Negatitivy surrounding wow

[Jambalam]

I'm somewhat confused as to why the negativity too.

There is nothing in BFA that stands out to me as absolutely bad. It's the same WoW it has always been.

Can someone summarize for me exactly which parts of the game are generally considered bad right now by the community?

The Entire Azerite System
Class Design
Island Expeditions
Warfronts
Reward Structures

[Swarzsinne]

At this point, I would've honestly resubbed if the D:I situation hadn't happened. I'm a bigger Diablo fan than WoW, and that whole thing has turned me against Activision-Blizzard until they actually say something about a PC Diablo release (rumors don't count, and they've been vague at best, which isn't a great strategy when a single "we're working on a PC release" would do).

As for BfA and why I unsubbed from it to begin with? It retained all the boring parts of Legion and, once you finish each zone once, wasn't really all that fun to level alts in. Leveling alts was the main way I entertained myself in WoW. Their tweaks to leveling speed, and the relatively slow speed you move through BfA compared to the lightening speed you could move through Legion made me lose interest. M+ is fine, Raiding is fine, but there is nothing else that's really worthwhile (could just be personal burnout, I'm not beyond admitting that this is mostly a problem I have with the game).

Also, was anyone else confused that they nerfed leveling speed to seemingly encourage people to buy level boosts, introduced allied races, then locked the heritage armor set behind manually leveling a class? I guess they wanted to make it clear the two things weren't linked, and they weren't trying to sell level boosts, but why not? Now that they've put leveling speed back where it should be, it'd be fair to drop the manual leveling requirement for heritage sets in order to try and get a bit of money from level boosts. Bit of a tangent, but I'm curious what others think.

I had over a years worth of /played, so I'm pretty invested into WoW. And, like I said, I would've resubbed because they fixed the problems they introduced into leveling. But then they spit on the Diablo community.

[xStevooo]

I'm somewhat confused as to why the negativity too.

There is nothing in BFA that stands out to me as absolutely bad. It's the same WoW it has always been.

Can someone summarize for me exactly which parts of the game are generally considered bad right now by the community?

See the post below yours, if you haven't experienced this i'll assume this is your first xpac.

[Gaidax]

I've played since before Vanilla actually.

In my opinion, and the reason why I play this game, is because it's always the same game and you kinda know what to expect:
Raiding + filler content and some story.

Being from Vanilla myself it resonates strongly with me. Ultimately, it's all the same game in that respect and you either like it or you don't.

I was raiding pretty much since I dinged level 60 in Vanilla, this is what I like and all the way through expansions since then it all remained constant - they add or remove systems, reshuffle classes and gear, change mechanics and so on and so forth, but in the end Cutting Edge is a Cutting Edge and this basically does not change and it is always there.

The things that change are more of the fluff to me, I have as much fun raiding now as I had back in TBC when the whole gameplay consisted of mashing Shadow Bolt button until your fingers bleed and I still had fun there.

Honestly the only time I did not have fun with raids was in Vanilla because I was a rookie who chose knight in the shining armor class only to get stuck as a healbot in raids and maybe these patches where class balance was so dogshit that you needed to perform almost biblical level of miracles to keep up and thankfully in BfA it's not the case, for me at least.


Systems? Azerite, Artifact, Tier sets, whatever - I really consider these to be pretty much the same shit in different variations - basically means to an end, so they don't bother me much, because as mythic raider you pretty quickly get whatever is bis or at least close up there anyway.

It's really the same game anyway - get your tier first 2 weeks from all the sources and go push mythic raids, get your Azerite first 2 weeks and go push mythic raids, get your artifact up and running first 2 weeks and go push mythic raids. Ultimately it's all same bonuses just in different packages that server the same cause anyway.

[Deleted]

Most WoW players have been playing for so long that they have passed the 'peak' moment of their playing, and it will probably never come back. 14 years and 7 expansions coming out have seen hundreds of thousands of guilds form and fizzle out as players join the game and leave it years later. WoW is an inherently social game and regardless of the specifics of the in-game mechanics, 99% of players favourite experiences came from playing with other players, in whatever form that took.

The main things missing from the vanilla experience are the levelling experience and joined on to that, is the sense of roleplaying in the community. However, if you enjoy the game and have the time to engage with other players then your experience can feel 'like vanilla'. Yes, it will be a different rotations and combat speed to 2004 but the nature of the game is the very much the same same, and your first time progressing through the end-game can be just as fun as those that raided Vanilla Naxx.

[lolpve]

Diablo Immortal + every new to BFA system (azerite, islands, warfronts) all being a flop created a perfect shitstorm

This. Blizzard are doing a great imitation of EA. Actually that's unfair, the fifa game series are better made than anything blizzard have done for many years.

[Vakir]

Your opinions are valid but I don't think they are the majority. I think if you did a survey of favorite raids from people who actually experienced them, ICC would rank highly along with Ulduar. I would guess both would make the top 5, which says a lot about the quality of Wrath as an expansion overall. Wrath also is considered the favorite expansion in every single poll I have ever seen done. You don't get that consistent of feedback without being strong in a lot of different areas in my opinion... class balance and gameplay, pvp, raids, dungeons, zones, etc.. Was every area perfect? Of course not, but the overall package was extremely high quality which is why 12+ million people payed a monthly sub to pay.

I mean, at least one of us thinks the other has an opinion that's valid.

Argumentum ad populum doesn't look good on anything. When you add in how completely fickle and braindead the WoW community is long before it was trying to make them braindead and you're not adding much to the discussion. Ignoring that 12 million users didn't account for all subscription payers (see that huge valley smack in the middle of the chart? It's because China lost rights to the game for that period), Blizzard has themselves stated that during the entire duration of the game's lifecycle up to the time subscription calculations stopped that new players were added as swiftly as old players left. What this means is that not everybody who was a paying customer during Wrath's lifecycle had a metric for understanding how the game used to be or how it would be later. "Wrathbaby" carries a way less negative connotation now than it did then, and there's reason for that - a large chunk of the population singing Wrath's praises currently have far less of an understanding of WoW's history prior to when it came out. It's almost like Warcraft's most popular villain and arguably the most popular class at the time brought in a huge chunk of new people or something.

But even if we look past that, you have just as many people now on hardcore fansites that sing the praises of Mists in retrospect in numerous polls despite hating it for the first and last quarter of its lifestyle, either because of early daily bloat or pre-successor content drought. But that's just it - the people singing the praises of these former installments are the diehards to begin with. Their views don't reflect the entire lifecycle of the game.

And even if we look past that, none of these polls are actually scientific in any way or require any understanding of data regarding who is doing the voting - how long they've played, whether they play currently, what their experiences are as players, or what have you.

So what we're left with is "Wrath existed during the time that the game was most marketable during the time that it brought in the most players and was made casual in the manner it is now - er, I mean, 'most accessible.'" Kind of sounds less impressive now, huh?

When I say Wrath valued skill over time investment, my comparison is to the more recent high end raiding era where split raiding was allowed to be FAR too lucrative for FAR too long and new systems like AP and TF basically required a significant investment of time OUTSIDE OF RAIDING or any cutting edge/high end group wouldn't even let you trial. Wrath and even extending into Cata/MOP was quite different in that regard. You didn't need to spend a ton of time outside of raid to be a potential asset to a high end raiding guild... you primarily needed skill. I say this as someone who raided with a 12 hour per week guild that achieved many highly ranked kills. I'm not saying you don't need any skill now, but skill alone IS NOT ENOUGH any more. You have to have a certain number of hours to invest outside of raiding time as well, which a lot of people, including myself, do not like and are simply not willing to do. I find it pointless as it proves nothing/takes no skill and see it as an intentional change in the paradigm by the dev team in a shortsighted attempt to increase MAUs. It's also why, in my opinion, the "high end raiding" community has never been smaller in size or less attractive to people to participate in.

I'd agree on a certain level, but then we already talked about the time/finite attempts issue. It wasn't skill oriented. It meant bleeding edge guilds were focusing their time on leveling and gearing alts for attempts rather than farming older tiers and/or M+ for gear and artifact power. The nature of what kind of bullshit maintenance that was being done changed, but it was still there. If anything, having 50 fresh attempts was more meaningful progression than a 2 item level increase from poopsocking your pendant to level 41 or whatever is now. The entire name of the game for winning the Heroic race was being able to learn mechanics through throwaway characters. It's a shame that the internet sucks at archiving this stuff, because the usual suspects that won out back in the day during said races - Ensidia, Vodka, et al. - fucking hated Wrath during these races for this reason.

Again, you can't judge the dwindling of these sorts of things on the numbers of how things look 15 years into the game's lifecycle relative to how things looked 4 years in. There's less raiding guilds now, but there were also less in Legion than WoD, but there were also less in WoD than Mists. You can argue there was a gradual decline in quality to correlate with this (although Legion was a large step up from WoD) but the correlation wouldn't mean anything. Raiding guilds have trickled down because the game has and other organized competitive games existed, even if they're not MMOs. Or. you know, the people playing those games...are 15 years older now and have families and other obligations.

There's other factors to go into, like the buff increase or weekly waits between wings in Icecrown - by creating encounters that are deliberately not possible at lower gear levels, you can artificially drive up the need for people to continue playing to a certain point in gearing up so they can successfully kill Arthas without the buff, but it means the buff is needed to successfully kill him the first time at high enough difficulty levels. Once people managed to do it sans buff, people celebrated it, but it only happened because of a long enough period of time farming gear to be able to manage it.

What is this if not an example of driving up MAUs and artificially bloating the amount of time? The only difference is, subscriptions were one size fits all without the introduction of things like the token. But it comes down to the same shit.

I also feel like you have a misguided opinion about "bring the player, not the class". The homogenization you and so many white knights cry about whenever you talk about the change was a GOOD change that was CHEERED at the time by serious and even more casual raiding guilds. It meant that if your Enhancement Shaman couldn't show up to raid that your chances of defeating whichever boss you were trying to progress on didn't go down the tubes because a frost DK could bring the same buff.

In one regard, it is nice, say, not needing 5 shaman to be able to reliably do a major encounter by allowing Lust to extend into the entire raid.

In another regard entirely, it is not fun starting to have the identity of a class pruned to the high hells specifically for this purpose. People look back and don't see that because it isn't as draconian as WoD or BFA's purge of abilities/identity, but it was there, and there was a damn good reason for the complaints. Similarly, the problem exists a lot around the idea of the fact that most people wouldn't have noticed the problem...if they were casual. There wasn't a huge gap, but the gap and stacking still existed to a massive degree on bleeding edge content (which for like 50% of the expansion's runtime were gimmicky fucking achievements rather than actual encounter changes). You were still seeing huge, HUGE "bring the class" encounters to Wrath's dying days, and when people complained about it (and mocked "bring the player not the class" to Ghostcrawler's face), the argument Blizzard issued was "that doesn't apply for top content." So basically, nothing actually changed but the implementation of watered down difficulties.

Again, this is my opinion but the popularity of the expansion and the dominance of Wrath in "favorite xpac" polls would indicate that I'm with the majority.

You can't tout the majority, which I already established is a fallacious argument, and also try to approach this from an elitist perspective to the point where Death's Demise somehow gives you a greater lens into the health of the game. It's contradictory at best and completely disingenuous at worst. Styling a game towards the unwashed masses is a slippery slope. WoW was incredibly popular among the average gamer with less than 1% of the population even touching raid content back in its earliest years. The entry to raiding did little to empower skilled but less time investing players into somehow breaching the glass ceiling - the ones who were decent already fucking did even if stacking and certain role barriers prevented them from making the most of certain groups. The people entering raids generally were only going to be as skilled or aspire as high as they already were prior to Wrath's release.

Everyone else who got a chance to enter raiding got to, but the people playing on a hardcore level were already seeking that out. None of the top guilds consisted of people who weren't already of the philosophy to do that because people who wanted to competitively raid already found a way to raid.

But Wrath didn't just change the entry point - it was the slippery slope beginning for the problem we have now. So you can praise it, but it won't change that you're indirectly praising things like the Dungeon Finder (you know, that thing people still hate...that started in Wrath) and LFR, because their DNA stems from Wrath. When you want all aspects of your game game to be accessible to grandmas by Street's own words, you're inviting some problems in as soon as you start making the changes to allow it.

You can remember some great encounters like Firefighter and Yogg+0, and oh were they great, but the rest of us will remember two of the lamest tiers in history (3.0 and ToC), a BG bad enough that it had to be removed recently, horrible and gimmicky vehicle combat being a part of core encounters, a vehicle dungeon so bad that it required developer bribes, a new class that was flagrantly broken and overplayed for the majority of its time, entry level raids that required sub-Heroic gear, gimmick achievements that extended gameplay over actual meaningful parts of their encounters, 4 different types of loot and upgrade tokens that were the start of Blizzard's loot bloat problem, community clashing over 10 vs. 25 logistics and rewards, guilds getting banned due to Arthas bugging out from them using Saronite Grenades in their rotation, making armies of progression alts, the entry of the Blizzard Store (with a paid mount that was clearly meant to be an Algalon drop, just like Heart of the Aspects was clearly meant to be for Heroic Deathwing over a recolor) etc. etc.

Activision's starting fingerprints are ALL over Wrath and everyone's either too dumb or too amnesiac to recognize it.

[trm90]

Being from Vanilla myself it resonates strongly with me. Ultimately, it's all the same game in that respect and you either like it or you don't.

I was raiding pretty much since I dinged level 60 in Vanilla, this is what I like and all the way through expansions since then it all remained constant - they add or remove systems, reshuffle classes and gear, change mechanics and so on and so forth, but in the end Cutting Edge is a Cutting Edge and this basically does not change and it is always there.

The things that change are more of the fluff to me, I have as much fun raiding now as I had back in TBC when the whole gameplay consisted of mashing Shadow Bolt button until your fingers bleed and I still had fun there.

Honestly the only time I did not have fun with raids was in Vanilla because I was a rookie who chose knight in the shining armor class only to get stuck as a healbot in raids and maybe these patches where class balance was so dogshit that you needed to perform almost biblical level of miracles to keep up and thankfully in BfA it's not the case, for me at least.


Systems? Azerite, Artifact, Tier sets, whatever - I really consider these to be pretty much the same shit in different variations - basically means to an end, so they don't bother me much, because as mythic raider you pretty quickly get whatever is bis or at least close up there anyway.

It's really the same game anyway - get your tier first 2 weeks from all the sources and go push mythic raids, get your Azerite first 2 weeks and go push mythic raids, get your artifact up and running first 2 weeks and go push mythic raids. Ultimately it's all same bonuses just in different packages that server the same cause anyway.

I'm in the exact same boat as you, since Vanilla I pretty much exclusively play this game to raid and it has been a stable constant. No matter how bad class design / gearing systems get, I'm never disappointed by upper level raiding and that's ultimately what matters most to me.

[Pheraz]

You can remember some great encounters like Firefighter and Yogg+0, and oh were they great, but the rest of us will remember two of the lamest tiers in history (3.0 and ToC), a BG bad enough that it had to be removed recently, horrible and gimmicky vehicle combat being a part of core encounters, a vehicle dungeon so bad that it required developer bribes, a new class that was flagrantly broken and overplayed for the majority of its time, entry level raids that required sub-Heroic gear, gimmick achievements that extended gameplay over actual meaningful parts of their encounters, 4 different types of loot and upgrade tokens that were the start of Blizzard's loot bloat problem, community clashing over 10 vs. 25 logistics and rewards, guilds getting banned due to Arthas bugging out from them using Saronite Grenades in their rotation, making armies of progression alts, the entry of the Blizzard Store (with a paid mount that was clearly meant to be an Algalon drop, just like Heart of the Aspects was clearly meant to be for Heroic Deathwing over a recolor) etc. etc.

Activision's starting fingerprints are ALL over Wrath and everyone's either too dumb or too amnesiac to recognize it.

Yes! I started in 2005 and I hated wrath for the various points you described in your long post.
I think it is no problem to have started somewhere in between not-the-beginning and now but if you did, you should not really come along and claim wrath was the best time in wow only because you started in there and did your first raids in your first guilds. The raids were ultra crap apart from ulduar. And the dungeons were just facerollroflstomp until ICC patch dungeons.

[WowIsDead64]

I feel like there's this huge negative aura around wow right now and with all the people saying stuff like "it'll never be as great as vanilla" or "these new players will never understand" it makes trying wow for us new players much harder. At this point is it even worth it. Are new players ever going to experience a wow as "good as vanilla" or is it all just nostalgia and ignorance

It's due to Blizzard themselves. They have new philosophy. Now it's "Why should we invest more money into making better game, if players, who have got bored and burnt out, would quit anyway, and new players would play any crap, we'd make, due to novelty effect? So, let's just make crappy game with everything, built around keeping new players subbed for as long, as it possible, and invest more into marketing, than into game itself". And in the past it was about making game fun.

And MMOs have always been about long time investment. There are still lots of players, who love Wow despite of fact, they have been playing for a long time. And they feel betrayed, when Blizzard just kick them out of game and replace them with short term newbies.

[TaurenNinja]

WoW is one of very few games that are pretty much destined to be hated (yet still be played). The main reasons for this I think are:

1. It's an "eternal" game that changes constantly. People in general don't like change that much. In WoW, everything about your class that you've learned, or learned to love, can change. The level phase can change. Scaling can change. Difficulties can change. Systems can change. And they have. Multiple times. Many times.
Of course it has 2 upsides: the game remains relevant in a changing demographic, and it stays fresh, which is important as well, because try to remember which games you are still sinking tons of hours into after ~13 years. Chances are high there are very few, if any of those. WoW must keep fresh through changes, and keep getting new content as well.

2. People confuse WoW's success it had when it had its hey-day with its quality, or they mix it all together. In its hey-day, WoW was "the next big thing". Every single casual gamer wanted to play WoW because it was the cool new thing to play. Nowadays? Every single casual thinks "huh, people still play that thing?" and log into Fortnite. Fortnite is currently the next big thing, I've read that it's as big as WoW was years ago. MMORPGs - as a genre - are dead. WoW came at a time where it was still possible to revive the MMORPG genre. Nowadays, you can't. Blizzard still has the best MMORPG on the market, like they do in other genres too with Starcraft for example (SC1/2 are the best RTS there are), but similar to WoW, the genre is dead and almost no new causual in 2018 is going to say "I'm going to start StarCraft 1/2! Or WoW!". They simply won't. They will look at whatever is far more popular today and go to that (Fortnite, LoL, PUBG and the likes). So we are left with (mostly) the hardcore fans of WoW.
But just because WoW was the biggest game on the market years ago, doesn't allow the conclusion that today's WoW must be objectively worse just because it doesn't have the same huge amount of (mostly casual) players it had back then. This flawed thinking is like believing that Starcraft: Remastered in 2018, for example, must be an objectively worse game than Starcraft 1 in 1998 because much fewer people are playing it. That time is simply gone, and even though SC:R is objectively better than SC1, almost no one cares anymore about SC1 *or* SC:R in 2018. It's similar with WoW. Except the most hardcore fans, of course.
So can WoW re-live its "glory" of being the biggest game on the market? Never. But can it still be an exceptionally well-made game worthy of playing for years and years even though it's not the biggest game on the planet anymore, and can it still be the best of its genre (even though the genre is "dead")? Absolutely.

3. People grow tired of the game after playing it for years, which is also normal. Nothing will feel as epic as your first time experiencing something in WoW. We get it. We all go through the same feelings. But that doesn't mean that you can't have fun anymore in WoW. I love raiding for example, which is still my main activity in WoW, and even though I know that raids aren't feeling as cool or epic as they felt when I was new at them, I also know that it's not the game's fault. Today's raid bosses are actually more exciting than old ones because they have cool new mechanics and much more of them as well. It's just because I'm not a rookie anymore but a veteran. I know this game inside-out. But I can still have fun. And new players still have years of stuff to learn and experience, just like I did years ago. Some players who hate on WoW are maybe missing that realization.

That said, there is still a bit of reason to worry about the state or quality of the game's development in the future because of growing Activision influence. But it's still important to try to remain objective about everything and not just spread doom and gloom.

[Vakir]

Yes! I started in 2005 and I hated wrath for the various points you described in your long post.
I think it is no problem to have started somewhere in between not-the-beginning and now but if you did, you should not really come along and claim wrath was the best time in wow only because you started in there and did your first raids in your first guilds. The raids were ultra crap apart from ulduar. And the dungeons were just facerollroflstomp until ICC patch dungeons.

"Ahaha oh man, BE AFRAID, guys, Algalon FEEDS ON YOUR TEARS!"

And then he was a uppermid-difficulty boss trapped behind an hour timer whose greatest challenge was internet connections holding up.

/golfclap

[WowIsDead64]

2. People confuse WoW's success it had when it had its hey-day with its quality, or they mix it all together. In its hey-day, WoW was "the next big thing". Every single casual gamer wanted to play WoW because it was the cool new thing to play. Nowadays? Every single casual thinks "huh, people still play that thing?" and log into Fortnite. Fortnite is currently the next big thing, I've read that it's as big as WoW was years ago. MMORPGs - as a genre - are dead. WoW came at a time where it was still possible to revive the MMORPG genre. Nowadays, you can't. Blizzard still has the best MMORPG on the market, like they do in other genres too with Starcraft for example (SC1/2 are the best RTS there are), but similar to WoW, the genre is dead and almost no new causual in 2018 is going to say "I'm going to start StarCraft 1/2! Or WoW!". They simply won't. They will look at whatever is far more popular today and go to that (Fortnite, LoL, PUBG and the likes). So we are left with (mostly) the hardcore fans of WoW.
But just because WoW was the biggest game on the market years ago, doesn't allow the conclusion that today's WoW must be objectively worse just because it doesn't have the same huge amount of (mostly casual) players it had back then. This flawed thinking is like believing that Starcraft: Remastered in 2018, for example, must be an objectively worse game than Starcraft 1 in 1998 because much fewer people are playing it. That time is simply gone, and even though SC:R is objectively better than SC1, almost no one cares anymore about SC1 *or* SC:R in 2018. It's similar with WoW. Except the most hardcore fans, of course.
So can WoW re-live its "glory" of being the biggest game on the market? Never. But can it still be an exceptionally well-made game worthy of playing for years and years even though it's not the biggest game on the planet anymore, and can it still be the best of its genre (even though the genre is "dead")? Absolutely.

Don't confuse cause with consequence. You should understand, that casuals quit, because game becomes less and less casual friendly, not because players become way too casual to play MMOs. Biggest and the most simple example - removal of flying. Do you understand, why it has happened? Because Blizzard wanted to make world more "challenging". Do casuals need this so called "challenge"? No, they don't. And many other things, including overcomplicated terrain design, too high density of mobs, too many rares/elites, that aren't soloable, "forced" PVP, "forced" competition via CRZ, too "weak" class mechanics (putting CD on heals to restrict them for example), too much RNG/grind/time-gating in reward system, that forces players to get desired rewards in very long term only, so they can't work towards getting specific rewards with their own pace, scaling, that causes overtuning of old content. It's very long list of small but meaningful things. And it become only longer with time, not shorter.

[therealbowser]

I think people confuse the feeling of vanilla and the content of it.

Vanilla had a tremendous lack of content and bare-bones as it was, I don't feel it is remotely comparable to modern WoW despite it having a few backward ideas. On the other hand, vanilla felt amazing; it had an amazing community, and it was by far the best MMORPG ever designed at the time.

The irony of course is that there are people who think that classic will be just like playing on vanilla... and while it will be one hell of a nostalgia trip, it won't be comparable. Not even slightly. The game simply isn't comparable to the experience when it was new, and I suspect a lot of the people obsessing over its return will be on the forums complaining about a lack of quality of life features before long.

All of this said, I do miss those earlier days, but not because "WoW was better", rather, because WoW had a more enjoyable community and was ran by a company I deeply respected (a rarity these days; nearly every company I have ever 'respected' have been bought out and effectively outright killed off by corporate greed, but it is what it is). I am more interested in classic than I am for the future of Battle for Azeroth simply because of the choices Blizzard... erm, Activision, has made lately. But most likely, I won't be spending much time on classic, assuming I do infact try it to begin with.

[TaurenNinja]

Don't confuse cause with consequence. You should understand, that casuals quit, because game becomes less and less casual friendly, not because players become way too casual to play MMOs. Biggest and the most simple example - removal of flying. Do you understand, why it has happened? Because Blizzard wanted to make world more "challenging". Do casuals need this so called "challenge"? No, they don't. And many other things, including overcomplicated terrain design, too high density of mobs, too many rares/elites, that aren't soloable, "forced" PVP, "forced" competition via CRZ, too "weak" class mechanics (putting CD on heals to restrict them for example), too much RNG/grind/time-gating in reward system, that forces players to get desired rewards in very long term only, so they can't work towards getting specific rewards with their own pace, scaling, that causes overtuning of old content. It's very long list of small but meaningful things. And it become only longer with time, not shorter.

My argument is that casuals will never play a game for too long, no matter if it gets better or worse. They'll just jump ship at whatever the next big thing is. So it doesn't really matter what changes occured in WoW, they'd still leave because they want the newest stuff people talk about.

[PewpewNL]

Having negative feelings about a game is so much easier than to point out the positive things.
Some people have played this game for 10+ years, some haven't, that doesn't matter. It's personal, don't jump to conclusions because everyone is saying A or B. YOU play this game because you like certain aspects of it. You're wasting your good time if you just go and sit there feeling entitled what should change.

Look at the positive side of things, and if you can't find one, move on for now and look back later. There's always later.

For me personally I enjoy raiding with my guild and the people I play with, so I just raid a tier, do the things I like, have a break till next tier, rince and repeat and I love that.

[Vakir]

My argument is that casuals will never play a game for too long, no matter if it gets better or worse. They'll just jump ship at whatever the next big thing is. So it doesn't really matter what changes occured in WoW, they'd still leave because they want the newest stuff people talk about.

Yep. That's what people don't seem to get no matter how true it is.

People would like to think that if no major changes happened, WoW would have the same subscriber count it had in early Cata. But that's simply not the case - it would be the same as, or perhaps even lower than, now.

All the fairweather types are off playing League, Fortnite, Overwatch, etc. A lot of the loss in interest is fad related.

When was the last time you heard anyone say something about Farmville or Minecraft despite them being previously impossible to escape to the point of lunacy? Zeitgeists have the duration of a gnat's fart.

[WowIsDead64]

My argument is that casuals will never play a game for too long, no matter if it gets better or worse. They'll just jump ship at whatever the next big thing is. So it doesn't really matter what changes occured in WoW, they'd still leave because they want the newest stuff people talk about.

I can say exactly the same. I can say, that "hardcores" play this game only when there is still some goal to achieve. They literally need to be forced to play. They can't find things to do by themselves. And casuals can play exactly the same content for months and years, if devs don't prevent them from doing it. They can level alts, do some achievements, collect some mounts, pets, transmogs, do some old content, like MOP dailies. For example WOD content had been keeping me busy for 2 years. Why? Because it was great casual-friendly content with amazing replayability value. And I would continue doing it, I Blizzard wouldn't have ruined it with patch 7.3.5 and 8.0.1. I also have Loremaster of Cata on all my characters. Why? Because it was the best leveling content, ever made in Wow. Leveling content with flying enabled. And now I'm unsubbed. Exactly because game is way too casual-unfriendly now.

[The King in Yellow]

The negativity is partially because of people mindlessly following what streamers/youtubers say because these people are unable to form their own opinions. They just want to jump the band wagon to look edgy/cool.

Now in my own opinion I have enjoyed this game for over 14 years up until now. Sure there have been bad times (Looking at you WoD and Cataclysm end game content.), but lately I just can not find enjoyment in playing WoW. BfA has not completely killed my interest and love for the game, but I find the entire expansion lackluster. I try to force myself to love it, to enjoy the good things, which this expansion does have. In the end, the good does not make up for the feeling of the entire expansion being lackluster.

Maybe when the expansion has moved into a few more patches I might return, but for now I am just disappointed by the direction of the game and will just wait it out.

Eventually you should just form your own opinion and should not get discouraged by indeed, the auro of negativity, do not let other people dictate how you play games and even which games you enjoy.

[Philomene]

It's people opening their eyes to the realization that the game hasn't been an RPG since MoP.

The game took a tonal shift since WoD that many people noticed but a huge amount of the masses that play WoW didn't see until now, the transition from an MMORPG to a different perspective diablo-style game, with no more specific reward targeting, an intentional reduction in the value of professions, removal of party member reliance, and drastic regression of class complexity.
Demon hunters to me are the ultimate example of the transition between WoW before WoD and WoW after WoD. The demon hunter is flashy, has the necessary spells to have a kind of dps rotation, is a frontloaded burst-based melee DPS with none of the usual downsides and involves a lot of fancy flips and dashes but is overall a very bland and hollow experience with no nuance or complexity the other classes still have, even if just with the barest hint of a vestigial design that's faded in favor of pruning.

Overall WoW isn't an RPG anymore and the people who remained from the old times miss playing an MMORPG. We miss interacting with people, seeing that one jackass on your server in Shrine or Dalaran, seeing recognizable guilds, seeing friends out in the world, establishing connections with friends and logging in every week after reset and getting ready to get that last piece of badge/point gear.
The things that defined the identity of WoW and the way that you approach is has changed in both combat and rewards. To some it may be fine but to people who liked WoW for what it used to be have been just kind of clinging onto the memory of a game that's a shadow of what it used to be.

Pretty much this. WoW is an action-MMO since Warlords.