We are now almost 3 weeks into the new Mythic+ Season and the 2nd raid tier of The War Within. Over the course of the last expansions, there has been an established pattern of early hype and people dropping out later on for other games or real-life commitments. This would obviously show up in subscriber data. However, we have been separated from those public statements for basically a decade by now. August 2015 was the last time we got an official number. So the next best method would be looking at tracked in-game metrics.
Lately, we have been discussing M+ run data from week to week or even season to season using Raider.IO data. In this article, Nightstalker314 will be focusing on active character data in M+ and guild activity in heroic raiding. Both are provided by Raider.IO. How did the numbers develop from the first to the second major patch? How does the trend compare from expansion to expansion?
Mythic+ Active Character Data
First we will be looking at the active character data we can get from Mythic+. Raider.IO has been tracking the seasonal cut-off data on a daily basis for all seasons since Shadowlands Season 3. This is always done for the 4 regions EU, US, Korea, and Taiwan while we have no data from China. This means we can draw conclusions from their 40% cut-off points in those data sets. Adding up all regional data for each day and each season we get this graph.
It is quite obvious that activity in M+ in general did decrease for both expansions from the first to the second season. For Dragonflight, the drop-off is looking kinda decent early on. There are just 16.85% fewer active characters in S2 after 19 days. But things are different if we look at the long-term development after 21 weeks, the duration of DF S1. We find that DF S2 stands at 22.77% fewer active characters (DF S1: 3,886,920 and DF S2: 3,002,158 active characters).
In addition, we have to keep in mind that starting at around 40 days into DF S1 additional characters were created by Chinese players starting on Taiwanese realms. If we compare daily data for both seasons we can make an estimate that at 19 days into DF S2 around 100,000 additional characters were active on Taiwanese realms at the time. If we account for this anomaly DF S2 after 19 days has already dropped off by 23.44%.
The War Within Seasons
Let’s apply the same comparison for TWW S1 and S2. We see a sharp decline of -30.85% and also a rather weak start that was even closer to -40%. This can be attributed to bad experiences with delayed or missing tuning during S1. There’s also the larger step-up in terms of tuning from standard dungeons or world content and its rewards into the first few key levels of Mythic+. For the most recent days, we can observe a comparative upward trend. This is also reflected by the smaller drop-off in total run numbers when comparing both seasons. It will be interesting to see if this season can decrease the gap towards the end, with better and more regular tuning and hotfixes as well as more characters being brought into M+ later on.
Now let’s compare the first and second seasons to each other. The drop-off from DF S1 compared to TWW S1 early on after 19 days was just 6.9% and after 21 weeks had widened to 17.19% (3,886,920 vs. 3,218,740). For the DF S2 and TWW S2 comparison so far we get a 22.56% drop-off after 19 days. And corrected for the Chinese player anomaly in DF S2 it should be around 15.9%. This comparison is also impacted by the removal of low-level keys since DF S4. Those key levels probably saw some exclusive activity from a small portion of more casual players. Overall Mythic+ metrics see a clear drop-off. However, long-term S2 for The War Within could turn out a lot better than it did in Dragonflight.
Heroic Raid Data for the First Bosses
When looking at raid data Raider.IO also has quite the track record for former expansions and raid tiers. We will be focusing on the kills for the first heroic boss in each raid. Numbers for normal mode are quite similar for most raid tiers. However, they usually diminish a bit for anything after the first tier. Groups with good gear from the first tier are more likely to focus on heroic instead of also going through the normal mode progress again. The focus on the first boss makes more sense. This is due to clear rates for individual raid tiers depending on the tuning of the entire raid. And as we know from the most recent raid, this can vary a lot from tier to tier.
In general these stats reflect the monumental loss of players during Shadowlands as a combination of content drought, post-lockdown loss of interest and the Activision Blizzard scandal. Within Dragonflight we can observe the absence of lost activity and therefore subscribers during the expansion which was also highlighted during a Game Developers Conference talk from John Hight. The first TWW raid tier continued this trend in the early weeks.
One major change that definitely affects the reason for players to raid in general would also be the addition of the catalyst system. Why enter a raid if you have a reliable source for tier gear on a regular basis while you can focus on content outside of raiding that suits you better? During BFA you could acquire Azerite gear later on, but specific pieces were still locked as exclusive raid loot. This got even worse during the infamous SL 9.1 patch where the domination shards gear had no equivalent in Mythic+ loot.
The War Within Raids
From expansion to expansion, we see 46.05% more kills in the first raid and 5.99% in the second raid of TWW compared to DF. We once again have to add an asterisk to the second raid tier of Dragonflight. Within regional data we can see around 300 additional raid groups active on Taiwanese servers from season to season. But this amount doesn’t shift the values as much as the focus on Mythic+, which seems to be a lot more dominant on Asian servers in general. In conclusion – for the 4 tracked regions – the increase from DF tier 2 to TWW tier 2 is closer to 9%.
For The War Within specifically, we see a similar trend from raid tier to raid tier as we saw for the seasonal Mythic+ numbers. But compared to Shadowlands and BFA raid numbers, the familiar drop-off is a lot smaller this time around. While during DF we see a gain of 9.89% (only ~7% adjusted for Chinese activity) in first heroic raid boss kills, this trend is once again reverted during TWW to a loss of 20.72%. For BFA and SL these second raid tier drop-offs were around 37% each time during the first 19 days.
And for the entire runtime of those first two raid tiers in BFA and SL we are looking at drop-offs of 35.82% in BFA and a massive 52.36% in SL. For the latter this is quite obvious since the release of 9.1 fell right into the scandal in 2021. Meanwhile, for DF it was just 24.07%.
In Conclusion
So regarding the available raid data and in the context of a lot more rewarding content outside of just raiding, we can conclude that raiding is on an upward trend. We also see that The War Within is already showing a similar pattern to older expansions, but this time the effects are clearly diminished so far with a 30% loss in Mythic+ numbers and 20% for raid activity. Once this raid tier and the season are finished sometime in late August this year, we will take another look at the metrics and evaluate how well this entire patch has done in terms of raiding and Mythic+.
