Originally Posted by
Haven
Pet battles, innovative? Let's be honest here, it's a blatant, obvious way to kill time and occupy your OCD, and nothing more.
Cross-realm zones? It's a good one from a technical POV, but does little to nothing to the gameplay itself. Yeah, now there are other players around, tagging my quest mobs, stealing my nodes, and camping my rare mobs. Yay. In essence, it brought more frustration than use, because there's still no reason to group and do stuff together, the other players are there just to give you an illusion of MMO.
Scenarios? An amalgamation of a dungeon and a quest, it feels nice, but I personally had the feeling it had to be there since 2008.
Other MMOs, even though they didn't make it, had really good ideas, which WoW ignored. The point is, WoW has become anti-social. You're locked in a bubble. You don't have to group with other players while leveling - you can basically play 1-90 as a singleplayer game. The world is static. Mobs wander around spawn points, waiting to be slaughtered. They never attack towns, they don't form roaming bands, they don't clash with each other for territorial control. Never does an NPC hunt you. WoW could take some lessons from Guild Wars 2 in grouping, shared effort, and dynamic world. Even though changes are cyclic in GW2, it is still a big step forward. Rift gave us invasions, a way for the world to invade your personal space, a way for the world to live. WoW is still almost the same game it was in 2006 in the core.