I’m tired of cosmic garbage. Keep WoW on Azeroth. The plotline that stems from late Legion (e.g. the void/light Argus stuff) through BFA and SL is planted in poisoned soil and should be discarded.
The writers can at least write marginally serviceable lore and stories about down to earth Azeroth things. They flub it all and enrage the customers every time with this cosmic nonsense the overwhelming majority do not want.
If they don’t heed the success of DF and the failures of SL, more failures will follow. WoW’s true playerbase does not want this kind of nonsense. We like DF, we like MoP, we liked Wrath.
None of this other planes, dimensions, planets stuff. We’ve visited enough places already. How about another huge continent on Azeroth? One which only part of becomes visible/unlocked for 11.0 and which they iterate on by unlocking the other half in 12.0. I’m talking something at least 80% of the size of Kalimdor or EK (though a shape other than long and tall would be nice, something broader like Northrend/Pandaria.
During this time they should be revamping the old world. Updating textures. Expanding SW and Org to be the kind of cities they are in lore with sizes resembling Suramar/Boralus (though keeping most of the important stuff fairly concentrated as in Boralus).
The old world has now had more time pass without any kind of revamp than the time between launch and Cata’s rework. I’m not saying it all needs to be destroyed again. But fixing up the cities, maybe having transient changes based on events that last a patch or two in the old world seems like the better idea.
Think about it with regards to off-Azeroth expacs.
BC was less highly regarded in retrospect than Wrath, they retconned stuff around Illidan later. WoD was a monumental disaster, the first big failure expac that caused them to start hiding information like subscriber numbers, true subscription income, etc. SL, even bigger failure than WoD, decapitated the lore, spat on it and threw it under an outhouse. Sent the game tumbling, it will probably never fully recover from SL in terms of player numbers.
These jesters cannot even properly flesh out Azeroth and its story (constant retcons, consistent introduction of new layers of curtains being thrown back behind the previous big bad to reveal another bigger bad with another curtain we can’t see but know is there from experience by now) and they want to tackle a game where they not only have that on their plate but a whole expanded universe with other realms/dimensions/planets they’re touching on?
Get real. They don’t have the people, the funding, the writing skill or talent. And they also have the wrong game. Just as earth is a small, small place in the larger universe but we’re all very interested in its affairs, so to is Azeroth a small even if cosmically important place and most people joined and fell in love with this game because of Azeroth. Not Outland, not Alternative Draenor, and not Shadowlands. Visiting another realm for a raid is fine. I’ll even grant going to Argus to end the Legion was fine because it consisted of a single patch.
The funding is the real problem. They will never again have the people to pull a Cataclysm level revamp of the old world which is badly in need of it and they seem intent on if anything abandoning it. While I would like a new continent on Azeroth I think this is more important. I think setting the next few successive expacs on Azeroth so they can justify revamping, updating, adding more pixels to older zones is necessary for the health of the game. They should have it similar to BFA’s warfronts zones, have some happening in a zone or series of zones, send max level players there, after a patch is up revert it to a normal, but updated version of the zone with a Zidormi there to visit the event version. Do this over the various zones in EK and Kalimdor and re-use, update, expand.