The well-known YouTuber Bellular is one of the biggest critics of World of Warcraft. He regularly reviews the latest data about the game and has drawn mostly bleak conclusions in recent years. However, the latest numbers have him smiling with visible delight.
Who is the analyst?
- Bellular repeatedly evaluates data from websites like WarcraftLogs, Raider.io, or recently keyscore.me.
- From this, he deduces how World of Warcraft is doing currently. At the end of 2021, for instance, he found out that there are now less than 2 million players playing WoW.
- He was particularly pessimistic about Shadowlands. Bellular states, WoW has hit its low point. However, a few weeks later he has a different opinion.
This is what Bellular says now: In his latest video, Bellular once again analyzes numbers from raids and dungeons that were playable in Season 4 of Shadowlands (via YouTube). The special thing about Season 4 is that it is a ‘Best Of’ patch.
Instead of new content, all raids from Shadowlands were reconfigured with ‘fateful’ affixes and dungeons from old expansions returned as Mythic+ versions. This is the first time something like this has happened in this form.
Bellular shows that this attempt was a success. The season didn’t necessarily bring back more players, but it motivated the remaining ones to play more and achieve things they hadn’t before:
- while fewer players visited raids, more actually completed them
- 93.04% of players who defeated the first boss in normal mode also defeated the final boss of the raids on average
- for comparison: the highest completion rate before was Antorus in Legion with 85.36%
- the heroic mode still has a completion rate of 60.5%
- Antorus had a rate of 44.05%
It gets even crazier. According to Bellular’s data, the number of guilds that have defeated the final bosses in Mythic has increased by 1,750%. Before Season 4, only 18 guilds had succeeded in defeating the Jailer on Mythic. In the season, the average number of kills across all raids is 333 (and currently 326 on the Jailer according to MeinMMO reader Zid). The numbers refer to the 6 weeks after the release of the respective update.
Season 4 of Shadowlands has achieved something that no previous expansion has done, showing that the ‘Best Of’ experiment was a good idea. We have embedded the full video here for you:
“Season 4 is a limited success”
Bellular continues to discuss the dungeons in Season 4. Here he shows that weeks after the release of the season, about the same number of dungeons were completed as in previous seasons. While this is not visible growth, it also is not the decline in player numbers that one might otherwise observe.
In general, Shadowlands with Season 4 has managed to keep players more engaged than all previous seasons. This is partly because the content drought was simply absent. Players had something to do all the time because they could always work towards something new and better through unlimited valor points and the creation catalyst.
Asmongold, the largest Twitch streamer for World of Warcraft, shares the same opinion. In his video, he agrees with almost all of Bellular’s points (via YouTube). He even wishes that Blizzard should do something like Season 4 more often.
With a short film series, Blizzard raises excitement for Dragonflight and already teases a big plot twist in the story:
Bellular concludes his analysis with the words:
Season 4 is a limited success and that’s all it could ever have been. […] The idea of creating a ‘greatest hits remastered’ season at the end of an expansion is simply wonderful. It takes what’s usually a content drought and makes something out of it. It’s nice to create a data video that isn’t completely bleak.
Bellular is visibly happy and can’t help but smile. He hopes that the upcoming expansion Dragonflight will also be successful. In our special on MeinMMO, you will find all the information about the new expansion:
WoW Dragonflight: Release, Beta, new class – Everything we know
