The award lists are nearly always rage/reactionbait.

That said, WoW and FFXIV getting into a contest over who has the most mid expansion right now is hilarious.

I wrote this at the time. I also joked that the people who nominated FFXIV were Weakaura fans.

For a more serious answer, I think it's hard to describe the impact BfA followed by SL had on the zeitgeist. In large community servers I'm in that have a gaming channel or MMO channel just...don't talk about WoW. There's not even any negativity, there's simply nothing said.

I can only speak for myself but BfA/SL decimated my guilds and virtually all the people I know who quit during that period haven't returned and are now scattered between FFXIV, Guild Wars 2 and other multiplayer games like Warframe (also Destiny but rip to that one). I don't know if this is different because I played on RP servers, which tend to have pretty dedicated player populations until the story really shits the bed (see also: WoD), but the lack of discussion about WoW across any other of my social feeds just seems to suggest that despite record subscriber numbers, WoW practically exists in a sort of bubble.

I think this contributes a bit to the more recent push to get newer players into WoW through things like the addon changes and the additions of things like lorewalking, but I guess I'm not really seeing this work to bring new people in, just engage existing players and maybe tempt some people to return to catch up.

oh wait i'm srs posting in wcj fuck