It was the small changes that added up over time for me. The game slowly lost the community feel and the grind felt more annoying than accomplishing.
My biggest issues would be name changes & server/faction xfers, classes losing their uniqueness, and most annoyingly mob scaling.
them not being free? same.
Total boredom with BFA.
I felt like the only reason I was playing was to get rare mounts, because everything else is gear treadmill or not fun.
When I decided that the transition was complete. It was a slow process from early Wotlk until late Cata that the game moved away from MMO into “single player in a crowd” - dungeon finder, flying, phasing…
I’m not huge into PVP but I like alive open world and meeting friends and foes there, and more importantly having a strong reason to cooperate/fight with them. “Strong reason” meaning the optimal way to play/progress, “optimal way” meaning being forced to cooperate/fight if you want to be on top of progression.
Working hard to complete your character yet never completing it due to titanforging. Then as soon as your item level gets high enough to somewhat give you that tick of completion a new patch drops and everything you just did for your character is now obsolete. It destroys replayability for alts.
The world is shrunk to a couple zones in a concentrated area. The world feels smaller now than ever even though we have more zones.
This is wishful thinking here but I couldn’t help but wonder if with the whole faction conflict thing + the level scaling tech could have gave us a dynamic world and revamped questing like they did in cataclysm. Except this time they made every village/town except major cities conquerable. There would be frontlines in each zone that you could help push and get objectives to help you level and your “army” push the enemy out of the zone. Take over the towns and plant your faction banner. The world would be dynamic and focused on the faction conflict on a macro and micro level at the same time.
Instead we got afk warfronts for free gear.
The culmination of many years of change. Since Cata, I’ve started to play a little less and less as the months and years went by. By BfA, there’s just nothing left to play for. I quit multiple times over the years, but only for months at a time and always came back to play. This is the point in time that I’ve quit and have not come back, and don’t plan to.
If it weren’t for classic, and Blizz doesn’t radically change the current game back to what it once was, I’d be done with WoW for good.
-Most of my friends quit.
-The community/guilds are dead.
-Everyone does their chores solo.
-No one plays for fun, they play for rewards.
-Realm pride/forums are dead.
-Welfare gear/Gearing is too easy.
If I typed everything that made me quit it would be a novel.
I guess what was the final straw was how arena turned into the arcade shooter that takes zero skill compared to what it use to.
The absolute homogenization of every race, ability and class.
I loved the inequities that were found in vanilla where we all had strengths and weaknesses.
I quit because of how “shallow” the RPG aspects have become. So many things have changed in the name of convenience that it does;t feel like anything takes effort. Get to max level, the journey to which is hours long and anything acquired is useless and there is no reason to progress your character in any other way (professions for example). At max level you can so very easily reach an iLevel to join LFR or normal raid… absolute NO reason to run a normal dungeon anymore and most people skip them entirely.
I much preferred the game when you had to run normals to gear for heroics or get your face smashed in. The Heroic keys idea in BC was awesome as was the attunements for things like Kara/BT.
Then you had to run the heroics to get geared for raids… earning badges along the way to get some important fill in gear. It was epic! And speaking of epic… man I sure do wish gear meant something anymore. I miss the days when a green was a GOOD thing, and blues were awesome, epics were hard to come by and so therefore EPIC! Saddest day in WoW for me was when Legion dropped LEGENDARIES like candy… and they even added “bad luck protection” to make sure everyone got one.
Nah, I want to go back to a day when first aid was important, eating and drinking was a thing, where feeding your hunter pet had to be done, where crafting items actually was useful, weapon stones/oils, and so much more. It was AWESOME!
The lack of Community. Wherever you go you see people who aren’t on your server and you will never meet again.
Mainly just time. Right now, I don’t have enough of it to commit to working on any real progression. That’s really the main draw of classic to me, I can be behind the curve, but should still be able to catch up quick and still do everything when I have time again.
thats the T
…
I really quit retail during Cataclysm. I started having increasing amount of issues with the game during wrath and it all culminated in the eventual release of cross realm systems like LFG that finally started eating into me real bad.
I sticked around though but shortly after dinging 85 in cataclysm I just could not stand what the game had become and went away.
I did pop back in legion to see if things had gotten better and was sorely disappointed and quit not long after dinging 110. Honestly I don’t think Legion was a bad game it just was not the game for me.
Raids having difficulties and LFD were the things that did it for me.
I’ve “quit” retail multiple times for multiple reasons.
First time: The No-Fly Bait-and-Switch Fiasco of WoD. Lasted about a year, came back when they announced Pathfinder. To this day I still hate Pathfinder but I’ll deal with it.
Second time: Zone scaling in Legion. I don’t think zone scaling is a good idea for WoW outside of major events like pre-expac launch events or holidays. Unfortunately they got so much good press from it that it’s here to stay, so… meh. Ended up going back near the end of the expansion again.
Third time: A desire to wait until Classic. Unfortunately this “break” didn’t last as long as the others because I left some RP characters unresolved.
Ive played every xpac that has had pathfinder and ive never done it. protest lol
I can’t. The modern game is absolutely zero fun without flight.
Classic, on the other hand, is fun without flight, and designed so much better for its absence. Which is why you do not see me advocating for flight at all in Classic.
might be why im no longer subbed haha