You have no elements to link active subscriptions and the quality of an expansion.
If you followed what Blizzard said in the last 10 years, you'd have read an interesting article about this (no idea how to find it today).
Basically, they said that they have always lost a lot of players (all the time, people quit for various reasons), but that since the game was still relatively new and fresh, it gained more people than it lost.
Cataclysm was the expansion when less players joined WoW than players quit WoW, so the total number began to drop.
A good phrase to keep in mind: "Correlation does not imply causation" (which obviously does not mean Cataclysm was a good expansion, you'll be the judge of that).
At the beginning of Vanilla and that for months unless you were in a top guild, and even then, MC epics were very far from free, first due to the difficulty (new mmo, rf farming, tactics etc...) and later then due to the FEW epics drops / boss for a big 40 man sized raid.
Every entry in WoW has always had overwhelming amounts of complaints. It's just what people do, for everything, ever... in life.
I remember reading the old WoW forums back then and there was a LOT of criticism towards TBC.
Then, when WOTLK came, there were a lot of discontent voices which heralded TBC as the best thing ever and WOTLK as a failure.
Now WOTLK is consistently considered one of the best, if not the best, expansions in WoW, followed only by TBC, and nobody seems to remember that there was a time when both of them were relentlessly criticized.
Not as much as today but people didnt hang arround on forums that much.
That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange Aeons even Death may die.
It proberly did not recieve the large amount as the current game does today, but many did complain indeed. I just think that since many of the current players were not active on any forums at that time, they did not really see or feel the complaints Many people were too busy with their guild/raid progression to really worry, so it was left to the very dedicated and/or high skilled players. Yet i do believe, that if you made a serview of all players then and now, the % of satisfied people are proberly close to the same The forums, twitter and places like MMO-Champion are just more well known now, so many more people are taking their troubles to the internet community.
May the lore be great and the stories interesting. A game without a story, is a game without a soul. Value the lore and it will reward you with fun!
Don't let yourself be satisfied with what you expect and what you seem as obvious. Ask for something good, surprising and better. Your own standards ends up being other peoples standard.
Yes, TBC received many complaints, like every single iterations of WoW.
These complaints, though, were quite a bit different, because the entire design and the population was very different. And yes, there was little craving to go back to Vanilla, because TBC was still largely the same paragdim, and the game hadn't devolved yet - these specific complaints about getting back to the better early design didn't happen until WotLK and the "new design" of extreme accessibility (don't get confused by people putting Vanilla, TBC and WotLK together, these are often people who did during WotLK).
Ones I remember;
Sci-fi theme with cyber-demons and crystal spaceships didn't fit a fantasy MMO.
Welfare epics from arenas (lose 10 matches a week for free loot!) and heroic 5-mans.
Change from 40-man to 25-man raids.
Alts having to go through long attunements.
Paid services, especially the name change had people worried about ninjas getting away.
Characters without CC and/or AoE found it hard getting in 5-man groups.
Mages were beaten by warlocks in both PvP and PvE, about 90% of the Blizzard warlock forum was threads from bitching mages.
If you had 40 people and you couldnt kill stuff in MC i'm actually suprised you managed to get to lvl 60.
MC is literally the easiest raid ever. Yes. It was easier then UBRS, LBRS. Maybe on par with Strat and scolo when they where 10 mannable.
In no world ever did you need to be in a top guild to clear MC. You just needed to have 40 people who could actually show up at the same time at lvl 60.
Fire resistance gear later made that raid basicly 5 man-able.
There is a reason the race in MC was who had the fastest clear time, not who could kill raggy first.
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Pretty much the entire BC until the craftet swords wherent viable anymore. Especially pre the frenzy nerf.
Ironic that you speak about "people forget" when overusing one of the legends about TBC.
Reality is, every single spec was actually viable at every type of content, and the gap between the worst ones and the best ones is actually not very different than the gap today.
If its a thing that exists, someones complained about it at length.
..and so he left, with terrible power in shaking hands.
Moving away from PvP, the cloth DPS crafted sets were BiS for a gigantic majority of the expansion. Iirc, the only helm that replaced the crafted helm for mages was the drop from Illidan (Illidari Cowl?), and most specs were expected to get their 4 piece from everything except that helm. I think there was one exception for a caster to get their arena gloves. (Lol, 2% crit on FoL for holy paladins, #1)
It was kind of ridiculous, dinging level 70 on my priest as shadow and expecting to craft all of that gear to be extremely deadly. Ooooh, the mana battery I was, and all the innervates and mana-tides I had on cooldown...
People that confuse logical fallacy with false make me cringe.
Correlation doesn't prove causation but neither does it disprove causation, it literally just says "B following A doesn't on its own say anything about whether A causes B"
It might or it might not.
There is enough supporting evidence that not only is this not a statistical occurrence of unrelated events but an actual business plan bearing fruit.
ActiBlizz decided to refactor their game with the explicit knowledge that it could cost them subscribers (for a trade-off of increased ARPU)