Originally Posted by
Thrumballs
"Adding a new mechanic to an existing system" is not "abandonment". It's literally the opposite of abandonment. This is like saying I abandoned my empty coffee cup because I poured coffee in it, absolute nonsense.
And the player base disliked 40-player raids once the novelty wore off, and the logistical nightmare of actually keeping a 40-player raid functional revealed its ugly head. Granted that took until BWL and Naxx to sink in, when boss mechanics required all 40 players to not be AFK and pushing more than one button the entire time.
Because they were near impossible to balance while maintaining some semblance of factional flavor and class fantasy, a large and vocal chunk of the player base hated it, and dev team resources were plain and simply better allocated elsewhere. Same goes for racial class skills. To the point the difference between SoV and SoB alone was the difference between Horde paladins being high-tier DPS/utility and in strong demand, and Alliance paladins relegated to heal and cleanse bots for another entire expansion cycle.
You can't say Blizzard "abandoned" something when, in fact, they were responding to the player base's criticisms of design choices.
Nobody tell this person the percentages were actually the same, and all Blizzard did was figure out increasing the level cap without some form of diminishing returns on deprecated gear, meant level 60 raid gear would still be BiS at least until starting level 70 raids, and trivially easy to obtain at level 70.
Apparently, deciding to clarify instanced content as being intended for a single party of five players as dungeons, and instanced content requiring more than one party as raids, is "abandonment".
Just, never mind that nearly every dungeon in vanilla WoW could originally be done with ten players. Never mind how players quickly figured out that wasn't necessary, and generally just ran everything but BRD, Strath, Scholo, and BRS as a single party...and if players were mostly in tier 0-0.5 gear, those could be done with a five-player party as well. And thus, Blizzard catered to community trend.
But I mean, what is a "raid" by this illogic, anyways? The need to attune? Players had to attune for the "dungeons" of BRD, Scholo, and UBRS. But I mean, I guess that's one thing Blizzard "abandoned" as well, multiple wings of a dungeon in the same instance? Because everyone who played vanilla WoW loved that and ran the entire dungeon from beginning to end every time, right?
I mean, other than unlocking a raid instance for the winning faction that was relatively simple and dropped tiered gear. And enabling an expansion-wide buff that allowed bosses to drop currency, that was traded for endgame recipes, crafting materials, enchants, gems, and heirlooms. But I mean it's technically accurate to what you said as Wintergrasp didn't buff everyone in the zone (I mean, except for Tenacity), it buffed everyone on the continent.
But other than that, nope, no effect on anyone who didn't participate in the PvP at all.
The queue-less PvP zone, that anyone could enter into from any point and at any time they desired and leave identically, which is pretty much the definition of open-world PvP.