After some years off WoW I recently picked up MOP and a month sub for cheap to check the game out, and to see if any of my old mates back from vanilla/TBC were still around. I was in total disbelief at how the game has devolved. The game basically has become this extension of Facebook where people log in to kill time. Not doing anything intellectually stimulating or challenging, just something to kill time like watching some teen show on TV. Players even defend some gameplay decisions with the argument that they can watch TV or a movie while they play. But don't we all watch a movie while we play Planescape Torment, MOTB, Arcanum or Fallout.
Yeah, a lot of people subsist solely on doing daily quests (literally doing the same quest every single day upon reset for a token [roughly 1/100th of a gear piece] and a pittance of gold) and pet battles. Actually, when I last left most of the people in my guild were obsessing about their farms. You can farm crafting materials.
The other thing people do is they level up alts. Leveling an alt is about the saddest waste of time that I can imagine, and people make as many as 10 or 15 alts.
The other thing that was big in MOP was Timeless Isle. Everyone loves Timeless Isle. You go there and run around the map chasing after "rarespawns" (which have set spawn timers and locations that are then farmed for hours/weeks on end) and farming.
That's basically what the game is popularly now, farming. Farming little trinkets and mats for stupid shit.
I have no idea, absolutely no idea what keeps people going. I put up with it for short bursts (5-8 months) in order to try to blitzkrieg through to progression raiding normal modes, and every time, every single time, I got stonewalled by people that all they wanted to do was pet farm and level alts.
Progression raiding really doesn't exist because it's borderline impossible to get these imbeciles to do anything. It really isn't even remotely worth the time investment in dealing with all the dillweeds. I got the farming done relatively quickly, e.g. within a few months to weeks halfway thru the content patch, and everyone kept dragging us back from seeing any real raid content, so I got sick of it and quit. Raiding is full of dramz and half the people that signed up don't even show up for the continuation.
I have no idea why people think the raiding content needs to be more difficult, people can already barely handle what's on their plate at the moment so most people never get to even see what endgame looks like. What really needs to change is they just need to cut out all of the farming/weekly lockouts so you can actually be done with the game and pocket the 3-5 months of subscription money you would have blown trying to herd a bunch of lazy idiots through normal mode progression.