Originally Posted by
Pantalaimon
This is going to sound "elitest" but that is how collecting or acquiring things go in games and in many aspects in real life too. Ever since WoW was created and released on live servers back in Vanilla all of the way up til now there have always been things that had limited time windows to acquire it. Naxx 60 was the best example of this. You had gear & items almost nobody got access to that were then forever retired in their original form & color scheme, and there was a legendary even fewer people and guilds were able to obtain. Every single expansion increased the amount of rewards that were limited, whether bear mounts, raid titles from limited attempts per lockout, gear and quests from older content, transmog sets from dungeons, or legendary rings & questlines. Sure there are players who might feel a little bummed about joining later than many other players, who see a particular reward and wish they could obtain it, but if they weren't active participants in the game's community at the time why would it make sense for them to achieve everything from the past?
These real life examples are a little silly, but it is to help establish my point. Beanie Babies were part of a large collecting craze, and probably still are for some crowds to this date. Some of the stuffed animals that were released early on were relatively or comparatively common for the time, but eventually production for them stopped and the company moved on to produce other Beanie Baby items. After many years some of those first stuffed animals became rare collector items that gradually became more sought after by other collectors. The vast majority of Beanie Baby collectors will never get those collector items because of money and due to the fact that they either were not born doing that early part of the Beanie Baby craze, did not know of the social trend, or any other number of reasons. If there are so many people that want those early items should the company simply reproduce them all over again to make up for the fact that people simply want it?
This second example is where it gets really extreme so take it with even more of a grain of salt, but if somebody got wrapped up into the Olympics sports scene and wished they had got to experience a particular Olympics event they either couldn't or didn't attend would their hopes be realistic to think that the Olympics will be hosted at that same spot with the same countries participating in the events? Most likely not.
Now back to WoW, some things just shouldn't be reproduced because the 'casuals' and 'hardcore' players alike participated in the game during the event of the activity, along with all of the hype, strategy, patience, luck, rng, nerdraging, grinding, etc of the game in that window of time. Eventually those in game achievements would turn into a type of 'veteran's stamp' or 'customer loyalty' type of experience (again both for 'casuals' and 'hardcores' depending on what we're talking about in game). If you join at a later time, or even unsub for who knows how long, why does it make sense for you to obtain literally everything when you weren't an active participant in the game's community and a paying subscribed customer to the product? Having limited windows for some things provides incentives to stay so that you don't miss something because in the end the game is still a product that pays for part of the purpose of the company existing. If you have no worry about missing anything from unsubbing then players wouldn't have a big deal about taking long extended breaks from the game (more than what is normal in today's WoW).