You make fun of this, but the differences between Classic and Retail regarding an immersion standpoint are vastly different. The only time someone feels like time flies is when they’re focused on the fight for Retail but you move to Classic and it’s not just the fight, it’s the entire journry for 60 levels that keeps reeling you back in and always enjoying the next thing around the corner. Mages getting portals, hunters and shamans upgrading to Mail armor, Warriors and Paladins upgrading to plate, the slow grind for cash so that at level 40 you can buy your first ever mount that feels earned and warranted. These things matter in an RPG game, and yet Retail has chosen to essentially opt-out in order to appease convenience.
I enjoy a lot of the Quality of Life changes that have happened over the years, but even I can recognize that we opened Pandora’s Box and it cheapens the experience for everyone along the way. The things that REALLY hooked people are gone and now the questions aren’t about how you feel, who you are and what class best suits you. Now the questions are “how big do I wanna see the numbers go?” and “what color spells do I want to see fly across my screen?”
Mounts are cheap, Talents freely customizable, leveling is an absolute freefall of a joke, skills are magically learned upon a new level like you’re part of the Matrix “I know Kung Fu…” “Show me”-style without a rhyme or reason. Flying completely bypasses tbe struggles of the game on the ground and virtually sollves all annoying problems along the way. In every single aspect of world of warcraft, it has been degraded, cheapened, convenienced out, deleted, pruned, and made easy for the vast majority to feel that they can hop in and theme park around for hours.
The reasons why we stay are sometimes personal, like we invested in these characters so we want to see their story come to an end, sometimes it’s just the speed at which the game plays, sometimes its generally easier when the comparison of time versus reward comes into play, and those are all okay.
However, what we absolutely should not be doing is going onto any forum and mocking the “immersion” of the game or the lack of it. Your immersion is what makes you forget you are on Earth if only for a few moments. Immersion is what makes you FEEL like the Death Knight or the Demon Hunter you are meant to be role playing as and is at the center of nearly all RPGs and by mocking it and acting like it isn’t important, it sets the precedent that we as players don’t want to feel immersed, that we just want to click the big flashy squares and see big numbers and then collectively say “oooooh,” and “ahhhhhh,” like the pizza aliens in Toy Story.
So say what you want, do as you please, but I am begging you, please do NOT mock immersion or the core elements of an MMORPG or we’ll soon end up with a mode called Call of Azeroth: Murloc Ops and it’ll be a first person spell slinging battle royale that literally no one wanted but Blizzard interpretted that we did by asking for a bland “shoot them and they die” style game.
Some of us have asked for QoL changes in the past and now we see just how far we have fallen and wish that it was challenged more, taken far more seriously, and in some ways, Blizzard should have stomped their foot down on our neck and said “try again, nerd, this isnt Runescape” and sent us packing. Instead, we opened the gates to Candyland and Shoots and Ladders and are surprised that WoW is just an empty tbeme park of pop culture memes and shiny buttons.