Wow has lost its touch. Is cata responsible?

[Apps]

It isn't so much that Cataclysm sucks, while Burning Crusade was an absolutely amazing expansion through and through.
Even though the BC era is my favorite, and the Cataclysm era is my least favorite.

This.

There is the long thread of people who quit the game, in the Cataclysm era.
Some of the reasons are boring questing that is incredibly linear.
But the questing process is relatively quick, compared to say 10 levels of WotLK... and people complained of the collection quests there, then the very next expansion complain of the rail-roading of Cataclysm.
Once the leveling is done, and that is a very small percentage of the game, Cata is essentially the exact same as BC or WotLK or whatever the next one will be.
There are dungeons, heroics, raids, battlegrounds, arena, world pvp or farming.
Tradeskills use a different cloth or dust, but the basic formulas are the same, and likely will be the same into the future -- it is a winning formula.

Despite games like Rift coming along (which had just over a million pre-orders), with the passage of time the player base grows.
Warcraft, including Cataclysm, is massively successful.

God help me I read that wall of eye bleed. But in total agreement.

Taking breaks from the game, makes it fresh when you come back to the game.

This is what I do. Playing WoW through Classic for so long was indeed fun. It was a different game. No one argues that... ever. We can pick out the things that where key for us individually, but the point is.. it was different.

For most original wow players who still play, I think itll be hard to find a significant % of them that didnt like it, when BC came out. Hence, just heightening the already likable game expierence.

Wrath and Cata (IMO), seemed to cater to the "instant gratification" crowd, and the "im not willing to learn, or cant learn skill for this game... not fair... lemme be OP too." crowd. Those people tend to accept and love Cata more so than what I call old school WoW players.