Blizzard's WoW team is like a stand-up comedian that wants to be funny to every single person.
Think about it for a second. When did you see a truly succesful stand-up comedian try to be funny to every group of people out there? They might exist, I'm not gonna pretend I know every single stand-up comedian, but by far the most that leave me in tears (from laughter) for a long time afterwards, are the comedians that accept that there's a certain group of people that like their humour, and they go all-in on that. This to me is one of the bigger issues of current WoW.Blizzard's WoW team used to be the same. They realized that there was a certain group of people that enjoyed WoW and went all-in to satisfy this group. Until a couple of expansions into it they decided that it wasn't enough to satisfy all fans of MMO. No, even the people who were into Farmville at the time should be appealed to WoW. WoW suddenly had to appeal to your grandmother that played Candy Crush once, or to your little brother that only played Halo and GTA (nothing wrong with those games, love em).Game design can flourish when designers identify who they make a game for. Having a million different difficulty levels for all content (LFR/normal/heroic/mythic for raids for example) indicates that they want to appeal to every single person that might even consider touching the game. It's like a stand-up comedian trying to make a joke that at the same time:provokes people who like dark humourdoesn't offend people who don't like dark humouris understandable for childrenrequires a good amount of thinking to understand for adultsNo one is gonna end up loving the joke, nobody is gonna end up laughing so hard they can't breathe. Everybody is gonna be half-satisfied AT BEST. WoW is doing the same, the game is trying to appeal to:People who want to play 24/7People who want to play 20minutes a weekPeople who want to raid with no commitmentpeople who want to raid with mutliple days a week of commitmentPeople who want challenging contentPeople who don't want challenging contentPeople who want free gear and think that everybody should have the same power level no matter what they do in the game.People who want to work for their gear and want to see a difference compared to someone who doesn't.tl;dr: I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it's impossible to appeal to all situations all of the time. There needs to be a definition of the 'core' WoW player that the game is balanced around. Around the edges of this defintion you can try to please other groups, but the game can't be 100% balanced towards 10 different target audiences. Nobody has done this succesfully in the past, it's arrogant to think that WoW can do this.edit: Formatting
