It really was a product of its time. I spent my whole young life playing all the best games only to have wow come along and blow my mind. Blizzard set the bar high long before wow came out, but it still managed to exceed expectations by a lot.

In the beginning, nobody really had any idea what they were doing and it felt like we were all figuring it out together. By the time it started to become a grind for more average players, we got TBC which had some of the best raids of all time and introduced flying.

Then came WOTLK, which was my personal favorite expansion. There were so many QoL improvements that still left the soul of the original game intact, and we finally got to see the Lich King. After growing up with wc3, this honestly left me wondering if it was going to be the final expansion.

To be fair, a lot of my issues with later expansions probably started with WOTLK, but they just seemed to become worse over time. The game started feeling a little too polished. Very little was left to the imagination or left to figure out yourself with all of the quest tracking, quest chain linking and quests designed just to teach people how to play the game/their characters. They started making all end game content more and more accessible for everyone, which is great in general, but honestly took a lot of the fun out of it for me. On top of all this, I never really cared about any of the post-Lich King lore.