll for new items has definitely flooded the game with new desire for players to actually engage with the content. And the 12.0.7 upcoming patch that's just around the corner will once

[14:34] again add new things for players to do in terms of character progression and overall RPG grinding. And of course, this is not all. We already have the world map released earlier this year, and in this world map we already know

[14:48] that season 2 will also feature at least two raids that we will be able to play in. All of this to say that World of Warcraft is drastically changing. If there was ever a time to call World of Warcraft World of Warcraft 2.0, it would

[15:02] probably be around this time. What do you think? Did your friends come back into the game in the last couple of months? Are you excited for the 12.0.7 upcoming patch and raid? You should be because it's cool and we have a video on

[15:17] it right here. If you click, you'll find out more about the new raid, the new gear, the new item level increase, and more stuff to do in wow.