More Horizontal Progression please

[Nadirah]

Actually, WoW post Cataclysm wasn't much more difficult than pre-Cataclysm, having played through Cataclysm myself during the transition from Wrath of the Lich King.

No, this is the source of most of the ire from Cataclysm:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/205...hard-1-11-2011

Go through the comments. They increased the difficulty of heroic dungeons.. you needed to CC, you needed to be careful about pulls, the healer couldn't carry stupid anymore etc.

That was the first thing that caused a lot of folks to leave. The whole blog stinks of "we know better than you, shut up" and that attitude has never left, even after that guy that wrote it(Greg Street, Ghostcrawler) left.

You can see the same attitude during any discussion involving flight in Draenor, or the Bladespire/Karabor removal debate.

Now I'm not hating on it, because I actually *liked* the difficulty increase, but that's pretty much where it started to fall.

The leveling experience biggest gripe was that they changed the old world to reflect the new Lich King, but once you stepped foot into the Dark Portal to go to Hellfire Peninsula at level 58 to start leveling in Outland you literally WENT BACK IN TIME because the story did *not* change. It quite literally acted as if nothing ever happened back on Azeroth and it was disconnecting.

And as for the story... they relegated all the important stuff to the damned books to make bad authors feel better about themselves. Emerald Dream/Nightmare? Resolved in a book. Theramore? Book. Garrosh's trial for war crime? Book.

*sigh*

[Fendred]

No, this is the source of most of the ire from Cataclysm:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/205...hard-1-11-2011

I totally agree with you that it is a reason for the game's decline. It's just there were other reasons as well. The leveling experience in Cataclysm was completely messed up: The careful balance between the number of quests in the zones and the XP gained from them didn't match up right. It was so easy to gain levels that important quest chains would be greyed out (no exp) before they could be completed. I didn't even do any dungeons. It happened from just doing quests!

Many of those quests were needed to unlock other quest hubs to continue progression, so it became incredibly messy to level as a new character. A lot of new players just gave up because it was too hard to level. That cut off their replacement players where the thing you are mentioning caused the loss of their end game players.