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.