Now there are new revelations that Blizzard might be losing some of the magic with their own employees. It sounds like changes to bonuses are amounting to pay cuts for some employees. At the same time the pay scale at Blizzard is reportedly lower than other companies, while the cost of living for many who work at Blizzard is painfully high.
It also sounds like some developers are enticed by the smaller projects where their time and effort pays off quicker developing on mobile or much smaller projects other than WoW or Diablo 3 style projects that take much longer. There is a very real chance of a convergence of bad things that create a vacuum of talent for bigger projects like WoW. Sure they can hire new talent, but with that can come change that isn’t always good, and less experienced seasoned developers used to working on long running projects.
WoW has already changed a lot, and many of those changes are not welcomed by a lot of the long time players. Mix in some more random chaos and the current dev teams unwillingness to change course on many unpopular design decisions could lead to WoW being unrecognizable to what it once was. It remains to be seen if vanilla will even actually be like vanilla was back in the day since it’s based on Legion not the classic code.
Nothing has changed for me. Pathfinder has killed the magic WoW had for me. Time gated flight with multi-achievement requirements just isn’t the same as max level flying purchased with gold you could obtain in a variety of play styles based on personal choice. Excessive control forced upon you in a game isn’t really fun unless those choices were fun for you to begin with. It’s too restrictive and lacks the freedom WoW used to have.