Most of the people who started playing SoM wanted to level (although often just one toon) and go through that “fresh” experience. Leveling is a big part of that.
These players knew what they were getting into.
For those people who do not know and want to learn instead of just making their own reasons up here are some issues that SoM had/has:
- Released too close to the end of “Vanilla” Classic
- Too many servers at launch
- PVP system put out right at launch - and that PVP gear being the very best for raiding which caused people do “no life”
- The PVP drama was quite intense, I find that this makes the game more fun/memorable but it turned some people off.
- Suspensions for bad chat/language of 8 days from people who were PVP ranking which with the way that works costs even more time
- Difficulty gold farming due to nerfs of common gold farms (like we are seeing today)
- Lots of consume grinding or needing to buy due to the buffs to the boss health/changes of raid encounters making them longer, often needing 12 healers with mana pots on cooldown and resistance pots not needed in the original.
- Gold buying due to the above issues mentioned and then a large 14-day suspension wave making it so that groups could not raid for awhile because so many raiders were missing.
I’ll be honest I haven’t been following SoM lately but this all happened in the first few months. I very much found fun in the game but I didn’t ever plan to stay because I already just did all the raids every week for over a year. I leveled two characters on SoM (one of each faction) and enjoy leveling.