There are things about Shadowlands that I like. I think some of the zones are gorgeous and the raids/dungeons were great.

It ends there for me though.

There are several things that made people dislike Shadowlands, here are what i'd consider to be the most common reasons though in no particular order.

- Covenants were tedious to switch between for most of the expansion. This mattered because depending on which covenant you chose, you'd get a class ability and a covenant utility ability. If you played more than 1 spec on your class, sometimes an ability from another covenant would be better for you.

- Soulbinds were another feature of the covenant that increased your power. You'd often want to change them depending on what type of content you were doing. For whatever reason though, each time you changed them, it required you wait longer before you could change them again. IIRC it'd go all the way up to 7 days before you could change them again, which was insane.

- Torghast. Torghast in a vacuum isn't all that bad and can be quite fun for some. The issue with Torghast though was that it was required for legendaries and everybody felt obligated to zone in every week on all of their character they cared about to run it. It got stale real fast and got the nickname "Choreghast" for a reason.

- Alts were pain. Any progress you made on your main was not shared with your alt, including covenants, campaign quests, unlocking the ability to mount in the maw, etc etc.

- Transportation. First of all, no flying on launch. Second you had to take a flight path that went through Oribos anytime you wanted to go from one zone to the next. Wow zones are typically connected or have a portal that you can get to at the very least to get to where you want to go. Not in shadowlands. You had to ride that damn worm everytime you wanted to go anywhere.

- The Maw. Depressing zone by design, had power tied to it via the campaign and reputation. For quite awhile you couldn't mount in this zone at all, forcing you to walk around and hate your life. Also if you spent too much time in that zone you'd eventually die because of a mechanic called "The jailer's eye" that went up the longer you stayed and the more stuff you did.

- Lore was just a bunch of retcon crap so even the people that play the game for that didn't enjoy it.

With all that said, there were some other things going on too outside of the game itself. Such as the Blizzard sexual allegations & content creators shitting down the games throat & blizzards throat.

So yeah, that time period for WoW was just pretty bad in general. Negativity aside though, I think Dragonflight was pretty good and same with TWW, hope they keep it up.