if he didn’t play prequels first and love them and wow still he aint a fan.
Heavily scripted encounters are the worst. From the vehicle fight in Ulduar to the endless stream of repeating world quests.
It may just be me but I cannot recall many world quests from Legion. Maybe that’s because I prefer not to remember them but I think it’s more that it was so unimportant to me that I couldn’t remember them if I tried. At some point that’ll happen with the BFA world quests.
Anyway my point is once upon a time before the in game cinematics and the world quests you were supposed to gin up your own experience in the game. The most vivid experiences I’ve had playing MMORPGs are the experiences I’ve had with other players role playing, adventuring and just having a good time together.
Being isolated in modern WoW is actually pretty terrible as far as experiences go. I think that shows how these highly scripted approaches to creating content are actually negatively impacting the game.
Queue the contrarians.
First week or month players would be trying to figure out how to unobfuscate it lol. After that some would quit, others wouldn’t quit but they wouldn’t do the same content anymore, others would continue life as normal and do best guesses.
I’ve never been a mystery and wonder player. When I first started playing back in BC I looked around the world and though “man this place is big” then I started questing. I didn’t wander around like I was on a disney adventure, I just played the game 
I think a lot of those around here don’t want to see it, either because they’re benefiting from the current situation or simply because this is so far outside their realm of thought that they can’t conceive of it being any other way.
As for those who can see it… well, I think most of them left long ago.
Seems they were the wise ones.
There’s a handful (myself included) hanging on out of some foolish hope that the ship’s going to turn around… but with the amount of second-guessing I’ve been doing lately and ever-increasing zealotry to the game’s current state of affairs, it feels all the more unlikely.
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Except you know what? There are still people of people who play to have fun. Other games that didn’t support these features had people trying to implement them.
FF14 frowns on such things, but people have still found a way to create things like recount for it. They’re illegal by the rules, but they happen.
The API is a tool, and like any tool, some people will use it in problematic ways.
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What game? Guides have existed even without inspect. In fact most guides are built by folks who theorycraft and do not rely on inspecting others.
Again, wrong. Meters have existed in a lot of games. Those that do not have it do it via third party tools (SWTOR - starparse). You are deluding yourself here.
The 2020 MMO gamer is nothing like the 2000’s MMO gamer.
This is true but not for the reasons you state. Look up MAUs.
This is not poker, nor a casino. If anything the insane layers of RNG have ruined WoW.
Not sure what argument you are trying to make, but pressing buttons mindlessly is not fun.
Eventually you would figure out your optimal rotation whether it be via an addon, api, guide, or trial and error.
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What other MMOs were you playing where you couldn’t inspect gear?
I was, for lack of a better word, heartbroken with 8.3. I genuinely thought it would at least wrap the expansion with a positive. First week in, and I knew they simply we already focused on the next thing, because when you look deep, this patch had zero QA or “polish” as they like to say.
BfA has systematically teared down all my confidence that this current team can relate to its player base, nor that it intends to prevent the growing outliers that are cropping up in every aspect of the game.
You might be right:
Part of me agrees with this. I was a high end raider for years and eventually I quit because the game just felt like numbers and not a fantasy game anymore. Like when Neo sees the matrix, I guess. I took a considerable amount of time off and came back and play more casually now and its more fun for me.
However, I feel like this is not just because of the API and what not. Warcraft has just existed for long enough that people naturally have analyzed it and tried to maximize their efforts. This happens with all sorts of games and even real life sports. Its just a natural progression over time.
I remember first starting WoW, and being amazed by all the races. the grandeur of Stormwind, the Mystique of the Night elves. The harsh environments of Durotar. I remember seeking the Shamanstone for Orcs and going into this hidden pathway to be granted the powers of Earth, to climb a mountain for Fire.
I remember going into a Tavern in Stormwind and going into a backroom where a pathway into a Crypt to summon forth demons and bind them to your will.
God this was a trip down memory lane.
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I can certainly sympathize there. While I wasn’t hit quite so hard by patch 8.3, it mostly comes down to me being SO disillusioned by the game that I had little faith in the game left to break.
Nevertheless, I gave it a shot… and quite frankly, after that first week I was more angry at the god-awful and unnecessarily dragged out nature of the content that I pretty much all but abandoned the game on the spot. Chipped away at some other side activities for a bit, but I just kept drifting away from the game at that point and played less and less. The only thing I haven’t done at this point is pull the plug.
That’s a very good way to describe BfA in general, it was a deliberate and systematic dismantling of the few remaining pieces of systems and content in the game I enjoyed over the past 14-15 years. Now… it feels like there’s nothing left.
Absolutely… nothing…
If you’re not interested in the narrow band of content the developers are pushing forward, you’re better off not playing the game at all.
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The alternative is brain-dead encounters that you sleep through so I’d stick with the scripts.
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the entire coming xpacs getting data mined and posted on youtube/ open beta in the hands of people who just want to play the new stuff and not actually test for bugs/balance not just shadowlands but every xpac maybe not bc but that was a long time ago i dont remember clear enough
Thotbott…? 
Game was never a mystery!
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At the core this is a problem less with WoW itself and the community. The game rarely demands players to play at a level or be as “serious” as the community pushes for and expects.
Raider IO scores gatekeeping mythic+ runs and AOTC gatekeeping even normal raid runs are chief examples. Nearly everyone has this infuriating mentality that they deserve to only have people at or objectively better than them. As if they are temporarily unguilded method first string raiders and thus they deserve only the cream of the crop players.
Blizzard facilitates this by not smacking down elitist attitudes directly and indirectly. For example, there is a lot they can do to incentivize groups formed through the LFG tool to take someone to a normal raid and/or punish people stacking overly geared players (ideally by both scaling down the gear and giving mobs a damage done and damage reduced buff proportional to how overly geared someone is). They could also give new players to the raid additional buffs like not counting for the scaling of a boss and guaranteeing an additional piece of loot will be generated for the non new players in the raid. Blizzard has the power to “enforce” people to play the modes of content their character is both geared and experienced for and offer both carrots and sticks to tryhards to include new people in a run.
In the end though, this is all the fault of a community too selfish and egotistical that has come to think WoW is some ultra hard game and Blizzard feeds into it because they try and cater far too much into the tryhards by piling mechanics into encounters and convoluting and complicating specs more and more and quickening the pace of the game in an effort to appease the smallest but most vocal part of their playerbase…the gluttenous content consuming tryhard who for many, derive their sense of self worth and satisfaction of this game strictly by what they can get and also deny others from getting by deeming them unfit and requiring they meet a higher bar than what was originally expected.
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There’s guides even for games without dps meters or addons or armory. 
But sure ignorance is bliss.
If you think this hasn’t been going on since day one of vanilla you’ve just been uninformed.
Top people have always been running sims and trying to get the most out of their gear, as well as trying to optimize their play time. It’s just that over the years we’ve gotten way better at it.
People have always been trying to to this since day one as well. It sounds more like you’re surrounding
yourself with players who want to tryhard. surround yourself with others who just want to take it easy.
They don’t allow laptops because that gives the play an advantage over the house. That don’t care if your having fun or not, they care about making sure they in the end get your money. Not a great example.
Only thing that kill the mystery for people is when they decided to spoil themselves. No one is forcing you to look up datamined stuff or to run sims. yes if you want to do top end content you may have to do this to compete with others, but that’s a choice to do top end content.
You are right, just not in the way you are saying.
The only selfish and egotistical ones I typically see are the ones stating that their time is more important than 4 other peoples’ time combined.
If any person feels 4 others are wrong for not carrying them through content, they are selfish.
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It works both ways, though you probably aren’t noticing because you spend all your time on the other side of the impervious barrier.
Quite an assumption you are making there.
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