According to limited data we can gather on the listening posts and some unofficial polls done on twitter and some of the official WOW forums the biggest source of people leaving 14 to go back to WOW was dragonflight was good. The second biggest was that EW’s patch cycle was boring and empty
TOS disagreements didn’t even rank
It’s stupid to think you shouldn’t try to hold your competitors players by adapting to them. As much as some people on the forum hate it the sheer amount that fled to us was worth whatever square could possibly do. Instead they did nothing and not only sent the WOW refugees back but also pissed off the core playerbase. 14 has increased by about 100,000-200,000 players per expansion since ARR. the fact that two expansions later we are barely clinging to ShB and are about to fall back to SB numbers is blatant shrinkage. This isn’t a return to long term trends, we are losing players