So this is probably a really unpopular opinion – but here is the reasoning for me.
The only content I participate in nowadays in WoW is leveling characters and running mythic+ dungeons with my friends. I stopped tanking mythic+ dungeons because it was causing me anxiety and no longer a source of fun with my friends. I stopped PvPing a long time ago, because I don’t enjoy the PvP that most of the WoW PvP community enjoys.
So I’m already in carebear mode and just running dungeons. Blizzard decides to make all the hard work I put into my gear completely irrelevant by giving the ability to upgrade mythic+ gear – but only new pieces you collect. So all the time I spent on getting my gear farmed up, was made completely pointless and I was supposed to just grind it out a second time so that I could upgrade it. I said screw that and quit.
Once I stopped running Mythic+ dungeons there was nothing worth my time.
That being said – I think the Arena is largely to blame for the state of the game.
What originally drew me to WoW was world PvP. I’ve always been a huge fan of games like Archeage, where PvP drives the economy. If you wanna make money, you have to do something active in the world – and players can kill you / steal your progress. It turns the whole world into a living breathing thing.
So in WoW, it wasn’t so much of an economy thing, but you could build rivalries / infamy on your server by being a menace to the other faction. It was really fun.
World PvP is probably the main reason I got into playing MMORPGs – and they pretty much murdered that a long time ago. They add the arena and start turning players into damage sponges because all the cool hardcore kids feel like they’re not able to flex their big skill peens when they get killed really fast. So the game went from “Hey this is pretty easy to pick up, and I’m having casual fun” to “I’m chasing some guy around a pillar for 30 minutes because I physically do not do enough damage to kill him when I do catch up with him.” Which bores the life out of me. I’m not going to pretend to be good at the game, I’m garbage at the game. But even watching pro level players play at a competitive level bores the life out of me. I know the PvP community on the forums is REAL fast to be like ‘git gud’ or ‘you’re just trash’ and that’s fair, I own that I’m bad at the game. A lot of that has to do with my attention span though. I’m not gonna spend time getting good at something that isn’t fun – you know? Also I shouldn’t need to be good for it to be fun. Every game I’ve ever played, I’ve been one of those people that once I sniff out the fun – I chase it down like some kind of adrenaline junkie. If I get wrecked, and I’m having fun – I’ll want to fight the guy who kicked my tail in over and over again until I win because I’m stubborn like a mule. I don’t get that with WoW though. I just get bored.
I think a lot of that stems from the fact that the game isn’t balanced around objectives. If the game were balanced around objectives, then the game wouldn’t end the second someone dies – and the pace of the game would be much faster. You’d be able to get that sweet sweet dopamine hit more often when you delete someone. And yeah – half the time you’re gonna be the one getting deleted, but it beats dragging the fight out for 3 minutes.
Then you add in the mega servers and sharding and phasing and warmode and world pvp is dead. The only people you’re gonna find with Warmode on, are people who have already farmed gear and are going to annihilate you like you’re a small child.
Blizzard expects you to endure hours on hours of getting your face smashed in trying to get gear – just to be on even a remotely even playing field… and once you have gear – dealing with a single healer completely butchers any chance of getting that sweet sweet dopamine from actually securing a kill.
So basically, the real reason that Shadowlands croaked is like the culmination of bad choices they’ve been making for over a decade. They’ve slimmed the surface of content I enjoy down so much, that the second they made a stupid decision about mythic+ dungeons I was done immediately.
I could complain about the Maw and Torghast and the raid content… covenants… not having flying forever… blizzard wasting gargantuan amounts of my time… ignoring player feedback and doing the bare minimum to keep the game afloat.
But honestly, I’d put up with it if the core gameplay loop was something that really got my blood flowing… and it hasn’t done that in a long time.
I’m probably a fringe case though. /shrug.