Blizzard has made made innovative and creative choices and decisions to there games, none more so then Wow, and for a game near to a decade old, and a game legacy older then that, a lot has been decided upon to keep it going.
But not all those decisions have been good ones, and have even damaged the reputation of the game, either making people lose faith, trust, or even go as far to quit the game for a time, or permanently.
In your opinion, and please give even a brief as to why you think this, what do you feel has been the five worst decisions to the game, either for gameplay, design, lore and story, or any factors that you simple can't agree with or enjoy.
Mine are
1 - In introduction to the shop. Yes yes its new, despite buying items from wow's website is not like mounts and pets. But as danger dolan put it, this feature has steadily became something worse and worse in terms of how blizzard use it, what they sell on it, and how far they are prepared to use it to sell items and get more money from the playerbase. For a game that is sub based, having pets and mounts is one thing, but armor, and buying lv90 characters, features that you can do in the game, I feel this is going to get worse over time.
2 - The separation of pvp and pve. Might be stange to think of, but there was a time when people formed large groups to come and fight the opposing faction, either in major cities or out in the open. I formed many a group in the past myself for fun to go attack alliance cities and counter account ones done to ours, leading to big battles in a none battle ground setting. It was chaotic, but it was fun. Since then, blizzard seems to have worked on making this less and less of an enjoyment and something people want to do, from flying in azeroth, to making guards in major cities hit like trucks, to making faction leaders extremely hard to take down, people have ground tired of this, and you hardly see anyone forming sich groups now. All just so it doesn't effect peoples pve?
3 - The direction of the story since the end of wrath. Up until the end of wrath, the story in wow felt like it was growing and getting better and better, it seemed like the devs knew what they were doing, from Illidan and kil'jaeden and the draenei and blood elves, to death khights and the old gods and of course arthas, it felt like the game had a growing appeal on story alone.
And then cataclysm happened, and the story of the game became a joke to so many, everything from one side getting more focus to the other, to over powered lore figures doing all the work, to dumming down of bad guys, to contrived plotlines, to absolute silliness and even parodies of there own story, people were no longer happy with the direction of the lore, and it seemed like that well of story and innovative ideas they had from WC3 had all but dried up.
4 - The linear questing experience. Why this became a thing god knows, because nobody complained about the questing system prior to this, aside from it needing a little more sparkle, which quests did in cata and mists, but the way they were presented, that you couldn't do quests except in a linear fashion like a final fantasy game, it made the experience of leveling any new characters such a drag, and the reworking of vanilla zones into cataclysm zones did just that to these hubs we knew for years.
5 - Of course, the daily questing system. Way I see it, wrath had the best setup to all endgame. You had loads of dungeons to do heroics in, tabards to grind, and by doing dungeons you got gear and rep and got prepared for raids because you practiced your character in a setting more suited for doing bosses and content in. you were also not required to grind dailies, but you could for extra rep if you got bored of doing it one way.
Cata started to knock this on the head, with the increase in difficulty in heroic dungeons, yet the system was still there.. and of course, mists killed it, because to get upgrades, you had to do dailies, at the determent of doing content that would give to practice for raiding.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on blizzards mistakes, probably not all shared, but I don't give a shit, its just thinks I feel they didn't think carefully enough about at the time when making them.
What are your ones?