Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
The distinctions ARE important, and absolutely matter - think of WoW's Warlords of Draenor (WoD) expansion. It's near universally disliked for a number of reasons, but a big one is that the only things to do in it were really PvPing and raiding. There is that "The one thing it DID do well was..." argument, which is the raids. But that was it. Catering to one part of the community to, effectively, the disregard and cost of the entire rest caused a massive collapse in player numbers that was, at that time, unheard of for WoW.
...This claim seems a bit odd. There was a greater difficulty range on grindable outdoor/auxiliary content, especially at the start of the expansion, than in Mists or Cata (though I would have liked to see a continuation of the Brawler's Guild, there were new additions to scratch similar enough itches) and unless attempting to full on no-life rep grind or the like there was about as much available to do/grind as in previous expansions. The Legendary Ring questline was a step down from the Legendary Cloak questline of MoP, but not really in terms of time available to be sunk in so much as just the storytelling surrounding it.

WoD's main issues were just (A) newly/comparatively low content output overall, (B) player activities that were highly resource-intensive to add but created few enjoyable play-hours especially relative to dev time required (Garrisons, Shipyards, etc.), and, perhaps most importantly, that it (C) impaled itself on its own hype (or, failure to deliver on certain promises or implied degree of quality-times-quantity).

In more objective/contextualized retrospectives, WoD tends to rate higher than it did at that time, even if not as highly as it did in nostalgia waves during the worst-perceived patches in Shadowlands; much of its overall problems was just that it promised too much for what it could actually put out.