In the early years, there was a lot more talk going on on the forums. A new thread would drop from the first page in hours, sometimes minutes.
I don't usually visit the forums unless there's a blue post link or something like that, but at least from what I've seen, the forums have made the same change that the in-game social nature has. I remember the forums being a
fun place to visit where people would interact with each other by name. For example, since it was a PVP server, it wasn't uncommon to see threads talking about PVP encounters. Normally, they were quite civil with remarks of gratitude for the fun "duel".
I noticed a stronger shift away from the social aspect with The Burning Crusade, and it has pretty much gone downhill from there. That's partly due to the large surge in the player-base and the shift in focus of the game. The prior is not much different than a tight-knit team ballooning in size -- you tend to lose the sense of camaraderie among everyone. In my experience, you usually have to go to smaller guilds to get that anymore.
The shift in focus from long, difficulty content being the main focus of the game to many different, easier, bite-sized morsels causes people to be too focused on short-term goals and faster gratification. A good example of these things were the vanilla class quests. There were four classes that had quests: Priest (Anathema/Benediction staff), Hunter (Rhok'delar/Lok'delar bow/staff), Warlock (Dreadsteed mount), and Paladin (Charger mount). If you ask anyone on here that did these, they'll tell you that they weren't all that easy, but the pay-off was icing on that hellish cake! I did the Priest quest during vanilla and the Warlock and Paladin quests shortly after TBC started. The latter was still kind of hard because I used a single 70 with my 60-62 Paladin/Warlock to do it. I still have nightmares of trying to solo the final part of the Warlock class quest in Dire Maul with my 70 Shaman and 62 Warlock. The biggest problem is that Shamans lacked AoE threat generation (or even just AoE damage), so it was hard to keep enemies off my Warlock.
6) It's just a game!!
This is the crux of the problem. Summarized in 5 words.
WoW used to be a world. A mysterious, dangerous ever-changing world. Nowadays, it's just a game.
I
highly disagree with your statement. The issue isn't that WoW is a game, but that WoW has become a job/chore. I don't log in every day to do Garrison missions because they're so
fun and
exciting. I do them because it's part of "the job". Amusingly enough, I made that remark to a friend last night when talking about our work. I mentioned how software people tend to remark that you should probably reconsider majoring in Computer Science if you enjoy it as a hobby because it may make you not want to do it for fun anymore. I think WoW is the same way as when it feels tedious and like a chore, the fun stuff loses its mojo.
