From what I see, Blizzard is slowly rolling out everything they need to eventually get rid of realms entirely as separate technical entities.

Cross-realms features are everywhere, the concept of PvP servers is no more, and if they manage to upgrade the auction house system to something more global, realms will be mere namespaces and players will be able to seamlessly play with all other players from their region.

Cross-realm guilds would be a big one. I was in a mythic progression raiding guild during Legion and recruiting was always a mess. I didn't play on one of the "top" servers for raiding and there just weren't enough quality players to go around. You'd have a handful of solid guilds at the top and everyone else would struggle to complete a tier before the next tier came out. And then in the middle of the expansion when player counts drop it got even more difficult to recruit. If you made the mistake of creating all your characters on a "dead" server you'd be looking at several hundred dollars at least to transfer them all. Cross-realm guilds are a long time coming.

Yes, I didn't mention it in my post because I think the auction house and the underlying economy issues are going to be the hardest part in making everything cross-realm, but cross-realms guilds are highly desirable. Your arguments are on point.

BfA is absolute crap. I don't know who is to blame, but it really is the worst expansion. WoW does not deserve to die like this. I suspect Blizzard believes the game can't be redeemed so it's in life support.

Thankfully, Classic is around the corner.

I'm sure i can go back to 2007 and find a few posts every expansion proclaiming a new low has been reached.

Maybe a game built around grind which withholds content until fixed dates in an effort to stretch the run-time out just isn't as popular as it was 10 years ago. Players have a load more options ("Services") competing for their attention now.

Vanilla was the pinnacle of questing and total game experience, absolutely no question about that. TBC had a noticeable drop in questing quality that began the descent into the "series of tubes" it is now. Thankfully TBC added arena and great raiding. WoTLK was solid with good raids but Cataclysm was truly atrocious.

You're going to see a lot of one-offs saying they are having a great time, but this is truly a low in the history of WoW. I've played since launch and this is only the second expansion where I've canceled my subscription (the other being Cata).

To try not to be just another personal anecdote, the major WoW streamers like Asmongold, Preach, and Bellular have all made scathing reviews of the BfA expansion and it's systems. The WoW subreddit is very vocal about how bad the expansion is. People are finding it hard to find a reason to log in.

Currently playing on warmane (private server, wotlk) and having a great time. Not worried about leveling up, just re-living the nostalgia for the game when I played it. I think classic is going to be pretty amazing and I'd consider playing it again. Although, I'm not entirely sure there's a point when private servers are doing it and for free.

As a RuneScape player I'm astonished at how well Jagex have done to revive the old RS community by bringing back the old version of the game, and then polling in new features.

Hopefully Blizzard can take notes from this with WoW classic

Most of my friends who played RS in their youth are now in their mid-20s playing OSRS.

It's just astonishing how well they've managed to reclaim their market.

I know a couple maxers who still devote 10-20 hours a week to RS. I can't fathom how they find new ways to entertain themselves, but they do. It never gets old for them. I never got into RS but by all accounts they've perfected a genre.

People give Jagex a lot of abuse for treating Reddit and Twitter as a support channel, personally i think its great community engagement.

It could work for Blizzard too, they share a customer base with similar outlooks and mentality... to put it politely.

It's great community engagement for certain values of both "community" and "engagement". Personally, I find that (largely as a function of the consensus-manufacturing effects of Reddit) it leads to a distressing loss of diversity in the ways the game is enjoyed. In short, you get a feedback loop. A blob of players vocally supports a particular paradigm of gameplay (call it the PvM/ironman/slayer industrial complex), so they talk about it on Reddit. It helps that this approach is attractive to newcomers and inexperienced returners. The developer notes this and produces content accordingly. More players are attracted/kept around by this additional content, leading to requests for more of the same. Rinse and repeat.

As a result, the more fringe communities (which tend to be correlated both with emergent forms of gameplay and experience with the game; skilling and PvP being the big examples) get starved or actively harmed by the course of development. As a result, those players leave or become less engaged, furthering the cycle and leaving the game a less-interesting place.

Back in the day I never thought I'd whine about Jagex becoming better at listening. I guess it's sort of similar to issues that can be had with A/B testing - when engagement is the name of the game and you have easy access to knobs and feedback, you can end up overfitting. In the terminology of this thread, the bean-counter approach makes you long for the touch of the auteur.

disclaimer: 20k-hour multiply maxed get-off-my-lawn grump with several axes to grind

A F2P BR set on WoW, that might do the trick ;-)

Or Heroes of the Storm BR.