Again, it`s not
just the leveling. It`s everything. When I list all the things that have been wrecked, nerfed and trivialized I get accused of writing "essays" and when I list an example like this, people pretend the example is the only thing that`s wrong.
Let me give you another example anyway: in WotLK the harvesting time for herbs and ore was reduced from five seconds (It think. Unless it was even longer. I can`t find any info and can`t remember exactly.) to two seconds.
Respawn of nodes had already been nerfed at least twice during classic and TBC, and multiple nodes for ore was removed as well. Why was all this done? Who in the world was bothered enough by this to complain that harvesting was "too hard"? I had never before heard anybody complain about it, never read a single post complaining about it on the forums, yet Blizzard nerfed the entire thing to shit. Yes, to shit. When combined with the introduction of flying mounts this made farming mats trivial, when it used to be a risky and time-consuming endeavor, likely to get you embroiled in genuine, and usually vicious, PVP. Nothing like competing for nodes with an evenly matched enemy, when both are as desperate to get their mats farmed. In fact, the main reason I had to learn how to PVP originally was that I absolutely
had to farm herbs to be able to raid. And to be able to farm herbs I absolutely had to learn how to defend myself. And this then made
both farming and PVP
meaningful, rather than some trivial afterthought as it has been since WotLK.
So a few nerfs and a helping of convenience and an entire part of the game was wrecked. And it`s one example of hundreds and hundreds, because
everything has been nerfed. Usually over and over and over again. What and MMORPG needs more than anything is a persistent world. You cannot continually have challenging efforts be made pointless by nerfs. Someone has spent weeks and months working the hard content, only to have their efforts turned to nothing by nerfs, which make people able to do the same thing you have done in one tenth the time or less. The reason for this is that nothing has meaning in such a game, and there`s no incentive for long term effort of any kind. In fact it is being actively discouraged by Blizzard and has been for many years.