Well because the players simply can’t stop doing them and Blizzard knows this and take advantage of it .
Even the current prepatch event , there are soo many players doing it that it lags entire zone . 
Time gating anything, in any genre, is bad game design. If your only solution for player retention is time gating, you can go work for a mobile f2p game.
I have 64 alts and they’re ALL mad at Blizzard at the moment
If this happened, all activity from the same level of play, would result in a spectrum of different levels, with a naturally occurring high end.
But then they can’t measure participation in a ‘meaningful’ way, cuz all the different levels of performance all lumped together in the same play space.
The resemblance to a ‘skinner box’ becomes clearer and clearer, the more I look at Wow’s design elements.
I just want to enjoy the story 
. I tried remix but am lost and don’t really get the hype. I want spoken dialogue and cutscenes.
I completely agree with this. I spent all that tme acquiring heirlooms and lvling them up so questing to max level would be a tad faster n more enjoyable, and then they make leveling a quick n boring experience you can accomplish in less than a day…
I more or less agree with your summary of events. I feel like they are to “worried” about a player being " done" with a character this time around though.
The traditional tools for keeping players around long term (ie ce, glad) still exist without the need to draw out earlier activities
It’s casual friendly because it takes no time to level, you can’t die without trying, gearing is fast and cheap, talent builds take no thought, you can be carried through everything, classes are wildly homogenized, questing requires no thought, raid modes that allow half the raid to afk, reputations take little effort, add-ons play for you, you can buy gold, catch up mechanics constantly, and the list goes on and on.
Devils advocate. That stuff is overwhelming as a casual player. I see them trying to think of us but it is not working. I gave up on trying to get to mythic to get some of that cool stuff, even stopped trying to progress my professions. Just do not have the time for it. And when I want to do a dungeon or LFR. It is all rush rush rush. It would be nice if they had solo difficulty progression. Heroic/Mythic solo that rewards heroic/mythic. This way I can progress at my own pace and be geared when I feel up to doing group content.
A lot of players are from old WoW where the grind is not only expected but cherished because it serves a purpose when logging in outaide of just standing in Valdrakken and twiddling my thumbs
That never existed in old wow though… shouldn’t that be a big point of contention? Even in old wow skill bypassed the lionshare of almost every grind. There are few exceptions.
A lot of this thread is confused because we’re missing a key piece of terminology
WoW IS casual
Casual = hard to fail at. It’s actually impossible to fail at WoW, broadly speaking. There is no fail state. M+ is popular because it isn’t casual, there IS a fail state.
The terminology that’s missing is APPROACHABLE
Approachable = easy (enough) to succeed at, meaning you can achieve a desired win state. In an MMO that’s pretty variable and will vary between players.
Time gated content and grinds reduce approachability, sometimes to the point of removing it. Obtuseness also decreases approachability. Personally as an old head who played every expansion between classic and Legion I find the current game to be VERY obtuse. That’s the other piece of missing terminology.
Obtuse = hard to enjoy, or rather the game gets in the way of it’s own fun. A good example of this, in my opinion, is the prevalence of overly geared players PUGing LFG dungeons and doing them at break neck speed, while the other 4 players just meander behind. That isn’t fun, it’s obtuse. It’s also very casual, and approachable.
A counter example is raiding, broadly. Raiding is not (usually) obtuse. It’s fun, it’s straightforward, but it’s also not casual, there’s a fail state. But it’s also approachable, success is pretty easy.
I think where WoW has been failing at for a while is conflating casual with approachable. Casual is bad for most all game design because winning when you can’t really lose doesn’t feel like anything, it isn’t fun, it’s obtuse.
WQs are obtuse in this manner. They’re almost impossible to fail so they don’t feel fun or fulfilling. This is what I believe OP is talking about. Time gates and grinds can be good, great even, when they feel like an accomplishment, when they’re fun.
Elden Ring has been brought up a lot because it’s a great example of how important it is that a game isn’t obtuse. ER isn’t casual, it’s very easy to fail at. It’s also not approachable, it’s notoriously hard to succeed at. But it’s incredibly unobtuse, everything is fun. It’s difficulty is paid off.
WoW has the problem that it isn’t difficult but it doesn’t pay off. The problem is you can’t just make it difficult; difficult AND obtuse is BAD. The problem I see is that they’ve changed the game to be too fast, part of being more casual. This has the effect of being very obtuse for most players while also lowering approachability because part of the win state is the speed at which you move, quite literally in the case if M+
Someone already hit the nail on the head, the time sinks exist because the game pace is too fast. If they got rid of all the time sinks people would be clearing all content at absurd rates. The time sinks are a (bad) attempt to reintroduce the approachability lost by the increase speed of the game. In doing so they’re making an already obtuse game MORE OBTUSE this is why things feel worse.
The game needs to drop the time sinks and slooooooow down i.e. time gates ORGANICALLY. I assume the reason they won’t do that is because that would make the game far less casual. Remember when 5 man dungeons took an hour or more? Remember BRD taking like 4+ hours? None of that is casual because the one true fail state for WoW is not having enough time to complete something.
The real issue is that MMOs should take time, and they should only be minimally casual. But that alienates players, but the reality is that MMOs can’t be for everyone or you get what we have now, varying levels of approachability and casualness and far far too obtuse
None of this was real… or at least wasn’t to people who knew what they were doing. BRD took roughly 40mins.
People keep inventing this version of wow from when they were 8-12 not realizing what they are remembering is being 8-12.
WoW was considered casual to ultima… maybe everquest if you squint its been three decades. We can move on
You can log into classic today and spend hours if not weeks trying to find your 4 hour brd group. It won’t exist.
No a full clear of BRD took several hours. My single fondest memory of WoW was taking hours doing exactly that with a bunch of guild mates back in 2009. You can say that isn’t true but you’re wrong.
It wasn’t untrue it was you having no idea what you were doing not the content. Its why it doesn’t exist in classic. You are nostalgic for a lack of a better word your more innocent times.
No game design can give you that back, no grind will replicate it. Time wears on us all but its how we use that experience that matters. There exists two long grind in vanilla wow and that is scarab lord and getting your winterspring tiger. That is it.
We can’t burn the future to try and restore your misremembered fantastical past.
It wasn’t blindly and i wouldn’t say they backed themselves into a corner either. M+ is dirt cheap to develop for using mostly recycled content.
What are you talking about? Blizzard has bent over backwards to appease the begging segment of this game and took the whole RPG element out of the game. MMORPGs are historically timesinks, DF required like 15 minutes per day to stay current.
Because then some +streamers+ and other h&s-people could not produce as much CONTENT and must do a normal job x) (kiddin)
The problem is that with m+ content, the game was shifted into the e-sport direction.
So since Legion its getting downhills for lovers of more classic oldschool-mmos.
What else do you want war within is doing everything that it can to provide casuals with solo gearing content.
The entire point of releasing umpteen expansions is quite literally to give us that feeling back.
The problem is that recently expansions have been less about giving us new content to explore and conquer. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be nostalgic about every expansion.
But they aren’t making expansions to conqueror and explore anymore. That’s exactly my point. Time sinks are here to emulate the challenges we used to have so that the game can remain casual and fast paced because casual and fast paced = maximal engagement for minimal effort
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