Sir, your nostalgia glasses are way too strong.
What you mean by "exploration was better in Vanilla" you mean that it had more fluff as opposed to being more gamey (containing rewards) in WoD. Also, you were 10 years younger at the time of Vanilla. Actually, it is as a game that WoW improved over the years, because instead of having max. 1 viable spec per class and 1 button to spam we now have all specs viable and proper, extremely deep rotations. Everyone who refuses to admit that vanilla was shit is a retard. The mere fact that tanking could be macroed to spamming sunder armor is enough to prove it.
You don't need to be rewarded an item for exploration to be good, god you're talking like one of those idiots that won't do shit unless there is an item or gold for it.
Has WoW improved? Yes it has, but for every step that they take forward, they take two steps back. When you talk about the improvements in WoW, you mention specializations and skills? What the hell are you on? We had all of that in Wotlk/Cataclysm and they started removing that stuff in MoP/WoD. We lost over half of our skills between Cataclysm and WoD because Blizzard though that it was 'too complicated' for players to control all their skills.
Extremely deep rotations, in WoD? What game are you playing?
I'm not saying that vanilla was the best, it wasn't, vanilla had many flaws, but it's still a much better game than WoD.
1.) One of the complaints about WoD was the LACK of dallies in the game, the only dailies in the game were the apexis shards when it was released.
And the garrison is what? Not a daily abomination? It doesn't have to be called "daily quest" for content to be grindy repeatable shit.
2.) When devs work with statistical data, my one subscription would only be a drop in the ocean compared to the over 5 000 000 they lost.
Except your almost pathological behavior is what the MMO devs target, not the passing by players who come and go with every release.
3.) "Also WoD zones had more exploration than all other zones in WoW put together, stop trying that hard" It's easier to be taken for an idiot by writing this shit, than it is to come straight forward and say that you are one.
Vanilla had some easter eggs and decent exploration (though most of it was due to zones never being quite finished). What only vanilla got and seems sadly gone for good was explorable instances that were an adventure on first run.
Next expansions were defined by streamlining the leveling/questing. Barely had more than some easter eggs.
WoD zones were deliberately built with lots of exploration in mind (probably because it was well recieved in GW2). If next expansion doesn't have them it means the player base didn't care for them.
Also, you don't care about exploration in games (or not enough). If you did, you wouldn't be using an addon to find all treasures.
Are more white knights going to come forward and defend Blizzard?
Am I white knighting or are you (for the "good ol' Blizzard")? Maybe wake the fuck up and realize WoW evolved according to how the majority of the player base acted. You don't just keep millions of
subscribers in a 10+ year old theme park with ~ 1 year content gaps playing it by ear.
The Garrison is a quest hub, and it's the only place where you got daily quests, which I said above. Outside of Garrison there were no dailies, there was nothing to do until Tanaan and even the stuff in Tanaan was shit.
The MMO devs sure as hell don't target my type of players, they have alienated most of the 'hardcore' players and outside of raids they have been focusing on casuals since Cataclysm.
Vanilla had 'some' easter eggs? Vanilla had more easter eggs and secrets than any other expansion, and they were interesting and not just loot pinatas like WoD.
"WoD zones were deliberately built with lots of exploration in mind" And they failed with this, just as they failed to give us a unique capital city, failed to let us customize our garrisons and move them to other zones, failed to make PvP interesting, failed to make professions special, etc.
Warlords of Draenor was built up around using your Garrison. The main focus in the expansion was the one thing that kept the playerbase separated and away from each other.
And to the people who keep bringing up Mythic raiding. MYTHIC RAIDING IS NOT EVERYTHING, and only a small % will ever enter a mythic raid, and even less will complete them. What the fuck does it matter if Mythic raiding is challenging when people aren't doing that content. They should put some challenge into the rest of the game, like re-introducing group quests and elite mobs. Mythic raiding requires joining a guild and having a stable roster that is large enough to run a 20 man group. There should be challenges outside of raid groups. I would also like to mention that many raiders don't play except when they raid, because there is nothing to do in the game for them except mythic, and when they have cleared the raid, they roll their thumbs until the next raid comes, which can take longer than a year.
So you never actually played WoD. At least not Tanaan. Why don't you go inform yourself before you post about something you have no clue about.
