I know it's been a while since a lot of these things happened, but Cataclysm (and its continued hate it recieves all these years later) is to me, the biggest reason why Blizzard should NEVER take too much stock into what its fans are saying.
I understand the opinion that people who are willing to invest the time into making a feedback post deserve to be listened to. However, here are some reasons below that I completely lose sympathy with that:
MAJOR Things Complained about during WoTLK (THE BEST XPAC EVAR for a lot of people on these forums.)
-Dalaran (too laggy, spend all your time there.)
-Heroic Dungeons (too easy, too fast, no CC, bring back BC style HM's)
-Raid Scaling (Why can't 10 man have same loot as 25, they weren't on same lockout which led to people doing the same raids twice a week.)
-Levelling Takes Too Long (Vanilla quests still existed, BC/Wrath weren't quick strolls through the zones.)
-Reputations (Wrath reps suck/dont offer good enough rewards.)
-PVP (People dying to have rank system back for BG's)
So what does Blizzard give you?
-Stormwind/Org main cities
- DIFFICULT Heroic Dungeons with needing to CC trash, know mechanics, and be geared enough to do it.
- 10/25 Man Same Loot/Same Lockouts (I know there were tuning issues initially)
-Reduced levelling time & flying right off the bat at 80.
-Reputations you could do via dailies or tabard dungeon grinding (which gets you gear anyway) with rewards being mounts & epic raid loot.
-Rated BG's added to PVP
And guess what? So many people CRAPPED ALL OVER THIS
.... What?!
Blizzard then hit a hard abort button on the direction they were going, and seemed like they effectively gave up on Cataclysm end game and moved on to MoP (with the crappy lack of content Dragon Soul patch.)
I could go on with examples from MoP & Cataclysm, but the morale of this post?
The players aren't game designers. They don't work for Blizzard. Are there good ideas in there? Sure!
But the majority of them aren't - as in they either aren't good ideas, or they are good ideas in theory that wind up really hurting the game in another way. (Looking at you LFD, LFR, SkillUps without seeing your Trainer, faster levelling, World Bosses...)
Don't let the fans dictate the direction of the game - because its been proven over and over that they don't REALLY know what they want - they just THINK they have all the answers to everything.
(Why isn't the game like the "glory days" of BC/Wrath still? BECAUSE THE PLAYERS DIDNT WANT IT TO STAY THAT WAY!!)
With a new expansion coming out, and WoD having a ton of criticism (and I agree with a lot of it), I feel like WoD however is just a product of Blizzard listening TOO MUCH to its fans on the forums and such (guess what? raiding and only raiding isnt the end all be all of WoW! who knew?!)...
I sincerely hope Blizzard doesn't completely overhaul the game (yet again) based highly on what the players post about. Because for 3 straight expansions, it isn't working.