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The point, for a lot of players, is to be the best.
They are obsessed with it, often to their detriment.
If there's an boss to kill, they're tracking their DPS and posting the logs to compare against the rest of the world. They sharpen their characters into the finest instruments of damage, or healing, or mitigation, trading off literally everything else that isn't perfectly optimal for their role. They will never be satisfied until they get the #1 "parse". If this results in the raid having 40 characters without a single extra point of health buffer, so be it. If this means any mistake would kill them, or wipe the raid, they would take that trade in a heartbeat. They're always chasing that perfect parse.
If there's a dungeon, they're mentally tracking how long it takes and trying to do it faster. If they can shave 30 seconds by doing a mechanically difficult jump to skip some enemies en route, they will try it every time. If there's an 80% chance a teammate gets the timing wrong, and they all die, and it ends up costing them 5 or even 10 minutes, they will still try it every time. The "best" way to do that dungeon is to skip the trash packs, so they will try and skip.
If they need to farm, they will always go to the "best" farm. That is, the one that theoretically pays the most per hour. If this area is heavily contested, and everyone else is farming it too, they will not adjust their strategy, because farming a less contested zone would not be "the best". If the area is better farmed by one class that is not the one they are playing, they will level an entirely new character of that class from scratch just to farm (taking weeks of effort).
If there is gear that is "BiS" - Best in Slot - they will spend every waking minute trying to get it, until they do, and it's an act of mercy by Blizzard that the raids can only be attempted once per week. In vanilla classic, there was a dagger that dropped from the end boss of a dungeon at a 0.2% rate (not a typo. zero point 2 percent, and later 2% after the devs changed it). Players would solo this dungeon boss 5 times an hour (the limit) nonstop until they got it.
But "best" only has value in a social game. If everyone leaves, they're just playing solitaire on Blizz's servers. They naturally move to the new thing and try to become the best there.
Sure, I get that dynamic. But we're dealing with the particular scenario of players who have already chosen the middle-child form of WoW. Retail, modern WoW has about 7 million active players, tbc classic had a few hundred thousand. Players in tbc classic have already self-selected into a less populated version of the game from a social perspective. It doesn't make much sense to me to drop the game suddenly, all at once, because it loses some of its already limited popularity. I could understand someone playing a very popular game, one that most people would recognize, say whatever the latest and greatest CoD is, moving on instantly when another game attracted popularity. But this is a population that has already chosen to play an unpopular game. I have trouble comprehending how 100,000 players is materially different for so many people than 50,000 players.
Never played retail, so I'm not 100% certain, but as I understand it, the reward structure has been gradually made less rivalrous there. This is "good", in that no one gets screwed out of their vertical progression by luck or politics, but it undermines the thing they were chasing all along. They want to be the best, and if the best isn't rare or difficult, it doesn't mean anything.
In vanilla/classic, only one person gets the legendary sword Thunderfury (maybe 2 or 3 if the guild gets very lucky). That represents potentially months and months of effort by 40 people, and it can only go to one recipient (typically the main tank and guild leader first, then a second tank, then maybe the top performing dps). It's not guaranteed either. Some guilds can run the raid for a year and never get it.
As for the Anniversary/TBC realms, it was generally understood from the start that those were "Classic plus waiting rooms" and that the population was always planning to drop them as soon as the new Classic came out. Maybe in a nod to the sheer number of classic releases, they called Classic Plus "Forever" and are planning horizontal progression. We'll see how that goes when it meets the population of minmaxers always itching for a little more vertical.
This process basically started in TBC, and the course they set in TBC made what the ultimate evolutionary drift of retail kind of inevitable. You started to see Arena epics that were as good as the best raid pieces, you saw badge vendors, you saw heroic difficulty dungeons, you saw a variety of welfare epics offered to help people get geared up. This was a huge improvement over original vanilla in my mind, but it also will inevitably lead to what we have now in retail. Which I never played past Wrath, but I saw the writing on the wall even then as each new expansion was announced and the changes got goofier and goofier in my mind.
The problem is that each convenience change improves the game in the moment, but as they accumulate they eventually kill the spirit.
That's exactly what confuses me about the dissatisfaction on display! If I were treating the game as a "Classic+ Waiting Room" I would never choose to invest any amount of effort in the game that I would regret if Classic+ dropped. Many thousands of players are upset that Classic+ dropped when it did, and that seems silly if everyone "already knew" that the game would die when Classic+ dropped. It's irrational, and I can't figure out what's going on there.
I suspect that in the long run Forever will be a reboot of WoW, and will eventually make a lot of the same decisions made originally. Maybe not for three or four years, but that's Forever in gaming terms.
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That works well in Retail WoW, where the developers design around it. But what puzzles me the same mindset is found in people who play exclusively play Classic, a game that wasn't designed around this mindset.
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That wouldn't happen to have been a level 19 requirement dagger that therefore made it tremendously popular for alts in low-level PvP, would it? I recall something like that specifically...
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Many MMO players are the kings of optimizing the fun right out of a game. I played both WoW and FF14 for years, and I would see so many people playing in ways they admitted were less fun, just because it was an extra 1% more DPS or whatever. Absolute lunacy.
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