News
WoW Classic: EU raider counts fall for a third week
Raid logs on European realms show TBC Anniversary down 19% and MoP Classic down 18% week on week, while Classic Era barely moves.
The number of players appearing in raid logs on European realms has fallen again. For the week beginning 23 September, a raid log service counts 62,129 raiders in TBC Anniversary, against 76,267 the week before: a drop of 19%. Mists of Pandaria Classic went from 13,091 to 10,743, down 18%. That is the third week in a row in which both counts have fallen.
Classic Era is the exception. Its European count went from 7,940 to 7,807, a fall of 2%, which is close to flat. Era has no new content to lose players from and no announced future to wait for, and its raiders appear to be carrying on as before.
These numbers are not a count of everyone playing. A raid log service only sees raids that players record and upload, so the figures move when fewer people raid and also when fewer people bother uploading. They cover normal realms and leave out PvP realms. Blizzard publishes nothing of this kind and has not commented on any of it, so this is one service's data and nothing more.
The fall began in the week the WoW Forever beta opened, on 17 September, and has continued through the 2 weeks since. The beta runs until 21 October, so there is a month before the question answers itself: if the counts come back after launch, the drop was players testing Forever; if they do not, something else is going on in both versions.
