Achievement trackers that don’t differentiate active subs and those who have been inactive for like 10 years? You don’t think that will absolutely skew numbers?
You are also ignoring how I dismantled your argument that casuals were not rewarded this expansion.
As well as stuff like Ember Court, Stitchyard, Korthia special mogs/mounts, protoforge, etc.
Then go play FF14.
PLEASE
I do. I mainly do Gold Saucer stuff 
Would it really hurt you for there to be other things put into wow that don’t require player power or even offer player power as a reward?
If wow had its own Gold Saucer, you’d see a ton of complaints go up in smoke.
There’s a truckload of content in Shadowlands that don’t require player power or offer player power.
Maybe if you actually played WoW, you’d know that.
For world gear exclusively: SL has had 3 out of the best 4 patches in the history of the game. (only non SL patch up there is 8.2, and benthic gear is in actively made the game worse tier).
RIO shows 410,000 unique characters obtained a score of 1450 in M+.
That only accounts for the top 60% in US/OCE alone.
That’s just for season 3 not even including raid participation.
World quests literally take 10 minutes /facepalm
All of which rely on gear. Even your Ember Court, Abom factory, etc.
Wow is glued to a “must kill all the things to progress in anything” mentality. That relies on player power.
Why do you need mythic raid quality gear for outdoor stuff?
Ok, now I have to call this out:
Ember court does not take gear beyond world content/mob level gear, you might have to repel invaders but most of them are the trash mobs you find in the world.
Abomb factory just added a set of weeklies to your questing
Kyrian was vehicle combat, the “gear” was to gear up your soulbinds
Night Fae garden was a set it, leave for a few days, come back for rewards.
The only player power involved in any of this is the power to not be a lazy bum and do things.
Ok
Correct, so I can stop here.
Gold Saucer offers all sorts of cosmetics and pure entertainment without a shred of player power required.
So again, who would that hurt if casuals were given a wow version of Gold Saucer?
i can’t believe this keeps getting asked. POWER PROGRESSION. the answer is POWER PROGRESSION. the exact same reason people have been leveling and gearing up in RPGs for decades. because it feels good to overpower something that previously overpowered you. it’s completely irrelevant whether that thing exists in the open world, or instanced content. the motivation is exactly the same.
Your argument that casuals were well rewarded in SL is based on your elitist bias that open world players don’t deserve anything, so you would probably consider Normal dungeon iLvl a good reward. In other words, “well rewarded” is subjective.
So let’s think about rewards in objective terms. Casuals were not rewarded this expansion as well as they were in the Wrath / Cata / MoP era or the Legion / BfA, in terms of iLvl they could achieve compared to max raiding iLvl at the time. This has been thoroughly discussed in other posts, but the elitists always reject the numbers saying “But, but….”
And by the way, whether or not you think SL rewards for casuals were too good, this post was meant to discuss upcoming rewards.
—Season 4 had virtually no upgrades for open world or solo players.
—Dragonflight pre-patch is going to offer no upgrades for open world players that already did ZM. This is a nerf over pre-patches that typically reward the current raid tier Normal iLvl as a catch up. (iLvl should be 278, not 252.)
—Dragonflight world content will be capped at LFR iLvl, unless players farm up a ton of gold or mats or buy WoW tokens.
The issue at hand is not that elitists feel that SL 9.0 through 9.2 was too rewarding for casuals. The issue is that open world players have been nerfed for 2 expansions in a row, and 3 patches in row.
Ion said that he is divorcing player power from open world content, and he meant it.
Why does Mythic raid gear need to be stronger than outdoor gear in outdoor content? 
It would hurt no one, but it would not be done as too many in WoW are blinded by gear or treat gear as the goal, not a tool.
Power progression comes from fighting more challenging foes.
Beat more challenging foe, get better rewards, with which to fight even more challenging foes.
Problem: World content cannot be challenging, as has been shown many, many times. So that’s a dead end. You’ll get the gear necessary to do the content you’re doing, though.
Because it’s harder content???
Keep going everyone, we are almost there to 1000 comments. I believe in you all.
Thing is, it might be challenging, or have challenging areas, if the whiners were told in no uncertain terms that not all content needs to be for everyone and the challenging areas/content was for those looking for such, not for those looking for participation trophies from everything.
Though keep in mind, for quite a few of these whiners, even the content provided is “too hard” because it takes more then sitting around, looking pretty.
Outdoor content does involve fighting mobs, including elites. That requires player power, just like raiding and M+!
Maybe you want to pull more than one mob at once. Maybe you want to keep fighting without stopping to eat or drink. Maybe you want to solo an elite quest. Maybe you want to solo a rare.