- Treating flying as a design obstacle to be avoided, instead of a design opportunity.
- Letting Ghostcrawler escape.
- Replacing borrowed power chores with seasonal borrowed ilvl chores n currencies.
- Thinking pve could be an esport.
- Warmode with multiple levels of crz instead of warmode = 1 crzone.
- Listening to edgey bois.
(Glad they fixed #1)
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So do you have an example of where it went off the rails, or are you just here to praise the game and dissect my opinion?
So where did they go wrong?
I think WoW today is more playable than it’s ever been, just that there’s way too many other good games and versions of WoW to play.
Back when there was one version of WoW, everyone was together.
Playerbase wasn’t nearly as fractured as it is now, be it from alternative WoWs or other games.
PoE 2 just came out recently.
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and it will be a distant memory like Elden Ring in about 6 weeks when the shine wears off and folks are back in WoW. 6 weeks is generous. I’m more focused on this topic and this game.
Community was tighter and held each other accountable. 
You’re not wrong. “Jumping the tracks” is a metaphor that fails in that, once the train is off the tracks it can’t jump the tracks again. Blizzard has made a lot of missteps.
I think making them neutral was the wrong move. They aren’t any more silly or furry than tauren really.
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I just generally think there’s not much WoW can do. It’s 20+ years old.
They’re already doing housing, which is a “break glass in case of emergency” type of feature.
Players are naturally gonna move on to newer, shinier games, nothing really lasts forever. Especially, games.
And PoE 2 will likely last longer than Diablo 4 has.
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The assumption here is you must agree things went wrong
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I think it’s hard to point to one or two events as it’s more a gradual evolution(devolution).
I think LFR, Cataclysm, scaling, Chromie time, layering and the cookie cutter expansions all contributed but also, after WotLK they ran out of lore to work with and the stories for each expansion felt like they were just winging it. Legion was interesting as well as the Siege of Orgrimmar but for the most part the later expansions have been awkward, shoehorned islands/zones that don’t fit into the world. They are self contained, isolated experiences that further fracture the already siloed world.
There was an interview with some Blizz VIP years ago that said the zones are as much a character as the NPCs within them. That was evident in the early expansion zones but since Cata it’s all just rehashed and carbon copies. The only zone with some character in TWW is Hallowfall.
Its been my experience that people who hold themselves accountable and treat others decently tend to gravitate towards each other, and people that blame others for problems and treat others transactionally tend to have a lot of issues with “bad actors”.
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I agree with this. LFD kind of ruined community. But if they never messed with CRZ and left realms to their battle-groups, things would have been alright.
CRZ messed everything up. Followed by phasing.
They jumped the tracks with weekly login lootbox vault and sitting in weekly timeout raid lockouts.
Both make progression fake and not a real thing. Not meaningful to say you sat in timeout for the rest of the week for a weekly hand-me. Also raiding difficulty being mostly fake and artificial via about other people burning your raid lockout for the week taking away your agency ain’t the play.
The company is too much of a control freak and is willing to take away all player agency to control subscription duration, even if it makes progression worthless and trashed up fake. They don’t understand what makes engaging with content meaningful.
People need to get over themselves with their pearl clutching on these bad mobile game systems. The “we suffered with garbage systems design so everyone else must as well” is extremely prevalent on the forums.
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So, have things gone wrong at any point in the last 20 years?
Retail is a dried husk of its former greatness.
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World PVP was ruined when server transfers were introduced and most players gravitated to lopsided realms in TBC. But the writing was already on the wall as players rolled on lopsided realms already. Personally, i like warmode and ream transfers.
As far as LFD and LFR, they should spend the first 10 minutes looking for a realm specific group, then after 10 minutes, go outside your realm. There is no reason for full realms not to be able to form a random group.
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WLK, straight down hill during and after, & I have accepted that.
IMO Classic and Retail DO NOT directly compete for players. Not in any way, shape or form. There might be a few who play both, but the design philosophies are so different most players are in one camp or the other. Daddy Blizz couldn’t pay me enough to play Classic (at least not without wasting his entire bonus and “companionship” allowance), just like he couldn’t pay most Classic fans to play retail. BC was a huge step forward IMO. 
WoW is an exponentially better game now than it was in Vanilla.
It’s waxed and waned since Wrath, but the rose-tinted goggles people wear for “better times” are so thick and so tinted they can’t even see what they were playing contemporaneously, frankly.
People still argue about CU and NGE when it comes to Star Wars Galaxies, and I’m not sure there are right answers when it comes to these things. Instead, I think it’s more important that you do take risks such as these as a game’s life drags on, but try to minimize the impact. There is no way to eliminate the impact.
If you think about it, it’s honestly self-evident. No one can agree on what’s best. Housing good? Bad?
M+ good? Bad?
Raiding good? Bad?
Delves good? Bad?
MoP talents good? Bad?
DF talents good? Bad?
So on, so forth, until the end of time. Still, we’re an iterative species. We need to iterate, stagnation is never the answer.
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I think that it’s been on track from the beginning. But it’s a bad track. It’s the “only X% of players should be able to complete the content” track.
So every time someone comes up with an addon that makes the game vastly easier, Blizz has to up their game and make the content harder.
Over time this drastically decreases accessibility.
My choice is a narrative one rather than a game feature or mechanic.
The Afterlife cosmic space robot factory in Zereth Mortis is my choice for when the game went off the rails. I didn’t like timey whimey alternate reality stuff in WoD but It kinda made sense, sorta, in a way…but the narrative for Shadowlands was really bad, but the reveal that there was a “proto-type” pantheon and that most of the afterlife was cosmic space robots created by something else…
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