Yeah,I remember those days and the neighborhood fights on them ,gg.
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Just going to say, I’m just that Old…
Eh, playing SoD makes me cry for the quality of life we have in Retail.
I have more abilties than hotbar space, lol.
Old WoW is definitely more complicated (not in terms of PvE mechanics, but just raw player ability), due to stuff resisting, weapon swing timers, and generally things going wrong “just because”, in retail if you fail it’s because of a skill issue mostly, not just sheer dumb luck.
In addition, the systems aren’t interesting enough to be worth learning about every single patch. Like there’s no payoff for learning Ion’s new madcap idea, it’s just now you can play the game. Yayyy!
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I’m right there with you.
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I’m fine with WoW
But if you try to get me to watch something like Beat Saber or FnF my brain just blue screens at all the stuff going on.
You’re doing the same thing tho in DF
If anything the game has gotten alot simpler.
On my part it’s a mixture of getting old and not having as much time to play 
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Its a darn good thing our characters don’t have to use the restroom Peppermint , or we would be tinkling ourselves at the outhouse door trying to figure out the puzzle box lock, If you get my understanding.
Yes, it is way too complicated. Yes it takes way too much time to craft things when most of my friends have like 20 minute windows to play.
Age doesn’t have a darn thing to do with it.
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This feels so backwards too. Like so many quest items don’t take up bag space anymore, they give us these huge numbered slot bags, and we have the currency tab for most currencies… but also still just random trash to trade into vendors that we have to hang onto. Just seems not in line with other philosophies
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I’m fine with most things, though I’m definitely not the gamer I was 10-15 years ago, that’s for sure. My reaction times used to be so much better. I don’t think the game as a whole is that complicated. I just think that some of the player base is getting older in general.
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I’m older than Azshara’s mum. Medicare is more complicated than WoW.
Don’t confuse tons of content with complication. Just play the parts of the game you find fun. If you find crating professions too labor-intensive then switch to gathering.
The beauty and brilliance of WoW is there’s something for everyone.
I’m a casual player. That doesn’t make me an idiot with a learning disability.
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It’s not that complicated, if you don’t like having to do the talents just copy a good players talents and look through them to see why they choose them you can figure out.
You’re hovering around the correct assessment, but maybe I can shed some additional light.
In 2004 games were still be developed as passion projects, with emphasis on quality, gameplay, enjoyment, etc, and it shone through to us, the end user.
In modern times, the industry has learned that marketing sells games, whether they’re good, bad, or ugly. So Blizz and other companies who have done their research, have gutted their product designers, and invested heavily in marketing and strategy.
One go-to is to adopt mobile game style currencies and system.
They can be convoluted and unrewarding, or less rewarding, and emphasize more on the grind, extending subs. Kind of how grocery store and department store layouts are designed to keep you in the store buying stuff. You’re not doing anything of note, but the longer you’re there, the more money company earns.
The other thing is these practices are convoluted in a way that on the surface might seem innocuous, but in the background, the mobile game developers have crafted it in such a predatory way that you get the least pay out for the most work, to the best they could design it.
See Flightstones+Crests: Weekly crests capped at 7.5 dungeons, but it’s 8 to fill vault. They could give you enough currency to make the cap 8 dungeons, but as they shave off a bit of every system here and there, they’re keeping consumers in the arduous loop longer, certainly longer than SL Valor did.
It’s something like 12 Crests per dungeon. To upgrade costs 15.
Etc, etc…
To go back to grocery stores, it’s the same as making the empty space/indent in the bottom of peanut butter jars slightly larger where they can, to keep that consumer coming back just a little bit more often. A million peanut butter consumers buying an extra jar on occassion is a lot of peanut butter.
Do these tactics improve the game? No. Does it make money? Yes. But why?
The modern audience is very obedient and will pay for whatever they’re told is a good idea so they can ‘fit in’ somewhere. Marketing will do that.
See Diablo 4: not a very good game, but the Marketing not only convinced people this is what they should be buying to fit in with everyone else, but at a hiked cost as well.
And once the modern audience pays to opt in, and see they don’t necessarily need any skill or knowledge or experience to achieve anything of note, but rather just saunter through the grocery aisles long enough, or pay a nominal microtransaction fee/wow token to overcome to complexity or grind, that replaces the seratonin us old-timers got from *gasp * playing a game.
Also, make no mistake, a lot of these aren’t even “games” anymore. They are a platform to sel microtransactions, wowtokens, shop, merch, etc. They’re actually “Games as a Service” or GaaS. It’s just a platform, which explains why it oftentimes doesn’t feel like playing a game most of the time logged in.
Making a platform, Marketing it as a “game” (because people want to play a game), then making it mobile game obnoxious/convoluted, and then injecting microtransactions to skip over those hurdles is two systems having a symbiotic relationship.
This expacs rotations are extremely bloated and complicated imo
I’m in my 50’s and raid Cutting Edge. Being older makes you better at the game!
either we are both getting old enough but also game is complicated as usual we don’t realized before. I don’t really care every contents they provided i chose things what I want to play only! I feel i am old now and my fun source of this game has changed a long ago. I don’t talk, I don’t guild play, Item lveling is not my concern as well. im just fine with LFR once a week and go for my loots entire week and focusing all the events come up and look for rewards. recently i enjoy dropping customizations and collecting some old tmogs, mount? hmm… if it is look cool yes but not everything is interested. however this game is good for keep updating new stuffs like trading post. I really enjoying tmog! Don’t get stress out. this is just a game!! this game also helps “Dementia Prevention” becuz I keep use my brain working 
Think brightly my friend!!
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You’re overexaggerating.
Most of these problems you list aren’t even problems like they use to be. Rep is optional now unlike before, talent system makes far more sense and takes care of bloat for lots of classes, professions are easy to ignore by paying a small tip and buying some materials off the auction house.
Raids are the only thing that really got more complicated, but beyond that, not really. Seems like you just don’t like change.
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You are making the same mistake top players make thinking that being a casual player and not being skilled enough to play the advanced features means you are lacking in intelligence. They are wrong.
Lots of people are just as smart as the elite WoW players but they see WoW as a game, not a job or a calling. They have lives meaning they don’t spend 60 hours a week playing the game, learning the compleity and memorizing every detail.
Casual players who just want to play for two or three hours a week and don’t want to learn all the compexity should be able to finish the story with only a few side quests, dailes or simple dungeons as they have been from the start through SL.
Having to do 700 weeklies or dailies (about what it would take me to catch up so I could continue the story), or learning the complexity of M+ or Raids should not block people who just want to quest and see where the story goes and how it ends.
Which is why the raid scene is such a 
show. Only about 30k people have the ability and drive to get CE, and that number goes down every tier. Every guild needs to fish for recruits in that same bucket.
It would behoove them to lower the difficulty (grow the pool of people who can do it) or lower the raid size (spread those people out more) before mythic raiding hits that critical fail point.
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I was a welp like you in my mid-50s during Wrath and that is when I last did progression raiding. What got me out of it was time as there was not only the raiding but all the playing to support it as in repairs, potions (or mats for them) and so on. For a few months I got used to going to work a couple days a week on four hours sleep and a 95 mile round trip commute. Yeah, yeah, uphill, in the snow bumper to bumper both ways. Actually, the last one was true. Bleh. 
What got me out of it was Cata. The opening dungeons were over-tuned and fractured the guild as some liked it and jumped in while those of us who couldn’t gear or level as fast got left behind. Then there was the resulting bickering and I realized I was tired of it all. I was a lone wolf in my other dead guild but through Legion I raided as an LFR hero but come BFA I was just done with raiding in any form.
I was also into my 60’s by then and yeah, by then reflexes weren’t keeping up and my desire to compensate with gearing and really digging into my class mechanics just evaporated. Perhaps if things were different and I stay in it and that kept me sharp, perhaps things might have been different. Be interesting to see how you are doing in 10 years. Hopefully, you’ll keep on going strong. Of course, by then I’ll be in my 80s and my game may be limited to picking flowers, minerals and corpse runs. 
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