Long rant incomming 
I am not here to discuss the horrible lore being written. No, I made this post to talk about what an absolute mess WoW has become as a game.
Retail WoW now feels like it is designed around rushing to max level as fast as humanly possible. Leveling is no longer treated as an adventure or an important part of your characterâs journey. It feels like an obstacle the game desperately wants you to skip.
You gain extremely fast flying at a ridiculously low level, which completely destroys a huge part of the game: immersion, exploration, difficulty, and actually experiencing the world. Why should I care about roads, mountains, dangerous zones, or how the world is designed when I can simply fly over everything almost immediately?
The same problem exists with transmog. You can wear impressive, late-game-looking appearances at an extremely low level. There is no visual progression anymore. There is no excitement in leveling up and finally being able to equip a new set or look more powerful.
A level 10 character can run around looking like some ancient god-slaying champion.
Because of this, you cannot even look at another player and get an idea of how experienced or powerful their character is. In older WoW, gear told a story. You could see someone in an incredible armor set and think, âDamn, where did they get that?â Now appearances mean almost nothing.
Then we have the races and classes.
Almost every race can now be almost every class. We have 22 faction-based races and 4 neutral races. In my opinion, that is simply too much. I honestly feel bad for completely new players opening the character creation screen and being bombarded with race after race and class after class.
And neutral races are another massive problem.
Neutral races destroy a huge part of faction identity and immersion. In my opinion, they are also one of the laziest solutions Blizzard could possibly use. Instead of creating truly unique races for the Horde and Alliance, you simply create one race and allow both factions to use it.
What is exciting about that?
Battlegrounds used to visually represent two different factions fighting each other. You could look across the battlefield and immediately see the enemy faction. Different silhouettes, different races, different cultures.
Now you can enter a battleground and potentially see the exact same races fighting on both sides.
And more race options do not automatically make a game better.
Why keep adding races instead of making the existing races more impactful, unique, and important?
Why not give races stronger identities and even race-specific classes?
A Tinker class for Goblins and Gnomes would make perfect sense. You could expand that idea further with other race-specific or culturally restricted classes. Imagine classes, abilities, or specializations deeply connected to the history and culture of a race.
That would actually make choosing a race matter.
Right now, racial identity is slowly disappearing. Class identity is disappearing. Faction identity has been weakened. Leveling has been reduced to a speedrun, gear has lost much of its visual prestige, and the world itself often feels like something you fly over on your way to the next objective.
WoW keeps becoming wider, but not deeper.
I do not want WoW to become more restrictive just for the sake of being restrictive. I want the world to feel believable again. I want races to feel unique. I want classes to have strong identities. I want Horde and Alliance to actually feel like two different factions again. I want leveling to feel like part of the game instead of an inconvenience before the âreal gameâ begins.
World of Warcraft should feel like a world again.
World of Warcraft used to feel like this distant fantasy world.
It felt strange. Mysterious. Sometimes dangerous. Logging into WoW felt like stepping into another place entirely. Azeroth had its own identity, its own atmosphere, its own rules, and its own cultures.
You were not just playing another video game with swords and magic.
You were entering Warcraft.
Modern WoW does not give me that same feeling anymore. Now it often feels like any other modern game, just with some fantasy thrown on top of it.
Slowly, all the things that made Warcraft feel like Warcraft are being sanded away.
That is the real problem.
Most importantly, I want to log into WoW and feel like I have entered a distant fantasy world again.
Not just another modern game with a fantasy skin.
World of Warcraft should feel like a world again.
