Originally Posted by
Drithien
And therein lies the problem in my opinion.
World of WarCraft was not advertised as a raiding-based game to most of its audience. Certainly gamers with previous experience from mmos realized that there would be some type of such activity, but they were, and are, just a small minority. The vast majority of players that flocked to the game came for its open world aspect; that promise of a vast world filled with mysteries and adventures; not the raiding.
And initially, they got what they came for; vanilla, with all its shortcomings, offered an immense amount of open world content, mostly concerning exploration and questing; while at the same time it provided some, but very limited compared to nowadays, hand-holding. The amount of content, the type of content, and the time spent figuring out how to approach it, led to the most positive period of the game, for casual players mostly as well.
And it was only when the developers tried to shoehorn everyone into raiding, collecting points, repeating dungeons, gathering gear, etc; that the game started to become boring, repetitive, feel like a chore, and the greatest "sin" of all: lack excitement. Why did they do that? Other than the fact that it is easier, cheaper and faster to develop instanced and repeated content than open world one, I don't know. But they did. And they dragged most of the casual players to that content through the lure of rewards.
The result is a game that is inherently boring, favours and even instills routines (in a supposedly grand adventure of all things), promotes individuality instead of cooperation and just plain feels like a tour, a very comfortable one, through a park, rather than an exciting journey through a mythical world.
At the same time you have Skyrim exceeding 10 million copies sold, in an age of rampant piracy nonetheless, by doing exactly what vanilla did: offer a vast, complex open world for players to adventure in. And then people wonder what went wrong?