So, looking at the stats released by MMO Champion it looks like Mythic Raiding has been an abject failure in terms of participation numbers.
A few days ago I guesstimated that Mythic was catering to between 2 to 5% of the player base.
Looks like that estimation was absolutely right on the nose.
At best, in BRF, 5.15% of players have killed a Mythic boss. That was Beastlord. Oregorger and Gruul, the 2nd & 3rd most popular encounters in terms of kills were at 4.6% and less than 4% at 3.99% respectively.
Halfway through Mythic, only 3.27% of players are getting kills (Flamebender).
Beastlord: 5.15%
Oregorger: 4.6%
Gruul: 3.99%
Hans/Franz: 3.47%
Flamebender: 3.27%
Kromog: 2.48%
Thogar: 1.95%
Maidens: 1.23%
Blast Furnace: 0.8%
Blackhand: 0.4%
Would you consider Mythic a success when the latter half of the hardest content is being seen by less than 2.5% of the player base?
LFR and overall figures however are also down from participation numbers in SoO, but the decline is particularly egregious at the higher difficulties.
Why?
Because Blizzard put so much time and effort into Mythic, gambling with player retention by locking out a lot of players from even competing at the highest difficulty level, and these figures back this up.
What it also proves is that LFR players prefer to get proper tier pieces over welfare “LFR tier” sets, where the set bonuses can be counted towards the 2 & 4 piece set bonuses on gear found in normal mode and above.
With something like a 10% drop in participation in LFR, it is still by far the most popular method that players use to see the raid content. The admittedly excellent LFG tool implemented in WoD has been somewhat hamstrung by idiots looking Curve achievements, even after a week of the content being open. Furthermore most of these LFG Nazis are completely under-geared and patently looking a carry to achievements and titles.
But the paucity of player participation in Mythic raiding is the headline news here.
Will Blizz revert to the old SoO model of Flex/Normal/Heroic?
For those remaining in WoW I hope so, I really do.
Deliberately gating the highest difficulty behind body requirements, in an expansion that’s lost more subscribers than any before it in the game’s decade of existence, meaning getting those bodies has been problematic to say the least, has seen Mythic falling somewhat flat on its face.
Outside of a few thousand players, the general population in WoW, including the average raider, doesn’t really give two shits about World Firsts. Certainly the non-WoW larger gaming community gives less than zero fucks about it, and it’s hardly a draw into the game for anyone outside of WoW, except in the minds of those aforementioned several thousand.
