they didn't really do anything to try and stop people sinking into a meaningless life of 'wake up, turn on computer, play WoW, use toilet and eat food when necessary, turn off computer, go back to sleep, repeat x infinity
It's not the game developer's responsibility to dictate to their own customers how they spend their free time. If someone wants to destroy their life in such a fashion, why should the developer step in, especially when so many other customers can lead normal, healthy lives at the same time?

I'm also unsure how they made the game more addicting. Could you elaborate on that?

They must have seen and realised that their community was becoming corrupt and rotten, but never tried to stop this from progressing to the point it's at now, where 90% of the games player-base is a bunch of spoilt ignorant brainless little brats that will cry, shout, complain and insult ANYTHING that differs even 0.000001% from what they think.
Most of the complaints people made were completely baseless, and were as asinine as many of the complaints in this and other threads. The people who actually had something to say were either well-spoken and ended up having extended conversations with the developers (you know, before they put Ghostcrawler on a leash), or they were posting on forums outside the official ones, where the moderators wouldn't put up with bullshit; either way, you needed solid evidence to prove your point, which meant that you tested the shit out of whatever it was you were talking about before you came forward with the complaint.

Beyond that, most people I ever encountered in WoW were pretty nice, so long as you were A) also nice, and B) reasonably competent with the class you were playing. Issues over builds only ever came into play when you were trying to do raid content, and then, only if you demonstrated that you had absolutely no idea how to make an effective one. A lot of people pre-Cata seemed to think that never getting past the 3rd tier of talents or dumping everything into a single tree made for a more effective character than someone who decided that they'd put most of their points in one tree and the rest in another for a more balanced and specialized character.

Also if you were to try and have a debate about immersion on the Warcraft forums, you wouldn't get people argue with you, you'd just get about 50 "STFU" replies. That game lacks any possible form of immersion at all. Sure it has a plot, but no one cares, the players and the developers have made the game so easy that being in one zone is exactly like being in another, eventually you tunnel-vision and all you can see is enemies to kill and quest giving NPCs, you stop noticing the world you're running around because you're too busy aiming for more XP, loot and gold.
Actually, I would imagine a thread about immersion on the WoW forums would end up being much the same as what's going on here. Of course, you're picking the worst place in the universe to ask the question in both instances, so if you wanted a worthwhile discussion on the topic, you'd have to take it to one of the splinter communities where the signal to noise ratio is better because the mods actually give a shit about their community.

And once you hit end-game there's no point leaving Stormwind because you can access every heroic dungeon through the LFG tool, then you sit around argueing with other people in trade chat till your dungeon invite pops up. The game world is huge, but nowadays you're lucky if you even see 5 people outside of Stormwind or Orgrimmar. That's not immersion, that's the most broken online roleplaying game available.
They still had you discover the entrances (at least for a while; don't know if they still do) before you could queue for a given dungeon. Beyond that, the Dungeon Finder arose out of the playerbase's desire to run dungeons with a minimum of hassle. It meant that you and your 2 friends could still run dungeons for hours without one of you having to ground yourself in a town asking in Trade chat; you could go and do other things while you waited for the tool to find the required members. You could still get a group together the old fashioned way and go directly to the dungeon via the entrance if you wanted to...but most people don't do that because, for them, World of Warcraft is simply a game they play for fun, and not to act out their hidden fantasies of being an elf wizard in a living, breathing, realistic and persistent world like so many here seem to want.

Surely Blizzard could have done SOMETHING to the game to try and reduce the 'hardcore elitist' attitude that it promoted so much, and try and twist the game more in the direction of a social thing.
What about WoW isn't social? It's the largest game of its kind available on the market. Hundreds of websites all over the world are dedicated to it, and it alone. Various groups of players play it competitively, whether they raid or PvP, with money and sponsorship deals on the line. The biggest and most epic content requires groups of players to work together to successfully defeat it, especially if they're aiming to be the best on their server. The math freaks that play are obsessed with pulling the game mechanics apart to push their DPS, healing, and damage mitigation to their limit.

This is why I love FFXIV, you can be as hardcore elitist as you like, but you won't get to the end any quicker than a social player, because you're restricted to 8 battle leve's and 12 crafting leve's per reset no matter how much you try and do more, the only way to continue levelling is to just go out and keep killing monsters for hours on end. Elitists don't want that, they want to gain 10 levels NOW and they want dungeon loot NOW and they want all the rest of the games content NOW, so this game pretty much repels them.
Most hardcore players I've known are more than happy to grind if that's all they can do to reach the level cap faster. They're also pretty fair about loot distribution, and don't ninja loot stuff. I have no idea how you ran into so many douchebags. What would repel people from this game is that there's not a lot to do beyond crafting and mindlessly killing monsters, especially once you're capped out.