Which, in case you were wondering, is a nine-year low for the popular MMO. A figure which was released as part of the most recent Activision Blizzard Quarterly Report, represents the subscriber base for World of Warcraft at the end of June 2015. With the last reported figure being at 7.1 million this drop of an additional 1.5 million players continues a downward trend for the MMO.

It wasn't long ago that the subscriber base for WoW was as high as 10 million players. An increase which was seen after the release of the expansion Warlords of Draenor last November. Although 5.6 million players still positions the game as the most popular MMO on the market, its beginning to look like WoW might slowly be losing some of its lasting popularity.

But, things are not as dire as they seem. Blizzard are expected to announce a new expansion for World of Warcraft at Gamescom, which should no doubt help stabilise things and get those numbers trending back upward. Or at least that's the plan.

Milk the cash cow for as long as feasible, they've already got replacement revenue streams and others lined up innit.

As it currently stands CS:GO has more active players than WoW. That's how low WoW has sunk.

I only just re-subbed last week.

Edit: I'll probably end up cancelling again and just play until the end of the month as I never really played the latest expansion, one thing that annoys me is Guild drama I logged in last night and about 20 people /gquit over some mount promise and so much drama I'm like WTF I just want to play a game.

Yeah, they s*** the bed a little with this expansion. The quality of the content was some of their best, but there just wasn't enough of it. As far as content goes its had the least of any expansion and it cost the most. Too much emphasis on the garrison stuff, it wasnt a replacement for actual real content no matter how hard they wanted it to be. I'm sure they know they f***ed up though, they're not idiots. hoping they pull a D3 with the next expansion and fix all the problems and return to awesome form.

It really is like they don't understand their market. Remember 10 years ago when WoW was released? Yeah, a lot of us were in our late teens, early 20s. But guess what - it's 10 years later, and we all have jobs now. Well, most of us. But what we definitely don't have time for is to sit down and play long extended single sessions which is what all the raid content is geared towards.

Thing is, lately, WoW has very much been moving towards a more casual model where you can play for 15 minutes and still do one of the wings of a raid or a dungeon or some dailies. It caters for the casual player and the time-poor player far more now than it ever did, and thats often one of the biggest criticisms levelled at it, that it has become too casual.

Personally, I've never really been on the 'too casual and dumbed down' bandwagon, at least I haven't been in the past. Recent changes though have started to make me wonder. In the past even amongst all the content aimed at the more casual or beginner players I was able to find enough complexity to keep me challenged and interested. They've been chipping away at that over the course of this expansion though, the most recent patch took a big chunk of complexity out of Monk tanking when previously I really enjoyed the challenge of monk tanking. Then I read they're not happy with how complex Demonology is for Warlocks and they're going to significantly change that and 'streamline' it in a future patch, and my Demo warlock is the other toon I've really enjoyed playing so that has me uneasy.

The Mythic 5 mans don't offer up any sort of challenge at all, I was hoping for something that would challenge me but instead you can still just facepull huge packs of trash at a time and aoe them down. The Timewalking feature sounded cool on paper, but they erred on the side of easy and casual with the scaling, so it doesn't scale you down anywhere near enough for it to feel challenging or for it to feel like the dungeon originally did. After the initial little nostalgia kick wears off, they're just a huge drag. Tanaan Jungle is pretty cool though, I like what they've done there, I'd love to see some max level endgame zones of that kind be in the next expansion at launch, its far more interesting than just grinding out dailies imo. Blackrock Foundry and Hellfire Citadel are fantastic raids, but with the hard 20 player cap on Mythic and the inability to cross-realm it, they've essentially gated off the best and most challenging form of it from a vast majority of players, so thats just s***.

Looking forward to getting a sweet tan

Yeah I picked up that it was fake at the end when it said parody

Pretty cool. Love the part where Khadgar flies into the King and says "The Burning Legion has returned".

Amazing! Actually the exact expansion I was hoping for, so glad its not some s*** South Seas thing. Have been saying they need to bring it back to traditional Warcraft, well it doesn't get much more Warcraft than opening the Tomb of Sargeras. Thats some Warcraft 2 s*** right there. Apocalyptic Burning legion invasions, Demon hunters, Illidan, Titans, the Emerald Nightmare, this is the s*** I've been waiting for. Then throw in some Blue Dragonflight storylines, some War of the Ancients era Neltharion (pre Deathwing) stuff, the badass Viking dudes and Valkyr from Wrath, and Azshara for good measure.

Pandas were a fun distraction, and Draenor was essentially just filler that served to get Gul'dan back into play, but THIS stuff is where Warcraft shines.

How much game time is required to get a token?

You buy tokens ingame for gold off the AH, the price fluctuates depending on supply and demand but on average its about 30k for a token that gives you 30 days of game time.

I don't think it would really affect the figures though, because someone still has to buy the tokens for real money and put them up for sale. So even though the people spending gold on tokens aren't paying a sub, theres still someone furthur down the line who's still paying for their sub.

So Blizzard only make around $56 million a month from subscriptions now? How do they even manage to stay afloat?

Hey Khel can I get 30k gold please? I want to wow it up again after my vanilla days.

pretty easily doable within the 30 day time frame, still takes some effort but if you have a few alts it's a breeze

F***** dog. Tempted to buy a subscription to checkout the garrison feature. is it just cookie cutter gimmickie junk or can you have lots of fun with it?

Its cool, especially with the added shipyard now. It becomes a chore and a grind after you're doing it for months on end because once you've maxed it out it doesn't really change much after that point, but its fun until you get to that point. Its woven through the 90 - 100 levelling experience really well too, you kind of build up your base as you push furthur into Draenor and recruit new followers and get schematics for new buildings as you go through the zones.

The main problem with it is they put too much reliance on it filling a gap in endgame content, and it really doesn't. Its great while levelling up and while you're still unlocking s*** and its all new and your character is getting tonnes of benefit out of it, but that tapers off after the first couple of months and then it just becomes a chore. It should never have been pushed as something to occupy people at max level, it really shines at its best as levelling content/part of the story.

Hehe, yeah, that'd be f*****g awful. I went through it on my monk and on my warlock, I was gonna play my mage but the thought of even going through it all again put me off. It also f*****g sucks how little of it is account-wide. Like when I levelled up my Warlock and had to get ALL the followers again and rebuy all the schematics and level everything back up, it was a crock of s***.

But yeah, definitely didn't turn out as good as it sounded on paper. And as a replacement for player housing it was pretty pathetic, theres pretty much no customisability to it, every horde garrison essentially looks the same as every other horde garrison.

Thats just the nomenclature used to commonly refer to max level content, it doesn't literally mean its the end of the game. Just like when you're feeding in Dota it doesn't mean you're going and serving the other team dinner.