I don’t play that game so… I hope they don’t do it again. I really do.
Starcraft is a good game as long as you ignore the Epilogue.
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So you missed legion… this is going to be hard to explain then.
Classes:
In legion we had artifact weapons that provided a lot of functionality for each spec that should have been baseline. As players got those fully filled out specs started to play well again (for the most part).
Coming into BFA artifacts were completely nuked from orbit, all of the powers and features they had were removed. So all of that baseline functionality that we had become accustomed to was gone completely in most cases. This left a lot of specs in really horrible places. Many are still in bad shape even if they are “competitive” on meters.
Azerite Armor:
In 8.0 azerite pieces had four not five rings, this meant that getting gear with the traits you needed to be competitive was a major struggle. Adding the fifth ring in 8.1 helped a lot but it’s still a struggle in many cases. This often leads to situations where the ‘right’ piece can be worth as much as 30 iLvL over a ‘wrong’ piece. This means that if for some reason the piece you need to advance doesn’t drop you’re really hurting.
To make it worse, azerite armor is highly non-intuitive for many players. Sure there are guides but even with guides it’s not always clear what’s the best choice without simming every single piece of gear.
The Heart of Azeroth
In 8.0 up until 8.2 released the neck was just a grindy stat stick, it had no interaction and nothing to use it for other than unlocking traits. Not surprisingly players (in general) were not enthused.
Essences
8.2 introduced the essence system to deal with that lack of interaction. However many essences require long grinds (HKs, Reps, PvP rating) to get, this again turns people off because it makes being able to play alts really annoying because if you want to switch to an alt you have to grind literally everything over again. To make this more annoying what essences are best changes by situation. To add insult to injury some of the best essences for PvE are only gotten from PvP which not everybody particularly enjoys.
Removal of Tier sets
Part of the fun of a tier was the tier sets and being able to work to get each one. BFA removed them ostensibly because the devs didn’t want to figure out what a " themed set for a " was. Occam’s razor says that the real reason was Azerite gear which occupies the chest, head, and shoulder slots.
War Mode:
I can’t begin to touch on the issues with war mode. There are reasons it’s called ‘horde mode’ in the NA and EU reasons. It’s a complicated and very divisive topic and there are a lot of threads on the issue. Let it suffice that PvP happens in the PvP mode.
Storyline
Where to start… honestly I don’t even want to touch this topic with a robot designed to deal with nuclear waste. The story for this expac is what others have said: an MOP retread. Right down to the killing an old god at the end and the Horde warchief escaping to an alternate reality.
I think that about covers the basics. Mechanically it’s better than it used to be, but it’s still much more painful to play than Legion was and coming after Legion it really hurts to feel all the things we’ve lost.
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One of the best lists on this thread.
I felt the same way for the first 3 months. It gets old quick. People give a lot of different reasons, but for me it boils down to, you get rewarded for nothing and get nothing for grinding.
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Essences are terribly implemented, AP grinding, alts are totally screwed… can’t imagine why people hate it
If shadowlands is like BFA then thats awesome 
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This is not your car this is a game if i hate a game guess what i do i stop playing it simple.There really is nothing else here if you play something you hate it’s not my problem they cry about it while still playing something they hate.
Absolutely…I hate those stupid things but yet they keep forcing down your throat by having you complete missions to advance the story.
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Almost every player-friendly change from Legion was dumpstered.
Blizzard added a delay on way too many abilities making rotations feel (here’s the dreaded word) clunky.
Azerite armor was very poorly thought out - we were expected to lose traits we already had and grind them out again over and over all expansion.
Classes that were built around Artifacts had dozens of ability modifiers removed and Blizzard didn’t give themselves enough time to rebuild them, resulting in many classes that were straight up unfinished at BfA launch.
The xpac launched riddled with bugs and frankly not in a state that justified a full game purchase price.
The story was also widely disliked for a variety of reasons. People didn’t like going from Legion working together to BfA world war, character motivations which were hinted to be complex turned out to be just random actions, capital cities were broken for little to no payoff.
M+ felt like it was designed specifically with esports in mind, making it much less enjoyable for many people than it had been in Legion. The PvP gearing system frustrated a lot of people who wanted to see vendors return.
I’m sure there is more but that’s what I can remember off the top of my head.
Edit: one more - players going from Legion to BfA had Legendaries which stopped working after lv 115, resulting in classes that abruptly felt significantly worse to play around halfway through the BfA leveling process.
Edit 2: last one - many players felt like their classes were missing enough that they were obligated to enable War Mode in order to fill in gaps with PvP talents. This resulted in a double whammy of people resenting that they needed to enable PvP in order to access these talents that they thought should have been baseline and people noticing that their classes felt that much worse in PvE instances where the talents were disabled.
Ok, that’s it from me.
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Because it furthers WoW into being a single-player game with optional instancing if that’s what you’re into. WoW used to be an MMORPG and it was better as an MMORPG. It was the alternative MMORPG choice to EverCrack as a matter of fact.
Because it doesn’t really offer anything… The art is fantastic, but the quality is pretty low past that.
Its the xpac of RNG with a sprinkle more of RNG.
There’s not really anything fun to work toward, most things feel more like chores than other xpacs. Even rares don’t drop diddly. I loved class hall in legion, even legendary stuff looked interesting. WoD you got the garrison, not perfect but something new. BfA… uh?
The next xpac looks even more dry, sadly. Hopefully they prove me wrong on that.
Unpopular opinion, but I really like the story of BFA. But, BFA feels like a continuation of Legion. I don’t like the neck system, I don’t like the lack of having a legendary item. And I am kind of done with the idea of the hard content being 20 man mythic raiding; I wish they would reduce the size because flex raiding is basically a joke. Mythic+ are fine, but the raiding scene needs to be touched on. I think a lot of players have stopped raiding, and heroic guilds don’t really exist, sure there are a few out there but the rewards are not good, you might as well just do 5 mans to get better gear than a heroic raid. It’s sad really.
Well, aside from scaling, pathfinder, forging, and the fun-desert that classes are, my biggest issue with BfA is that:
The entire expansion is centered around an item you never replace, in a slot you can’t see, powered by drops you never get, which itself powers spells you have no control over.
Pretty fun idea.
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Exactly…doing nothing is their idea of fun. Like mission tables where you click a button to open a window, add-on preselects best group, you click ok and come back 4 hours later and repeat…hold me back I can’t contain myself. I’m so excited just thinking about it.
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You’re finished leveling? Good for you. Now here’s a piece of gear to level up. Finished with that? Well don’t worry. We have another piece of gear for you to level up…
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People have always complained. Started in vanilla. Vanilla players told us BC would die. The first 6 months of wrath were crucified on the forums.
Game is what you make of it. No one will ever agree what should or should not be in the game. Just read these posts.
I miss the artifact, I hate the artifact, lfr is bad, lfr is the only reason I play… etc, it never will end.
everyone is different
while i enjoy the lack of flying because i’ve always loved world pvp its made it great for ganking those they desperately wanting it.
I did not like the story of a horde char being a villian.
I didn’t like sharding, horrible, layering is much better.
We got no new spells or talents.
Azerite was god awful
No badge loot
The horrible RNG that caused me to get the same item 3 weeks in a row
too many allied races
poor treatment of alts
They literally made a decision to remove AP tokens, which you could click to activate, or sell for gold.
The ways that they’re removing your ability to control the things around you are nefarious and insidious.
Take reputations for instance. Can anything even be labeled as a grind anymore if Blizzard has taken it upon themselves to remove all opportunities to truly grind away at it? You have your daily allowed progression, and that’s it.
Shoot. As a player you’re not even allowed to farm recent and trivial raids for xmogs because nanny doesn’t like that you might do it beyond their little micromanaged vision.
While it’s true that there has and always be complaints, where you are being (unintentionally?) disingenuous is that Blizzard has never before had to change their core expansion mechanic DURING the expansion due to negative feedback and player withdrawal from engaging the system. That alone seems significant to me.