If you’ve been finding it harder to form a Mythic+ dungeon group in World of Warcraft: The War Within, it would appear that it’s not in your head: A popular player-run site known as Raider.IO released data that suggest player participation has dipped significantly.
According to a new bar graph that compares M+ participation in the first 13 weeks of TWW’s Season 1 to other expansions within the same time frame, the numbers have dipped across the board in all of the metrics the site tracks, including total runs and runs over time, and the number of finished M+ runs aren’t even nearing the percentage of the season’s first week. The data stack draws from over 20M TWW runs that players have logged with the site and WoW’s own leaderboard.
“As much as we hate to say it, there may actually be some credence behind the claims that Mythic+ participation is at an all-time low,” the site posits. “There will always be a drop-off in participation as the Season progresses, but The War Within is the only one with such a steady decline.”
There are a variety of factors that are likely contributing to this decline, chief among them being the addition of new ways to earn loot such as delves along with adjustments made to the activity itself, critique of recent dungeons, and frustration about class balance. Raider.IO’s other graphs tell some pretty damning stories about class popularity and group compositions (though of course it reminds players its data are provided “for information purposes only, and not to advocate for any kind of meta”).
“When we added Delves in The War Within, we knew that some number of players would shift from M+ to Delves as their primary activity due to the greater flexibility,” game director Ion Hazzikostas told PC Gamer. “But if people who have really enjoyed M+ gameplay in the past are feeling frustrated today, we agree that’s a problem.”
Blizzard has obviously been keeping an eye on the discontent with M+, with plans to change affixes and keystone deprecation in Season 2 and the possibility of replacing M+ timers with a death counter instead. Internal testing for the next M+ season is already underway, so it’s a matter of watching, waiting, and especially iterating, according to Hazzikostas.
“At the end of the day, it falls to us to create the conditions that provide everyone who wants to have a fun dungeon experience with the right level of challenge and a group to run with,” he says. “As we begin the cycle, the health of M+ is a major area of focus for our design teams, and for game leadership.”
