I dont know how true this is, but as someone who's played WoW since vanilla, it has been heading downhill in terms of enjoyement for a while now.
There's clearly an antagonistic relationship between the developers and the player base. The devs have a vision for the game that doesnt really match what the players want. They keep doing things, like introducing a global cool down, borrowed power systems, never ending grinds for artifact power that players hate. During beta testing respected and experienced players kept passing warnings about aspects of the game they believed didnt work and were totally ignored by the devs. When the xpac when like the systems failed and were the disasters predicted and the devs then spent the next two patches trying to sort the failures out. As one well know wow youtubers said, "it feels like WoW is just one long beta test".<p>The content when it comes out is agressively time-gated, the story is inconsistant, what there is of it, other than grinding AP there isnt much else to do.<p>From whats been said more is earned from the cash shop than from subs so the general playerbase isnt their main objective, its the whales paying for mounts every few months.<p>I really do love WoW and want it to suceed, but it really does feel like they dont want us anymore.
On this topic, if an old fan of WoW (and single player FF games) who hasn't played any other MMORPGs since WoW wanted to play a new one, what would an RPG-savvy gamer recommend? I tried going back to WoW some years ago, but found myself spending so much time running to and fro that I quickly got bored and quit.
Anecdotally (because this leak is likely not true), I did resubscribe to WoW for Patch 9.1 and it's surprisingly empty in my high pop realm/battlegroup, which is an issue when a large amount of new content is group-oriented and the time it takes to get a group makes the endeavor not worth it.<p>I cancelled my subscription.