I’m sorry to say this, but it’s just a symptom of multiplayer games in a world filled with celebrities that cater to children.
Until we end the ability to monetize streaming games, you’re going to get a lot of toxicity due to FOMO.
Guides were once how to reach a baseline, but they’ve been perverted by toxic (bad) players into must-haves. Players who would spurn $8.50 because they might find a $10 on the sidewalk one day. Players who think the game revolves around material rewards, without understanding that the material rewards exist to facilitate the next objective. They aren’t themselves the objective.
Retail WoW was long ago taken over by one of these players, someone thought of as a joke on the EJ forums. Classic WoW is headed by people who care more about their personal brands and relationships with streamers / recognized names than the average player. This isn’t exclusive to WoW, it’s simply modern online video games. They don’t care about the quality of the customer, only the quantity.
There was a brief period in the mid-aughts where people were starting to recognize video games as an art form. This was quickly destroyed by mega corporations gobbling up smaller studios, and losers like Fatal1ty trying to be celebrities. It took what was a growing art space, an egalitarian series of virtual worlds, and commodified them beyond recognition.
There are, and always will be, pockets of players that you can find who share like-minded goals. This is where your responsibility kicks in. The onus is on you to manage your own expectations. It sounds scary, it sounds unfair, but it’s how it always was. FOMO is cancer to this space. The idea of sociality is lost when certain faces are propped up.