Gaming Rants 2: Why WoW Went Downhill

As a 5 year WoW veteran with over 365 days played across 3 mains (rogue, druid, and priest) I quit in patch 4.0 after raiding for a few months because the game had honestly turned into complete crap and I was wasting my time on it.  Here's why.

1. Progression as a whole went to shit in Wrath, and stayed awful in Cataclysm: Progression and goals in MMOs are so essential.  I stopped playing GW2 mainly because of it.  In Gaming Rants 1 on GW2, I outlined the reasons I kept playing WoW - when I ran out of them, I burned out and quit.  In PVE, they completely changed the progression system of classic and Burning Crusade, where each raid was a progression of the last, basically requiring some farming of the previous tier to progress much into the next due to gear and skill requirements, to a system where each major content patch reset gear and progression and made each raid the singular end game pve experience.  In the raid world, instead of having tiers of progression from MC to BWL to AQ / Naxx, you would just have ToC, or Firelands, or ICC, or Demon Soul.  And that is so boring because you are always in the last dungeon, you are always a few bosses away from done, and you never have no sights to see.  4.0 was almost a breath of fresh air with 3 raids, but the real missing aspect is progression where you go from instance to instance (they are "trying" that in 5.0, but it looks like its failing - I'll get into that).  You are nearly done with one raid, and you can look forward to another to get your feet wet in.  So good.  And it meant the people who do get to the end feel really good because it means they are the best of the best.  They are hardcore, they have commitment, and everyone else, including me, can look up to them, want to be like them, to achieve that.  Today?  Everyone has end game gear, they all look the same, the difference between an idiot with raid finder loot and a hardcore raider is probably that the hardcore raider reforged BC / Classic gear over their new crap.  Wonder why.
2. They also killed PVP progression: I would have loved to get into Rated BGs, but never had the "crew" to do it.  So it never happened.  They sounded ok, but without reasonable balance (another issue) they would have always been FOTM anyway.  Without negative rating, they were just grinds anyway.  Back in my day, you went from 1500 to 2300 rating and fought progressively harder opponents.  It meant arenas were actually a ladder, rather than fake rating on top of hidden rating on top of personal rating on top of team rating on top of rating rating.  The personal rating and MMR systems ruined arenas for me because there was no progress anymore - and specifically, MMR forces you to a rating and actively keeps you there.  Progressing becomes hard after you play a bunch, if you switch team mates your MMR is almost permanently fixed.  That is such crap.  Arena participation dived from usually over a hundred gladiator teams in each bg in BC to a few dozen in Wrath and sometimes single digits in Cata.  And it was because the progression was gone, replaced with a 0 to 1500 grind to make the progress artificial.  Rating on gear was fine though, to gate pvp gear.  I think the ratings could have been lower - gear should never have been an "issue" progressing at any point, just a way to keep the percentages of who gets what gear nearly even between pvp and pve.
3. Dungeon content went from challenge to crap: They made dungeons faceroll to facilitate the dungeon finder system, so there was no fun in doing the 5 man content anymore.  In classic and BC, there were incentives (rare drops, actually gasp useful 5 man loot like Blackhands Bredth, badges, or reputation) that made going back to this content after getting raid gear enjoyable because it is fun to crush your old challenges.  And the oldest 5 mans were legitimately difficult.  BC heroics were really hard until ZA and 2.4 badge gear trivialized them.  In 2.2?  Shiz was serious.  The normal modes weren't even a walk in the park - they required CC, resource management, kiting, and knowledge of fight mechanics.  That is funny today when any random new max level player can just chain queue heroics, spam a dps / heal / tank rotation, and expect badges to pop out at the end.  No challenge means no fun, and dungeons going to crap was symptomatic of the greater issues.
4. The world became small: With raid finder, dungeon finder, portals to every city, and flying mounts, the game world went from massive and mysterious to mastered and boring.  The large game space is worth nothing if you never have to endure it or brave it.  Without guardless neutral towns, wars never broke out.  Everyone felt safe and pacified.  Terrain was designed to support player flows, rather than the classic MC walkways that would get saturated with war.
5. Flying mounts and god-guards killed world PVP: I loved world pvp in classic.  Unknown odds, wars, assassinating - it was a roguey thing and I reveled in it.  It completely died in BC.  With few exceptions of daily quest hubs, Isle of Quel Danas, Halaa, and Auchindoun, people would just be flying everywhere with no engagement with other players.  World PVP, in its raw and unsterilized ways, kept the game fresh.  In Classic, you could never be safe outside a capital city, in contested zones many neutral towns weren't even safe in the early days - it was a truly dangerous world.  And danger and challenge make games fun.  Maybe not for casuals.  Maybe not for the "target demographic".  But they did, and do, for me - and I miss that.
6. Destructive content kept the game flat and dull: When every expansion (and more recently, every patch) reset every player, not only did it demoralize the entire population by making often years worth of work worth naught, it also means that content loses all value.  Nobody comes close to raiding the old raids anymore, the old dungeons might be done once for an achievement.  There are dozens of dungeons and raids that are now dormant and empty because people race to max level - they are never a challenge anymore.  All those Cataclysm raids will now be relegated to the trash heap, with someone raiding them maybe for a transmog or achievement, and steamrolling it with a few friends.  What a waste of developer time.  If instead of constantly resetting the field, new content was injected where the playerbase was most concentrated (ex: when BC came out, Karazhan would have still been a 10 man, and would have acted a bridge from UBRS to ZG / AQ20, Gruul / Mag / SSC would have been between ZA / AQ20 and MC, and TK could have been between BWL and AQ40 / Naxx, where the major bottlnecks were... - and then BT could have been past Naxx, and Hyjal could have bridged MC and BWL).  By now, we would have dozens of raid instances, all of them "overlapping" difficulty and gear (bigger raids were give higher level stuff for less effort, but you could still have really hard 10 or 20-25 mans giving top tier loot).  Rather than 3 Pandarian raids that are gated over 3 months because they can't make raid content fast enough, and they are just going to toss these raids out in 5.1 anyway with new heroics that completely supplant their loot.  And in 6.0 all these raids and dungeons go in the dust bin as people skip ahead to level 95.
7. The sterile game world is soulless: In classic, caves existed that were empty, mountain peaks with nothing, glyphic signs referencing developers in random places, a sign in an "unreachable" zone that said it was under construction, with the entire world tree already built, entire regions of the game world not practically useful - the deep Silithid hives, Deadwind Pass, southern Blasted Lands besides Kazzak - but they existed to have something challenging in the world, waiting for players.  Same reason world bosses existed.  They should have had roaming ones, it would have been fantastic (they did have some!  some random elite packs would wander some zones, like the Fel Reaver, but I wanted raid bosses like that!).  The inconsistency in design and dangers of the unknown made the original game alive, like a real world, even when every mob stood in one place and aggroed at 20 yards.  It was so much more alive than the dumb scripting and cutscenes of today because now, your challenge is presented to you with a big sign and a raid guide page entry with a ready check, not in a random cave in a new zone.
8. Itemization has become trite, dull, and bad: One of the greatest reasons I fell out of love with PVP was a two fold reason - the introduction of flat damage reduction from resilience, and the removal of critical damage reduction.  The first basically meant spells and abilities would scale even more out of control because they could just tweak the magic "players hit players for less" button and make the experience extremely jaded between pve and pvp.  The second is just bad balance and it promotes RNG.  They were trying to lessen RNG in Wrath, and then threw a curve ball and got rid of critical damage reduction - crits are the greatest RNG in WoW PVP, and have been pretty much forever, and was pretty much the reason they added the stat in the first place - but you can see how the design direction changed.  They cared less about balance, skill, and enjoyment, and more about bigger numbers and skinner boxes to maintain subscriptions.  And humorously, it failed - they are below their peak subs, they barely got back over 10 million with Pandaland, and I guarantee it will hit 8 million or less by 5.3, because people get tired of not having challenge or goals.  And heroic modes are the most obtuse "goals" ever - harder hitting bosses for larger numbers on the same items.  That is nothing on new loot with original art, crazy itemization, and custom special effects and procs. That was loot, what is there now is a mockery of progression.  The fact gear has become extremely sanitized, and players can reforge, level up, regem, etc the items makes item levels just a statistic you want to get higher.  No more Onslaught Girdle being insanely good into Naxx even though it drops from the first raid because it was itemized perfectly - no more Dragonspine Trophey being the best trinket for 3 tiers.  Itemization became flat and boring, and that makes loot and progression less interesting.  Arbitrary stat allocation made content fun because the value of a boss kill varied with the drops beyond just who wants the new +5 ilevel pants.
9. As an addentum to why gear + pvp suck, stamina is useless: In classic, stamina was used in place of secondary stats on high warlord gear to make it pvp gear - it made you more tankey and take longer to die.  You didn't become more efficient to heal, you just lived longer from 100 to 0.  Today, nobody stacks stamina because the stat has been devastatingly eclipsed by every other stat - mainly, the revamped primary stats that give bonuses to multiple other stats.  It is still 10 hp per 1 stamina, even when damage / healing / mitigation per stat point in every other class has only gone up every expansion, maybe except Cataclysm.  Today it is so awful that nobody ever itemizes it anymore.  And that is the contributing reason pvp sucks, and why every patch balance is thrown through a blender - players gain tremendous damage and healing increases, often from gaining points in 3+ stats when each of them alone outpaces stamina, and they expect the singular stat of resilience to counteract it.  And when it doesn't they have to rebalance vast swathes of classes (if they ever do, they usually don't and just let every arena season go to the dumps) because every time they add another tier of gear, resilence isn't enough to offset damage gains, healers get stronger to counteract the damage, but it means burst is stronger, people die faster, and they live shorter because stamina doesn't keep pace.  Above all else, the scaling of player health pools has always turned the game into crap.  The only time player health was ever acceptable was in BC, when base health was high, and stamina was high on pvp gear and scaled the best it ever has since arenas started (it didn't scale as well in classic without resilience offsetting other stats).  When health pools don't scale, the game gets progressively more zergy and ping-pong like, and it gets stale.
10. The game is still pay to play: After buying 3 expansions, I don't get why they don't just make non-current content free to play.  They already let people play forever at level 20 - and I know hardware.  It costs them dirt to support players on their servers, and they make runaway profits from the game and so little goes to maintain the servers.  They could have tons of free to play players at lower levels, maybe on legacy servers.  They could be buying item shop loot like pets and what have you, but they are not.  The reason I couldn't keep playing was not just because the game turned bad, but if I'm paying $15 a month for something, I expect to get my monies worth - and that required, for me, a truckload of dedication.  I didn't want to keep it up, but felt conflicted staying subscripted and effectively wasting my money if I wasn't playing the game.  So I did the obvious - I quit.  And I won't pay for almost any game anymore, because free to play is such an earnest budget proposition.  I have a large enough catalog, people are awesome enough to make enough mods and custom maps for what I have, and I have too little free time to want to pay money to waste my free time.  I'd play WoW again, despite all its modern day failures and faults.

That's enough for now.  For all its worth, the modern game is almost always better than its predecessor versions - I wouldn't really want to play classic again, combat is too slow and flat, mana is terrible on everything, and while itemization was better back then, stats themselves were boring with only crit and hit mattering.  Random resists on spells and abilities were awful, and it is good they were taken out.  Random low percentage procs also sucked, and they are not as common (cough, 5 stack taste for blood, cough).  Really though, if you retrofitted the better game-play decisions from recent expansions into classic or BC and balanced bosses accordingly, without giving every player the kitchen sink of spells so they can do everything, the game would probably be amazing. (NO ROGUE AOE, NO HUNTER HEALING, NO MAGE PERSISTENT PETS... etc).