I think you’re right, in that the systems design hadn’t fallen apart yet.
Up until Cataclysm, both the systems design and content design for WoW were just assumed to be good. I remember waiting in line at midnight for WotLK, and I just knew it was going to be good (and it was). Then, Cataclysm showed us that the content design team was capable of hiccups.
MoP leaned a bit too hard into campy, giving us really over-the-top Pandaren monks for both factions. Some people were into it (I’m posting on a monk), and how the content design (questing / dungeons / story) felt was a mixed bag. The important part here is that we still just took systems design for granted. Of COURSE it was going to be good. And it was! Nowadays, people regularly just beg for their class to go back “to the way it was in MoP.”
That’s the thing, really. Cataclysm was where we were shown that you can’t rely on the content design to always come through and be great, and WoD was the first xpac where the systems team really let a lot of classes down. Cataclysm wasn’t bad if you’re just in it for the class mechanics / gameplay. The lore was lacking, the storylines, etc, which really put some people off. But the gameplay hadn’t slipped yet. In fact, it was still on its upward trajectory (IMO)! Ever since WoD, however, we’re all just a bunch of junkies ever-managing our own gameplay expectations, moving the system design team’s goalposts for them when they ignore and disappoint us over and over, and over again.
I think Legion surprised everyone, honestly. WoD had mostly crushed our spirit, and Legion’s content was great. We were enamored with World Quests, Mythic+ (prior to the dumb +10 affixes polluting the 2-9 casual tier), and how pretty our legendaries were. It took a bit to make us realize just how unfriendly those first two patches were for alts, and how we were basically shackled to our mains if we actually wanted to do the new content each patch when it was fresh.
7.3 snuck in World Scaling. We were so powerful that I think most people just didn’t notice. But man… what an awful, awful mistake. Now here we are in BfA: Gear is meaningless out in the overworld while questing, M+ with the +10 affixes in 2-9 is a slog that people aren’t willing to do anymore, PvPers hate how PvP rewards are done, and the players have never felt less heard.
They kept telling us to “just wait”, every time a new story beat was ruining a character we liked, or obliterating a capital city we enjoyed. “You just don’t know the whole story!” Cut to months later, and it is still dumb. The entire expansion’s war has been GoT-Season8 levels of character assassinations, and Shadowlands doesn’t appear to be righting the ship in any way. Covenants are tightly binding / conflating storyline and theming with what is effectively a talent row for your class. Many specs that have felt ignored for a long time seem to be in consensus on which things they think would make their class feel good again, and the developers are ignoring them.
Raiding is the last bastion for anyone other than us hopelessly addicted casuals that keep taking 2 month breaks out of frustration, but think “maybe if I just play a class I haven’t played before”, or “maybe if I just convince myself that M+ doesn’t exist anymore and I stop caring about gear”, or “maybe I’ll just get some xmog from old raids for the 1000th time.” Managing those expectations. Chasing the dragon.
Bleh, this rant has just depressed me. Good looking out, OP, your predictions for the next expansion feel dead-on, unfortunately. I’m sure we’ll all enjoy seeing our guildies of 15 years in-game again for that 2 week window at launch, and then go back to just sharing memes with them in our Discord and pining over the days when Voidform didn’t exist or Survival was ranged.
