Blizzard is now prioritizing Time Played as their main KPI over active users

I see this as capitulation in the face of dwindling player counts [1] that WoW will need to pivot focus to keeping the tight-knit core of players coming back, rather than trying to attract new ones.

It would therefore seem they’re done growing and are planning to go into maintenance mode.

[1] https://headphonesaddict.com/world-of-warcraft-player-count/

So instead of making good games that attract more people they choose to make grindy, annoying games that force players to spend more time in them and likely spend money to reduce those annoyances. Almost like... paying to play less. Counterintuitive to focus on that metric in that case, no?