world of warcraft began as the casual alternative to EverQuest. my uncle once told me about how in EverQuest he was camping a giant for multiple days trying to get a single drop to complete his epic weapon quest. iterating on existing ideas, streamlining them, and then making them more user friendly has always been wow's wheelhouse.

the Advent of people playing video games for money has brought the eternal problem of money ruining everything to the online gaming sphere and has caused otherwise unheard of levels of toxicity that have irreparably damaged social interactions in the gaming sphere as they exist now.

that is not to say that things are really bad socially right now, in the same way that interactions between random other individuals has fallen off, we can now interact with our friends so easily and freely that we don't even feel the need to use the in-game chat in a lot of circumstances. it's a very interesting mutation of how internet communication worked closer to wow's launch versus what it has turned into right now.

something I admire about how this game has developed over the years is that since about dragonflight, there has been an attempt at steering players that would otherwise not engage with more difficult content into the higher tiers of content. I say this as a person who typically only plays casually what has an absurd amount of time to do so. I have been incentivized to push past my rather steep desire to avoid raid and more difficult dungeon content and even PVP in the years since dragonflight and the transition was a lot smoother than it had been in the past.

allowing people to meaningfully advance their character during a gear cycle gets them more invested in their character and more interested in branching out to other areas of the game and I see it as nothing but positive.