Hardcore is fun for sure.
I wouldnt say WoW isnt fun though, depends on what ur honestly looking for. Although u can see the burn out is happening, players are just moving to classic era permanantly or simply not rerolled, but thats to be expected.
Ive returned to gw2 for abit haha, i rly can appreciate the lack of verticle gear progression after playing WoW for a long period of time
It’s like drawing. You need some tangible things to do it. Pencils, paper. What you draw is up to you tho. In vanilla the World itself was more than quests to level. It was a cohesive whole the character lived and breathed in. And did pointless crap in just because they could. Without markers or Blizzard telling them to (quite the opposite, all those jumping people to get to spots they were not supposed to be in 
).
The mindset is more functionality and efficiency driven these days compared.
Some people might find m+, raiding and collecting stuff fun but for me every patch is just more of the same. Oh I have to grind gear again, 30 new mounts but I already have 400 mounts and ironically the one I use the most is a flying pig from the store, new m+ season meaning looking at LFG for hours because pugging is the worst experience imaginable. Even twitch numbers would suggest that people have way more interest in classic than retail, and honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if classic + wotlk subscriptions were carrying retail hard. People in these forums are praising DF for not having chores but it’s just medicore expansion at best. Well ‘people in these forums’ is an over exaggeration because it feels like there are 7 people still posting, getting high on copium. What this game needs is a full reset because farming gold makes no sense when you can buy almost half a mil for 20 eur from blizzard, there are too many mounts, m+ became just boring and so did raiding.
It’s worth mentioning that a lot of things were actually meaningful. As a mage, once you hit 38-40 lvl, you’d go to Dustwallow to start mage’s wand quest chain as that wand would be best in slot until you hit 60. You’d have to go to Arathi to farm trolls, Shimmering flats to talk to dudes there and then run Scarlet Monastery Library to obtain quest items. As a rogue you’d want to run across the world twice and then do extremely long Maraudon for Thrash Blade. Leveling process was an adventure, an interesting one too. In retail you just plow through mobs mindlessly because nothing that you do during leveling matters and you just want to be over with it as soon as possible.
Is there anything fun in retail? Doing high keys? You’re just focused for 30-40 minutes and you hope that 5 random people will do their job because if someone fails at any point you’ll deplete. It’s not very fun. Mythic raiding for the longest time has been a clown fiesta too. Billy greeded and wanted to finish the cast and he was late to pick up the bomb. He exploded Susan and now we have to wipe 17 minutes into encounter because we can’t meet dps check in the last phase. The list of unfun activities goes on.
Not everyone enjoys this style of play.
Just because i dont want to wander around helping out random strangers doesnt mean that im not having fun.
I have a guild and we do what we want to do when we want to do it.
I dont understand why so many people feel that they need to decide what is fun for other people…
Yeah but there is no harm in trying it, especially if you already sub to Warcraft. It’s included.
What one person finds dull gameplay, another will find exciting. It’s all just personal preference.
That’s why I said “I’d suggest”. If you’re confused by the definition of suggest you should look it up. I would love to see player numbers of classic vs retail. I bet retail players are a minority at this point which suggests (confusing word again) that the direction wow has been going ever since legion is just bad.
Vanilla had very little structure to what you did at max level true. But even up until MOP the player had more agency about what they did when they logged in.
You could choose which faction to work on rather than an Emissary telling them that today you’re doing WQs for Highmountain.
You could choose to do a dungeon and it wasn’t determined by what Key you had (or group you can apply to) or what you needed for KSM etc.
The world had treasure to go and explore that weren’t just chests with s small amount of currency.
We had Tillers farm to help with professions (not overloading them like Garrison did).
There was rares out in the world you could solo and achievements for doing them. Only the World Bosses like Sha and Nalak needed groups.
Sure, by MOP questing had been put into Chapters and was a little more structured (not as railroad as Campaigns we’ve had since Legion).
And we had the Legendary Cloak to work on which did steer our efforts somewhat but not to the extent of later systems.
From WoD onwards your options were a lot more decided for you.
Tbh whatever asmongold / rich / safe is streaming is the most popular WoW.
HC was always gonna outperform. Watching mmorpgs are by default boring. HC spices it up with on edge moments however. Also everyones waiting for the facepalm when they get their level 50 killed
Legion onwards*
WoD was literally FFA:P
I don’t think Asmon is playing HC. Rich got cancelled and I don’t know who safe is so I can’t say much about them. If anything HC made some streamers super popular.
It wasnt neccesarily directed at your comment, i should have probably clarified that so i will apologise for that. However i will caveat that by saying that a lot of your posts make clear your opinion on what is or is not fun. Im just pointing out that not everyone is the same.
There are a lot of people in this post and on the forums that are saying the game has lost its way and people dont know how to have fun in wow anymore.
Its just an opinion, one of many that are often spouted as “facts” on these forums.
I have played DF more than any other expansion in recent years because it allows me to do exactly what I want to do. Which is what i pay for.
I dont have to go out into the world, i dont have to group with people that i dont want to, i can just talk to my online freinds and we decide what we want to do.
People are entitled to thier opinions but they are exactly that.
No, HC is a exception here. Mmorpgs im afraid are boring to watch, espically pve mmorpgs. Watching someone do a scripted fight simply lacks entertainment.
HC has always been favorable because its simply more entertaining to watch.
Thats it realistically, HC in any game is always more viewedd then non HC.
WOD had the Scouting table with your daily objective, when folk complained about not being able to choose which objective to do (especially when you had to complete them all for Pathfinder) and they added Missives which you could purchase. So we had to fight for a little agency there.
WoD had daily NPCs turning up in your Garrison like Harrison Jone for his set of quests or a Trader with recipes etc. So you didn’t decide what to do then you did what ever the NPC had given you that day.
WoD the Garrison Inn giving out quests to do that decided what you would do.
I agree that Legion ramped up the systemisation but it began in WoD. MOP was the last free choice expansion.
Hey I can do all those while having fun.
I raided mythic throughout BfA and SL so I had to spam islands for neck levels, grind essences, grind corruptions, do korthia every single day so DF being pretty much the same (m+ and mythic raiding) without daily chores is just not good enough anymore (for me at least). Many people quit in bfa, more people quit in SL and they didn’t come back for DF. It says something. Classic+ would probably be fun but a complete reset of retail would be something I’d look most forward to:P
Each to their own i guess. I would just quit if they reset it.
Fun is subjective. Some loved the treadmill make you play approach of Legion/BfA/SL etc. Others prefer the pre-Legion method of having ends and reachable goals. That’s something I really appreciate about DF.
I log into the game and have fun because I don’t have to complete a list of chores before getting to play the game. Others feel they’d rather have that constant treadmill. I like the feeling of being done with something, the sense of completion. I don’t like open ended never ending grinds.
This expansion has given me back downtime. When I’m done with the main grind for gear on my main and can go into weekly mode, or at this point I don’t actually need M+ or Raid at all. I have time to spend on alts or collecting things in game, or catching up on achievements.
I didn’t get on with any Classic but I’ve tried each one for about a month when they are launched. Blizzard are usually very good at launching them when Retail is quiet so it’s fun to go have that trip down memory lane. I am always glad to get back to retail though 
While i agree on endless grinds, the end is reached too quickly, and there’s nothing besides gear to aim for, gathering mounts is pointless now we can in effect only use 5 of them, for instance.
Now i know it’s a precarious balance, overly slow progress is frustrating and eventually off-putting too, but a month into the Zaralek caverns patch, i had all the gear i could get from it (Or LfR), and then dreamsurges came, which awarded the same itemlevel, yay.
For all its failings, the “Treadmill”-scheme had one thing going for it, you never hit that “I can’t do anything i feel comfortable with to progress my character”-wall.
Depends on your definition of fun, I guess. My fun comes from challenging myself and trying to become a better player at the classes and specs I love to play.
Me too.
I enjoyed doing a lot of achievements and mog hunting but I would resent having to do it again.
As for Classic+, I would need some of the mod-cons before I’d give it a go.
Minimap markings (all the ones we have now). being able to do a /tar and put a skull on the mobs head. Flying in zones that are overly convoluted (if they kept Classic zone design I could live without flying).
I guess some of what I’d use would be possible in AddOns.