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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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