World of Warcraft: Current Year

Personally I've always been okay with games having features I'm not interested in but that might interest someone else, as long as there's content I also enjoy myself. From what I sometimes read on WoW sites such as Wowhead or MMO-Champion, there's basically two sides now because we live in a society with no gray areas anymore : there's the My Little Pony / Hello Kitty Online side that wants pink armor sets with hairbows and fluffy accessories and who only cares about the housing and collecting pokémon aspect, and on the opposite end of the spectrum there's the grimdark edgelords who drink blood from plastic skull-shaped mugs and who want WARcraft to be about WAR and nothing but WAR all the time, lok'tar ogar or some shit.

Having played WoW straight out of EverQuest like most people here, I find it's actually a pretty good comparison to EverQuest in that it mixes some silly aspects with some more serious aspects in its world. Obviously WoW has a lot more pop culture / meta jokes because those are the times we live in, but EQ also had its share of funny or downright silly NPC dialogue or quests or item names, and players could play it seriously and competitively, or just have fun exploring, or tell jokes in /ooc or organize weddings if they wanted.

You can still do that in WoW today. You don't have to buy cosmetics on the store, you don't have to decorate a house if you don't want to, you don't have to collect pokémons or mounts or every armor set if that doesn't interest you, there's a lot of challenging content in Mythic+ dungeons and Heroic/Mythic raids, or ranked PvP.

I think WoW today isn't particularly worse than it was in the past. Are the stories always good? Hell no, there's a bunch of dumb ass writing in several expansions including the most recent, but the writing was also poor occasionally even early on (Burning Crusade in 2006 completely retconned Kael'tas Sunstrider from a noble blood elf leading his people into exile as refugees into a cackling maniac for the TBC raid, among other issues with the lore).

The gameplay wasn't exactly more fun early on, there was a lot of complexity for complexity's sake even though it felt accessible at the time because we were coming from EQ or other MMOs that were even worse at the time. They've streamined and added QoL features to a lot of things, and sometimes they go too far in simplification too, which needs to be corrected.

People complain that it all started to go down when they added daily quests in Mists of Pandaria in 2014, because "OMG you have to log on every day". Nah you really don't, but if you do, you'll always have things to do. "But it's just for shareholders metrics!" Of course it is, but everything has always been about metrics in all MMO's, that's why they have very rare drops and camps that last 72 hours in EQ, and that sucked a LOT more than anything WoW has done in my opinion.

It's like every few years there's a sudden realization by some people that those companies aren't your friend and aren't making content just for you, it's a business and their money plan is to give you access to a world they designed and you pay them for it.

There's a bunch of stuff in WoW I would change if I were in charge of the game, but as much as it gets criticized, I don't really see a better alternative out there that offers so much content with very smooth gameplay and new content being added every few months.