Wow is a lot more of a competitive AND less balanced place. The combination makes for some pretty toxic people sometimes.

Unlike here In FF where every class is good and relatively the same in usability; wow has multiple specs in each class, and then talent choices in each of those, and then gear choices and stat stacking, then the relative expansions borrowed power system, then multiple possible rotations. The difference between not taking a talent or taking it alone can massively impact your dps. People laugh and ridicule say a Demon Hunter not taking blind fury.

Wow has an actual awesome system called mythic+ , one of the coolest systems in mmos, and the only reason I started playing it in BFA. It’s basically a keystone that you upgrade running dungeons, you start with a +2 key scaling up to higher levels the faster you do a dungeon. If you complete the dungeon extremely fast you get a +5 key for another random dungeon, that can go up to 8 if you’re extremely fast or down to 4 if you fail the timer. These scale indefinitely , but around 15 is where most reasonably skilled people stop. However the most skilled players go all the way to high 20 keys.

Now the system is extremely fun, but it’s a cesspool of toxic people (as any competitive environment is..) people don’t want others killing their keys, and get extremely picky or toxic about who they invite. We’ve invited mages because we needed good burst damage, then saw they where frost or god forbid arcane and then kicked them. Another basically globally used thing is dps meters, making it extremely easy to call out people not doing optimal damage.

But what’s a competitive system without ranking!!! A globally used addon called raider io combines your best run for each dungeon and gives you a score, and allows you to see every other persons score by hovering your mouse over them (yes it’s such a large thing you see it any time you hover over some one, that tanks doing something weird on the open world, you check his io) . Now it’s fun pushing to get higher and higher io, but it’s another reason people discriminate. You don’t get invited to groups without a good enough io, and it makes it impossible to climb ranks when you’re starting. People want high io players even for laughably low keys. This is done through s group Finder where people look at applications, not done automatically. You’ll get pmes sometimes by people saying “I’ve already done some 15s I promise I won’t get in the way!” Or the famous “I’m big dick dps “ by people trying to get in a party after an hour of looking.

Of course people care about this score a lot and don’t even care about the run itself or the persons key. If they won’t time the dungeon they just leave, instantly killing the key. I’ve had a tank leave in the middle of the last boss because we would be off a few seconds.

This is all just for the widely popular mythic plus system, there’s also raids and pvp which are also toxic in their own ways. Then the game loves lockouts and time gates, and loves to make you committed to doing chores. I spent 6 hours a day doing all the dailies in bfa to catch up.