WoW was supposedly at their peak in subscribers during BC/WotLK. I’m not saying everyone enjoyed BC and WotLK more than other expansions (I loved WotLK) and I’m definitely not saying there haven’t been areas of improvement since then (raid scaling, m+, and others etc offer more ways to play), but I was wondering what reason(s) players attributed to that drop.
Personally, I blame “welfare epics” and the increasing amount they’ve been used. These were items offered not from a skill perspective but from just playing. Some examples would be world quests and mythic+ (and the weekly chest) without making it in time. By giving out this gear so freely it led to quasi-equality of gear among characters regardless of skill or experience.
This led to requiring increased reliance on some other way to differentiate between character “power” but which had to be unrelated to gear. Unfortunately that left “time spent playing” as a new metric (there aren’t many other options) - requiring reputation grinding via daily quests, and artifact weapons/necklaces/cloaks.
Without this system (that is to say without the “grinds” required for artifact power - via item level and/or essences and/or reputation) a new level 120 could do world quests, run a few Mythic+ that weren’t close to making it in time (heck in most cases people don’t even care about the end loot which is silly), and in a short period of time be virtually equal in power (though probably not in skill) to a character that had been played for months. That seems a bit unfair.
If there should be a way to differentiate power-levels of characters (which some may disagree with) then there aren’t many options once you’ve equalized gear. From my perspective, rolling back the amount of “free gear” eliminates the need for so much “grinding” to separate power levels. Some of this was originally implemented to allow players to be able to increase in power regardless of their play style (i.e. if you didn’t have 25 friends). But with so much flexibility now with accessing content (raid scaling for sizes, LFR, mythic+, etc) it’s outdated. One of the reasons WoW replaced EQ in the first place was the fact that EQ had so many time sinks. For those that remember some parts of EQ, camping mobs with 18 hour spawn timers just to finish quests was ridiculous. Time spent actually playing the aspects you enjoy is more fun than time spent sitting around and/or doing chores.
That’s just my opinion and I’d love to hear other opinions. Maybe it’s the amount of other MMORPGs (and/or their newer game engines) or the storytelling, or something else.
/As an aside, this isn’t to suggest WotLK and BC didn’t have any grinds (or stupid concepts like attuning and key rings - please… never again…) but grinds like netherwing faction and the argent tournament were pretty much just for vanity items (like mounts - and another dumb idea was making those take up inventory space - argh, another nightmare). There were others, but there were far fewer and far less required than the current game has.
. Emissary rewards on my server are limited to 445, equal to Normal raid loot, AND scale with your characters ilevel, so you only get items 5-7 ilevels above your current average. Fresh 120s don’t get 445 from emissariesalone for a couple of months, since there are probably only 2 gear emissaries a week. Besides, the “catchup gear” was demanded by the raiding community, so they could get their alts raiding ASAP. 
