Most of you are real WoW retirees – you’ve been playing forever

We wanted to know how long you guys have been playing World of Warcraft – and the answer is quite amusing. Because it is the purest cliché.

A few days ago, we jokingly asked whether the MeinMMO community was more of a “wrath baby” or a “cataclysm kiddy” when it came to World of Warcraft. In other words, we wanted to know which expansion you started with World of Warcraft. Over 1,600 of you followed the call and gave your answer.

The result is amusingly striking and at the same time corresponds exactly to what one could expect.

Most are vanilla veterans

By far the majority of you have been with us since vanilla World of Warcraft (or at least they say so). A whopping 53% and thus 881 votes stated that they had already played before the first expansion. This definitely makes you one of the first WoW players and you can boast of having spent time in the game before others were even born. However, a look at the “/played” time could lead to small crises of meaning. Better not.

Our reader Koronus had just experienced Burning Crusade:

I started on August 20th, 2008. So I was still just inside TBC, even if I really had my new player experience with WotLK.

TMP wrote something like this in the comments:

WoW Beta to Cataclysm, actually continuously as a progress raider.

Unfortunately, our server was slowly dying back then, and transferring all my chars would have cost a ridiculous amount of money. That was the beginning of the end for me.

Then I played MoP and WoD again for a while, even raised a few new profession characters, but it wasn’t the same for me anymore.

Burning Crusade comes in at #2

By a significant margin, many players found their way into the World of Warcraft during the The Burning Crusade expansion. As the first addon ever, WoW still had a lot of traction back then. The game was still in its “boom” phase, and there were many who finally found a point of entry to dive into Azeroth (and Outland) with the launch of the expansion.

By then, WoW had evolved significantly, and with a focus on well-loved characters like Kael’thas, Illidan, and Lady Vashj, Burning Crusade was able to delight many who still remembered Warcraft III.

“Wrath-Babies” land in 3rd place

In third place are the newcomers who started with Wrath of the Lich King. This is not surprising, since Wrath of the Lich King represented the pinnacle of World of Warcraft playership. This was largely because the story brought back Arthas, who ruled Northrend as the Lich King – and was an open point in the storyline since Warcraft III. Many found their introduction to WoW in this expansion while ending with a storyline that began in a strategy game many years ago.

Irxg writes:

Started with WotLK, but my best time was at the start of Cataclysm, when the dungeons were getting hard again and mana was running low. Blizzard lost me in the Tierra del Fuego expansion. There was no healer-priest raid loot in the Firelands back then – and Blizzard thought that was a ‘great’ idea at the time.

The newer the addon, the fewer new players

And that actually says everything exciting, because from now on the “curve” develops exactly as it did in the first three expansions: The later the expansion appeared, the fewer players have access to the World of Warcraft there found. Therefore, the other numbers just in quick run:

Answer shows what problem WoW has: But with all of this, one mustn’t forget that there is also a pretty big problem in WoW in this conspicuous distribution of votes: World of Warcraft is finding it increasingly difficult to attract new players and the problem only gets bigger with every expansion.

However, there could be other factors at play as well. So it could be that WoW fans of younger expansions simply hang around less on news portals or get their information from other sources and therefore appear less in the survey.

Still, it’s amazing that the curve is exactly in the order of release of the expansions. Or was that exactly what you expected?

The next WoW expansion Dragonflight is the great beacon of hope – can it tear something again?