Anecdotal, but a lot of my friends did not come back for Dragonflight for reasons unrelated to the expansion itself. There was various reasons ranging from the lawsuits to IRL issues, but the most common reason was simply that Shadowlands was so bad they gave up on WoW forever.
Edit: spelling
Regarding the title thread, honestly I don’t blame people. Blizzard has decimated the trust of most of its fanbase, between the assault allegations, the lawsuits, the Union busting (regardless of opinions on Unions in general, Blizzard’s antics are deplorable at best), the reveal of extremely low pay (that wasn’t even a secret), the two panned expansions in a row, the fact that the pandemic isn’t as prevalent right now, it was also the Christmas season, FF14 has become a bigger opponent in the MMO scene and has a lot more casual content for the casual playerbase, the fact Blizzard itself has revolting monetary practices in their other games, I mean the list goes on and on and on. Blizzard has a long, uphill battle ahead of it to try and earn back the favor of their community.
Mhm, this I think is a huge one. Shadowlands is going to leave a near irreparable mark on WoW for years to come. It’s going to take a lot of effort to try and close that wound, and one expansion that is actually pretty good from the start is not going to do that.
You can only repaint or try to fix something so many times. Eventually you want a new thing.
We have Zovaal at home.
OP: I don’t know, they have all the forever complainers here on the forum subbed. They’re surely the majority. 
Dragonflight is largely the best the game as been, ever. I don’t much care about the sales numbers, that aren’t even released by Blizzard any more.
Regardless, the next tier/patch cycle will really determine the health of DF as an xpac.
They sell you two caa-caa sandwiches in a row, some people are more inclined to sniff the third one before just assuming it’s a Ruben.
If players are being lost it’ll be due to 3 expansions in a row of mismanagement and all focus into selling WoW Tokens. This expansion feels good and I am personally enjoying it. Still 3 straight expansions of just waiting around for this one and hardly playing the past 3 did VERY little to add fuel to the WoW passion fire. Those players who haven’t returned yet are imo missing out, but are likely dealing with smoldering passion at this point.
Even though this expansion, finally a good one, has come; I’m left with 3 straight expansions where selling WoW Tokens was the main focus - lot of dirt in my mouth that still needs to be spit out. Those past 3 expansions did VERY little to add fuel to my fire, and its hard to keep the passion going. Practically a super casual andy at this point. Blizzard likely made bank selling tokens but failed to foresee the player/other side of the dynamic of hardcore P2W for those 3 expansions.
I mean, selling WoW Tokens and going hard af with the P2W was and is a GoT red wedding.
I didn’t pre-purchase until right before the expac dropped, once I realized that I had earned enough gold to buy it through the token system. This was a first, because I typically pre-purchase far in advance with real money under the assumption that I will be playing the new expac.
SL rubbed a lot of players the wrong way, and it didn’t help that DF doesn’t have a single new gameplay-related feature to advertise. (I don’t count Dragonriding and the profession revamp as a gameplay feature.)
Ion and other devs in fact clearly discussed how DF was going to be a reiteration of core SL design philosophies, saying things like “if you liked 9.2, you will like DF”.
This was all a mistake. The concept of only allowing full-fledged power progression through group instanced content appeals to merely a minority of gamers.
The praise for DF is a great example of survivorship bias. Either you are elitist to the core, or you are so casual that you are happy literally digging in the dirt for vendor grays.
SL was actually better for the casual diggers because you could actually loot LFR or even Normal iLvl gear from chests! When an expansion makes SL look generous, you know you have a problem.
I don’t like hotcakes.
COPE AND SEETHE!
The Factions should stay dead.
Cross faction saved WoW for me and my Friends.
Dragonflight is my favorite Expac since Panda.
Legion was good in the middle there.
it s hard to trust after 18 years of no communication and always changing everything regardless if players who generally protest hardcore in beta see it go live. it tough man watching things that never needed a change being fixed when they were never broken and broken things remain broken. Plus the entire cube crawl thing hit hard most of us thought blizzard would be a dream job, it was the reason I went to full sail university and got into game design.
Many factors that could be listed but it also a generational thing, young people follow whats popular and what their friends or age group play that looks fun. Wow is geared and populated by people 30+ mostly. and most of the population is casual players with a small percentage raid or mythic+ and PVP casuals log on run daily’s hunt a mog run an old raid and then log get ready for work.
imagine you go to this place and they mixed up your order two times in a row. why would you go to that place a third time? the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. It has nothing to do with the expansion as current, the underlining problem is something called shadowlands and BFA.
Ah, there it is.
What do you expect to see, Brewa? All your hating had an effect on Alliance-players during BfA. You reveled in their misery, I do remember these postings. Do you really thought there would be no consequences in the longrun? Imagine other people doing this as well, constantly. What is the logical outcome?
These players are gone and you have to take responsibility for this, including others. The moment you attack a beaten down person who has no fun, is permanently in a disadvantage and can’t enjoy the gameplay loop, they will never return to this game. Combine this with an awful story and the faction-less approach coming soon, Blizzard and Ion Hazzikostas fostered this behavior, Accept the consequences of your wrong-doings, because these were still people behind PCs.
Coming back after what happened in all of shadowlands is going to be hard for blizz.
Bacon pancakes!
Because Shadowlands, and things that happened during Shadowlands, has damaged the franchise well beyond anything we’ve seen before. With the fears that many had of what happens when Blizzard misses on the patter of a good xpac followed by a bad one and releases 2 bad in a row coming true, to the whole SA stuff coming up. There’s been so much damage done that it’s going to take more than just a singular good patch and promises that we’ve heard before that they’re going to totally listen to player feedback this time around to repair the damage.
Or you know, we could at least wait until Febuary to see what Activision Blizzard actually thinks about the franchise.
because this current iteration of WOW is trash as is most of its playerbase.
Are we speaking about the Arthas-anima-thing? Yes, this was absolutely inexcusable going forward.
How do you know how the game is selling?
Do you have a link to sales charts?
Please don’t tell me you’re using Twitch viewers as your metric…lol