Suppose it’s subjective, but the most fun i’ve ever had has been earning gladiator with friends or beating dungeons with friends. Don’t have much experience in raiding, but I’d like to do that with friends too 
Humans are best when collaborating imo. Joining minds together to accomplish a goal is what it’s all about!
Metric driven. WoW is a themepark MMO, this shift towards trying to create endless progressions systems has been bad for the game.
Themepark MMOs thrive on new content, and I think it is okay to exhaust that content and be done, or to have weekly lockouts in place so that players don’t have the need to keep grinding.
The old devs understood this, a lot of them came from EQ, which was one of the most grindy MMOs to ever exist.
I may be old-fashioned, but I think fantasy should be about escaping that #1 horrid reality of real-life.
Which is weird, because WoW is a raid focused MMO. This game has the best raids out of any MMO to ever exist.
I personally think the best times I had was in casual raiding guilds in past expansions. I still think about my Vanilla guild and I remember those people 20 years later.
SoD recaptured some of this, the guild raid nights for SoD were a blast.
Oh yeah, i want to get into it. Just for a long time I’ve been a chaotic player in terms of irl scheduling, so dungeons and arena were all i really bothered to commit to. I am actively working on finding a guild now and hope to do some mythic raiding in TWW
Looks like fun!
Same. I can remember all of my Vanilla/TBC/Wrath guilds and a ton of individual names from them.
Can’t even remember the name of the guild I was in during BfA though. 
Not a fan of this season that’s for sure. People leave keys and groups take so long to form that I’m lucky of I can complete a dungeon every two hours. The difficulty leap is killing M+ I think. I enjoy the idea of making the game challenging again, but there’s not enough skilled or patient players around to make it work like it should.
I personally think the game was just designed better back in those days for the average player. Modern WoW is too fragmented with all the different difficulties. There is way too much focus on competition.
I was watching that British WoW streamer the other day, can’t remember his name, and he was saying that Blizzard really hasn’t thought about the more middle of the road gamers the last 3-4 expansions.
I guess he has connections with some of the Blizz devs, and rumor has it, they are starting to realize this issue.
I think this is why we are seeing content like Delves and the many changes to the dungeon systems.
Blizzard needs to address guilds as well, the UI is horrid, the guild recruitment tools are terrible, and there is very little incentive to actually be in a guild anymore. It is no wonder so many people just stay solo and only do the easy content.
These are the things they value, the things they see as the reason players should want to play, the goals that players who are playing the game right should have.
I don’t think they’re ready to turn the focus of the game to average players. I mean, they might want to, but they aren’t willing to do the type of research that would reveal things like what average players think would make the game worth paying for. Instead they ask streamers and theorycrafters what needs to be done to fix the casual problem.
Whose fault is that, though? Every mechanism by which players compete against one another for PVE was player created. Blizzard has formalized many of those things into official channels, but honestly that could be viewed as much as a QoL change to prevent players from having to leave the WoW ecosystem to track as some kind of endorsement. I mean hell, race to world first is still a community run event. But whether we want to talk about damage meters, gear score, raider io, M+ score, raid placement - all of those things were introduced by players through addons and external sites long before Blizzard ever acknowledged those aspects as being relevant to players.
I can certainly understand how Blizzard choosing to add those things later can be viewed as an endorsement of the practice, and I won’t try to convince anyone they aren’t negatives to this choice. I just think it’s a bit unfair to exclude the role the community played in the addition of nearly every PVE competition structure that exists with WoW.
It seems like every few expacs they repeat this lie so the vast majority of players keep holding out hope and paying for content they will never see. My honest guess about delves is that they won’t give gear, or they’ll give the equivalent of WQ gear, and that they are just busy work.
Good designers don’t follow the whims of their ultra hardcore players. Most of the things you listed were all tools that the more competitive crowd utilized. Blizzard didn’t have to slant the game towards this player type. I put the sole blame on the more hardcore players they hired for the team over the years. Many of the current WoW devs were players at one time.
I look at games like GW2, Lotro, ESO, FF14, they have difficult content in their games, but those devs understand that casual players are the bread and butter that keep your game alive. So, they focus on the casual player first and foremost.
The vast majority of WoW players are casual players as well, and I think they have been really under served for some time.
There is just way too much focus on M+ players and high end raiders.
Edit: This was not a player created issue, because players aren’t designing the game.
I wanted to add that I think a lot of the current WoW devs are holding on to outdated ideas that were passed onto them from their predecessors.
I’m glad they finally added a mode for people who don’t have a big group of friends to play with. Because for me there was zero fun to play with strangers, and I was only compelled by item levels. I don’t play regularly enough to ever play with whoever I added to my friend list before they forget who I am. Besides the competitive psychology nowadays doesn’t convey wish to make friends anymore.
And honestly treating the content I don’t have friends to play with as an outright unavailable saved me from many headaches.
While they have said as much, it felt more like “We’re going to blame the guys who haven’t worked here for a decade for what Shadowlands turned out to be.”
I know, it is crazy that Ion alluded to this in an interview. I think the team has had their come to Jesus moment now. The number dive in SL and DF mediocre sales has really lit a fire under their butts.
I don’t think we will see real change until the expansion after TWW.
What have casual players lost, though? The ultra hardcore players you mentioned were using those competitive tools when they were external to the game. If Blizzard hadn’t added M+ score, your 200 io score would still keep you out of +8s. The aspects of the game that have players who care about those tools have all been additions to WoW or new difficulties that would have been out of reach to those players in the first place.
All the lower difficulty content is still available to those players who don’t want to use these competitive tools. Some of them have even been added to queues that don’t even have any requirements besides a minimum gear score.
All the whole Blizzard has added more world content, collectibles, quests, appearances, and non-competitive modes since Legion than any other time in the game.
I really don’t think the argument that casual players have been underserved in years since competitive modes and tools were added compared to before holds much water. The reality is Blizzard has added content for both groups. And the competitive group was going to use the tools to compare themselves to others whether they were in the game or not.
Heroic dungeon difficulty.
Toxic key issues are a GD experience. I’ve done hundreds of keys the DF and have yet to experience anyone truly being toxic. I think the worst I’ve seen was someone say “skill issue” to the group when the key was obviously broken. They can’t all be winners 
Okay that’s fair.
But the amount of content that casual players could complete, if it wasn’t outright targeted toward them, has still gone up significantly since Legion.
I would say if you’re taking into account the number of world quests that have gone away compared to Legion and BfA, that’s a no.