Anything
thestringpuller has posted is pure gold, I've boomarked
this page... thanks!!
I don't have much to add to this thread because basically he has already said everything I would have and even more... and much much better than I would.
Just pointing this out:
I was under the impression that WoW has been hemorrhaging players for quite some time. They made a very dramatic shift from focusing on the early and middle progression of the game to the late game, and destroyed new player's experience of the early game entirely.
Not exactly.
They started messing up when they decided to help unskilled players to compete in the endgame. Doing so actually degraded very much the endgame scene, which (as has already been said in this thread) was the main feature of WoW: skilled players got frustrated that the endgame was getting ruined and quit. Now, if skilled players quit, it doesn't matter how much you give free loot to unskilled players: if they have nobody to mentor them, they will fail. And they will complain. Hence, Blizzard dumbed down even more the endgame, making everything even worse...
It's just that, everything else is at most a corollary.