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

[IdowhatIwant]

Once again, I think people focus on WoW failing because of toxic players, an emphasis on hardcore raiding, and a bad story.

WoW is as toxic as FF just in a different way.

WoW did emphasize on raiding, but they did not only focus on hardcore raiding. Only about 1-2% of players even participated in the games hardest content, there are more FFXIV players that participate in FFXIV's hardest content.

Most WoW players did not know the story or did not care, but it was the icing on the cake that helped lead to it's failure.

The reason WoW failed, started in Cataclysm with a lack of content, expansions that felt incomplete, and a high skill cap. The devs also over simplified most classes after Cataclyms due to complaints that the content was to hard similar to what happened in FFXIV in Stormblood on. Warlords of Dreanor they introduced world completion to be able to fly essentially gating it behind more hours of game play vs simply buying it as in previous expansions. Legion they made a endless grind for artifact power to try and appeal to casual players that want to get on do a couple quests and get off. With each expansion less was added to the game as a whole to add various casual content which never served it's purpose, was implemented poorly, or was simply not fun. Examples of these are the island expeditions and war fronts in BFA and Torghast in Shadow Lands. These are the things that have caused WoW to fail, because with each expansion the game got much worse and the changes were not redacted and more content was not added only content was lost.

A large majority of WoW players will say that Vanilla through Wraith of the Lich King was WoW's prime. The reasons for this was Vanilla WoW was essentially the first MMO of it's kind with a much more simplified gameplay and less punishing mechanics when compared to older MMO's like Everquest and FFXI. Burning Crusade expanded the classes, began really balancing the various specs allowing many more specs to be viable, and expanding the crafting system to the best state in WoWs existence. Wraith of the Lich King introduced a slew of catch up mechanics, made most specs viable, and began to start introducing a plot to the WoW expansions which was not seen to this level in the previous expansions.

That being said, FFXIV is going through a similar process which will lead to its failure. FFXIV has always worked fairly well with all classes being viable for raids, even in ARR. Some were typically sought after more like bards, and ninja's due to there TP regen and party DPS buffs. HW was where all classes were very well viable, and in different fights certain classes provided more utility than others. For example a monk or dark knight providing an int down debuff which would help players survive magic damage based bosses. After HW, the classes got over simplified due to the raid scene getting close to dying due to Alexanders difficulty. Stormblood broke the plot into multiple ares which felt incomplete, and also began removing content in place of other content. Shadowbringers FFXIV stepped up with the plot, but the classes became even more simplified and the content even less. Now we are at Endwalker, were some classes press only a couple buttons for there rotation, we are told we are getting even less content in place of other new content, and the game is trying to appeal to another demographic of single player RPG game fans. If you really pay attention this is a similar cycle WoW has gone through, class simplification, content being cut for "other content", and trying to appeal the game to a wider audience by adding unnecessary systems to appeal to this audience while other aspects of the game began to falter. I will be eager to see what is done in 7.0 but I have low expectations, and assume it will likely be my last expansion if things do not change.