Everything becomes overly optimized, streamlined, and business. No messing around, no having fun, no spacing out, no taking in any casuals, no slowing yourself down, you just press your buttons in a predetermined way and are rewarded more for playing a single way.
It actively encourages you to blitz through it as fast as you can. When it was just 40man mode to get a epic or something with no real loot incentive this mindset was fine. This being a now required part of the game is insane.
Just remove the wiping altogether and make them like delves. Make the whole “we only got many hours to raid in a week” speedrun stress-inducing GOGOGOGOGO mindset only for those who want that.
After playing classic I realized just how bad retail is now. There’s no sense of community at all anymore. It feels like I’m playing literally any other game except I have to manually “queue” myself and hoping those elitists will let me joing their raid with world quest gear.
This isn’t WoW. Perfect play is encouraged so severely that everyone else might as well be bots you micro with pings.
Instanced content is anathema to what an MMORPG is supposed to be. By focusing heavily on instanced content, MMOs become a glorified lobby game. 10-20 people is not “Massive”
Raiding has been a part of WoW since the beginning practically. And you may want to join a guild if you want fun. Seriously, old account, previous guild, we did raids all the time and we had a blast. We were serious to get them done but we had fun.
The sense of community present on Classic is linked to the desire of this same community to communicate with each other, something that isn’t done on Retail.
Especially as I don’t think the game is really any different, people just use third-party software like discord to communicate.
As an old orc once said: “Times change”
The best, most immersive MMORPG Ive every played was the first 4 expacs of Ultima Online. Having end game “raid” content be completely open for everybody with PvPvE elements created such an amazing atmosphere.
MMOs trying to do the “something for everybody” hand holding themepark nonsense just makes the games boring.
This is WoW, This is WoW with a weeb skin, This is WoW with a SW skin, this is WoW with an Elder Scrolls skin, this is WoW with a Warhammer skin… So freaking bland.
No wonder the market collapsed when all the games are virtually skins.
It depends - I am a member of a couple super casual communities, where they do Normal runs at a casual pace and are open to just about anyone. They wait for people to pour themselves a drink. And actively carry through Normal as many as they can.
Then there are raid groups that don’t stop - pull pull pull.
You just have to look around.
M+ is definitely everything bad you mentioned, though - with the timers. We should start with hating M+.
Raiding is literally the core end game for World of Warcraft and has been since the game launched in 2004.
I still remember going to MC on my Paladin (not this one, but another one), even though his only job was to be a buff bot and purify spam most of the time. Raiding, PvP and Roleplaying are what got people into guilds, it got people being social with each other, it was the core MMO experience.
So no, it is not ‘a mistake’ and it is not ‘anti-WoW’.
While I’d like 25m to come back 40m is simply a mess. Also yes people can still have fun min/maxing. Raiding also has been a big way to have a community ingame in the form of a guild, so while you seem to dislike current raiding it’s also one way you can still play the game with a community.