Ignoring the effect of vanilla on the gaming market is equally laughable. I think you might be missing some of the history here. As for wotlk, it was all built on one another, the success there is a direct path from classic. And design wise, wotlk in particular is more like vanilla than it is the stuff today.
But it’s also important not to wax nostalgic too much. have to understand why things worked and a big part of that is context.
No, I think YOU might be missing some of the history here.
Vanilla WoW did as well as it did initially because it was the first big name MMO where you could play the game by yourself and have fun with the game. That was what made WoW what it was. The raiding was a joke in Vanilla WoW. They whipped up Molten Core over a weekend, class balance was a joke compared to other MMOs at a time, the content was so underplayed they re-released Naxxramas in WOTLK as new content and most of the player-base ate it up at that point.
Vanilla WoW had a long leveling experience that kept most players busy. BC added some of the precursor content to WOTLK (Karazhan being one of the most popular raids in WoW was due to it being the first raid that your average player could enjoy) and then WOTLK went all-in on making an end-game that actually appealed to the players who played WoW (playing a game that they could casually enjoy).
Catacylsm tried to appeal to YOU, and that’s when WoW started to show cracks. Trying to restore the “honor” of end-game content by making it too hard again without having fun content for the casual masses.
Your entire narrative is wrong. You are wrong. Lol.
for dungeons and raids just create 2 types of currency
Valor Points - infinitely grindable used to upgrade gear for both M+ and Raiding gear - no cap
Justice Points - Weekly limit that increases each week that can be used buy gear
EZ
OR we can have a body/accessory/trinket/wep token that drops that you can trade in like tier a mythic plus set / raid set
The problem with outright “removing the weekly vault altogether” is that would kill M+ participation in the pug/LFG scene almost overnight 
Let’s be honest, the average casual/pug player only dabbles in M+ for a weekly vault in the first place. The pug scene is probably:
…if I had to guess.
Basically, you can’t really remove/scrap the weekly vault system without effectively killing the M+ pug scene since such a large % of the players doing the content are “only” doing it to get something, are “only” doing it to get a weekly vault slot, etc.
Need to be careful when proposing such dangerous ideas, the pug/casual scene is much larger than you think so you’re really upsetting the balance if you cause the pug scene to lose interest in the content. You’re playing with fire in here 
So what you’re saying is M+ isn’t as fun and popular as that section of the community keeps insisting it is and that the only way to get people to actually do it is to either strong arm them or use methods which exploit addictive personalities?
Isn’t it just an expansion feature like all the other features in previous expansions that didn’t carry over?
Maybe I just assumed, but I didn’t think the vault was a new staple of the game itself.
You don’t understand, if you only do one mythic, it doubles your reward and is better than the dungeon. If you do 5 m+ you get some vault choices. This is for casual players. But hate the way upgrades are locked. The vault itself is great.
Who would have thought that more RNG to a system whose worst enemy is RNG would be a bad thing???
It’s not even holistic to the “role-playing” idea.
I think the idea of it’s fine. Instead of bonus rolls you get a chance at another piece if you complete x amount of content. My issue with it is I rarely get something I need, but rng right?
I Hate the vault too. Id rather do it for a currency.
If I could turn off M+ Affixes and do them for just fun and some gold Id that.
The Great Vault should die in a fire.
I like the vault so no don’t listen to Bellular.
He and other content creators are what got us the disaster of Shadowlands I remember before this expansion’s release WoW devs made their rounds doing interviews with “content creators” because they supposedly had the “pulse of the community”.
I misread the topic title as “Bellular on removing great value from the game.”
All I could think was, “Oh no. Has Wal-Mart acquired Blizzard?”
If they put in a vendor for currency earned through mythic plus, where you could choose your rewards, and those rewards has similar item level to what they have now from gv, then yes I wholeheartedly agree that the great vault is awful and needs to go.
I CAN’T STOP BUYING ALL THESE SWEAT SHOP CONSUMABLES, THEY JUST COST SO LITTLE!
I don’t think people understand if u “removed the vault” and added “currency for a gear vendor” it will diminish the value of gear, and participation in the game / farming for specific pieces of gear will become a thing of the past, witch may not be so bad for some players, but building ur character up and working for it is the game an without it there will be no sense of accomplishment.
I truly think anyone that doesn’t want the great vault to stay in the game probably has not gotten the gear they wanted and there salty … or they hate rng but rng is apart of wow play a different game if u don’t like it
The BFA version of the vault gave you one piece a week, no matter how many runs you did. If you only have time for one key a week, at worse it was the same as BFA, but even then the Shadowlands vault allows you to select currency as a reward over your piece if you don’t like your piece. You also can get vaults for raiding and pvp this time around. It’s not a perfect system, but comparing it to BFA and saying it’s worse off is pretty strange.
Roughly half of the players who are capable of pushing past KSM have pushed passed KSM, based on the percentage of players who have killed a certain number of Mythic Raid bosses and who have achieved an IO that is meaningful beyond KSM.
50% of a population of players enjoying the content for the fun of it is very, very impressive. If those numbers translate to a wider audience, then M+ is massively popular.
Having said that, yeah, no duh you would hurt the popularity of M+ if you removed the primary gearing source. If battlegrounds stopped giving honor you can be certain casual PvP would evaporate overnight, and raids stopped dropping gear you can be sure a lot of people would simply stop raiding - you certainly wouldn’t see AOTC pick-ups every week.
People can enjoy doing content, but there’s a point where you’ve done the content enough times where it goes from being fun to being a bit stale. Blizzard doesn’t release content fast enough for people to play the same dungeons for 24 months with no structure of progression.
Same. I wish we had signatures so I could put this quote in it. Does that guy work for the Dear Leader? “See, this shows your greatness, sir”
Cool. You like a loot system that makes you feel like crap most of the time.
You can still have the rewards take time for the really good stuff. I just think having clear progression feels a lot better than a slot machine.