World of Warcraft died because the developers only catered to casuals and world prog

[Shougun]

There is a hint of truth to this.

I had a wall of text typed out, but honestly I've rambled about it all enough times and there's no point. I love the game, it has enjoyable raids, a great story and the devs avoid things like endless treadmills and FOMO. Other games fail at this, so it's worth the sub for now. But it feels like every expansion an activity I used to enjoy is torn apart and handed over to people who didn't even like it for "accessibility" and it's frustrating. It also feels like the short term effects of handing things over to people on a plate and recent success of the game after WoW fell apart has caused a touch of arrogance to creep in and I'm seeing more of a dismissive "we know what's best" attitude.

I'm a little tired of how crafting is worthless, the DoH forums are a ghost town, Healers are rioting and told to be quiet, botting is rampant and unchecked, Hunts are an utter mess that the devs ignore and a source of player conflict, housing is a mess, class design is more watered down but they keep pumping new classes out, they keep trimming content but pour resources into other things that are just 10 minutes and done and so on.

Could be worse, but it's not perfect.

I'm not sure all of that is due to necessarily having to cater to a casual audience however.

Or at least all because of, for example DoH also have a lot of botting issues that were expanding with the popularity of the game. Some of the changes they made were to make it accessible in a way that I think is entirely fair and some problems crafters are having is because originally it was more obtuse, in which case now there is a greater market. It of course causes a disruption from expectation but... I think.. to an extent ... that sucks but also too bad / it's better.. To an extent. Because a lot of the great wealth was simply due to an unnesccary barrier to entry (imo), it's not bad that people can easily level crafting (not that I'm claiming that is exclusively the issue). There are lots of elements at play here of course.

An easy cherry in your list would be housing, that'd be relatively easy one to say "if they did this instead" you'd have loads of casuals clamoring for the second coming of lord and savior... Godbert (cherry as in I don't have to argue much lol, healers for example we could have whole blog posts on ... ).