TL, DR. Fact Is The Fact

TL, DR. Fact is the fact. The game was harder on all accounts, from leveling, to doing instances, to raiding. And in all that time from Vanilla till WotLK, WoW accounts for sale the subs went up.

Now the game is softer, easier, bland and even mediocre on all accounts except normal and heroic raiding, and the game is losing subs left and right.

"Fact is the fact."

Hyperbole much? At this point, hardly anyone is taking your position on the matter seriously. It is not fact. You haven't given a shred of objective evidence. Others have and have even pointed out your shortcomings on it, and you persist.

There's a phrase you may have heard, which normally gets tossed out in conversations like these. It's a statistics phrase. It goes like this: "Correlation does not imply Causation." If you have no idea what that means, Where to buy wow accounts I'll explain. It means that just because a) and b) are true, that does not prove that a) caused b).

Why was there a sub loss at the start of Cataclysm?Dungeons got harder. By your logic, shouldn't subs have grown instead of dropping? Perhaps, but maybe something else changed. The loss could have been from the less cohesive world. Maybe from the lesser end-game content. (As I mentioned both before.) Maybe people just got older and didn't have time any more or wanted something new. Could be a LOT of things.

Yes, the game used to be harder to level in. Is that what drew people to the game? I doubt it. The mystery of the game, the environment, the community (yes, seriously), the majesty, the fun is likely what drew people. Just being hard is not what pulled WoW to spectacular heights. If so, other MMOs which are harder and more punishing should have been more successful. They weren't. It's more than just hard that draws a lot of players.

Anyway, my point is simply that a) I don't think the difficulty of Vanilla is at all what was appealing, it was the overall experience. The difficulty may have contributed to that positively, I honestly don't know and don't think there is a way to know. Also, b) even if the difficulty was part of the appeal, that's gone. The game has irrevocably changed since then with the advent of the Dungeon Finder and (even more impactfully) the shift of overall community paradigm of "let's explore this game" to "let's beat this game."

The game still has a lot of fun to offer, but it is a different game now than it once was. It can't go back, but it can go forward.