49 thoughts on “"World of Warcraft Feels Like A Job"”
plunderstorm is S#it…tried it….within seconds I was being hunted down and killed by other players. With a 180ms latency I don't do pvp…and PS just proved it.
I get that Plunderstorm isn't for everyone but its really not that hard to reach Renown 40. If it had no cosmetics, people would complain, if it was primarily PvE focused, people would complain. It is impossible to please everyone. Instead we should be happy Blizzard is trying new things. Even if they "fail" its better than keeping the same stale gameplay (that people already complain about).
I love the leveling and exploring. Once I have to do raids or mythics or pvp to progress, I lose all interest. That stuff stops being fun. Wasn't fun supposed to be the point? Cause it isn't anymore.
This is the consequence of both Blizzard and the players demonizing, and then being absolutely terrified, of content drought.
We now have grind after grind after grind being thrown at us at break-neck speed. It's nearly impossible to keep up, and all the catch-up gear in the world won't help. We're right back to the same problem we had at the end of BFA. Too many things/chores to do.
That's why Plunderstorm is so hated right now. It has a 40 level renown track. That is 10 levels more than the highest Dragonflight renown tracks. The Plunderstorm renown track should of been 20 levels at most. (Yes that means each level of renown would award multiple rewards. Oh, the horror.)
It not being time-gated does help, but not that much. Being able to jump right back into the pool you were drowning in is of little comfort to put it mildly.
I haven't even gotten into how this patch cadence has resulted in shallower and buggier patches. It all because they're rushed to avoid the dreaded content drought.
So here's a hot take: Content droughts are not a bad thing. They give players the number one thing they need to keep up and catch up. TIME! Shorter grinds with more time = Less FOMO.
singular expansion wide universal currency – do what you want buy what you want – if someone wants bash their skull in maw of souls a million times to get the currency thats their problem. – plunderstorm could of just given you the universal currency.
the problem lies in Blizzards need to make things competitive, so the game design philosophy is one of making the game feel like a job. people confuse competitive with challenging though, because when I say that, I can hear all the sweats getting extra sweaty with cries of "dumbing down". the game should never feel like you a required to commit to a stringent 9 to 5 level commitment to get anywhere. things like timers and limit events are just an extension of that. one of the main reasons the game is slowly dying off is that the people who play this game like its an e-sport are a large minority, and catering to them is whats destroying it.
I’ve yet to encounter an enjoyable battle pass in a game. Every time a game implements one it’s always a time crunch factor FoMo fest where they sell skips to solve the problem they create.
How’s this relate to blizzard? Plunderstorm is just a battle pass test for wow. Yeah the first one is free, but don’t be surprised if the next experiment has a premium track.
The only reason the experimental team exists is to find ways to get you to drop money. That’s it. Now I’d like it to be by making interesting content, stories, enhancements etc, but this is modern blizzard so their focus is going to be problems that they will sell you the solution to, and that solution will be allowing you to buy plunder or buy some plunder boost of 2x 3x etc.
Cynical? Sure, why wouldn’t I be. It’s modern blizzard and they’ve been in a fail state for a decade.
Expecting to play the game 1 hour a week and getting ALL OF EVERYTHING is very entitled. Idk I like earning my stuff in games. It wouldn't feel special if we just got everything in the game just for logging on. Bellular making exaggerated hate content once again. If you think the rewards are cheap then dont do it! I'm so sick of seeing this guys face shit talking a game that makes over a billion dollars a month
Just give me core story about the fate of Azeroth and the World Soul and cosmic forces. Make it grey with a bit of moral ambiguity around the choices that key characters make. And give me cool gear and visually appealing cosmetics. If I have to complete another quest where I sweep up an area, or collect some honey or rocks or something, and then get a brown/dull grey garden hoe cosmetic… so help me… It's World of WARcraft, not World of Crafts.
"world of warcraft feels like a job" has been a phrase said since 2004. Whether its cheap rewards pumped into everything or grinding to exalted on reps that becoming meaningless a patch later; this WHOLE game is a grind. Can we please stop the retardation? You don't have to get these rewards. You can EASILY do M+, pick it up and put it down when you see fit, get your vault rewards and eventually hit max item level. Maybe we should make a new MMO called world of socialistcraft and then we can make it so if you log in 40 days straight, you get a reward. Also it will be funded by the federal government and the subscription will be free.
Plunderstorm feels like pandering to the types who would normally play Battle Royale type games in the first place. I never got into those because for one I was too busy playing WoW and for two it’s just fast paced gaming for kids with ADD.
Wasn’t what I expected nor hoped for. But to be fair I only even slightly heard about the supposed big pirate 🏴☠️ patch from T&E.
Blunderstorm would be fine if they didn’t jam tons of filler in the renown rewards and stick most of the good stuff at 30-40 levels. That’s insane for limited time event. Also would have been nice to stick some rewards in the game from elites or chests so I’d have more to look forward to other than certain doom.
Dude this game has been an endless treadmill of shit for over 10 years. It started in cata pandaria and has only gotten worse and worse with the fucking dailies and weeklies and blah blah fucking blah busywork. The best dungeons and raids they ever did all happened in BC, if they did it like that again it would make late game so much better.
I played DF until I got my Legendary and only stopped because of dictatorship within the guild. I didn’t think it was much of a grind but I can see how it can be.
Classic however is just a grind start to finish. But I’m doing my second toon in less than a month as well as just getting 5500gs last night I am enjoying it.
I guess don’t play if you don’t like to grind a little bit. Those that do will be rewarded for whatever they are doing… much like life 🙂
'how do you make content that is for collectors, without forcing them to do it?' easy. you just put it in the game, and leave it so they can get do it when they choose to. they'll still have to do it, but they can do it on their own time.
Plunderstorm was fun for like 15 games until I realized I'd have to play nearly 200 games to get the mount, or more. The inconsistency in the fights was just too frustrating to continue. I would have a higher level, maxed out abilities and I would still get clapped which just made my effort feel too random to enjoy.
Ironically, since I stopped playing PvE and have been playing a F2P on a RP server, a toon that actually lives and makes her living on Azeroth the game no longer is a job… …even though my toon has one.
Any forced engagement feels really bad in any game. We want to come keep coming back, but not because we feel like we "have" to. There is a story around my town about feeding straw to deer. Straw has no nutrition like hay and alfalfa do, but they eat it anyway. So it is basically a filler. If the deer are given only straw, they will die of malnutrition. So the lesson here is that they should be wary of how much "straw" they give their players. Player sentiments can reflect their level of "malnutrition."
I dont know hiw its on dragonflight quitted SL but wow really started feel like second Job. Started in legion collect AP and same thing just keep going till in SL finaly personally got enough. There is just too much stuff what "you dont have to do but you do" playing wow just started feel like you are stuffed turkey and alltime comes that wait take this too
Plunderstorm 1000% just enhances the fact it feels like a job , here is an another horrible grind you need to grind and it’s limited time ! So start grinding keep paying.
It doesn’t matter if it didn’t take away from the core team at the end of the day 10.2.6 added 0 content to the core game so in a way it did take away from the core game and I’d argue couldn’t that separate team add fun stuff into the core game ? Instead of this FOMO trash
9:38 Across the Isles have into the storm which have an annoying achievement in it where you need to do all the 4 different elemental storms in all the 4 different zones, the feature that was explicitly stated to not be for the hardcore players or players that play a lot early in DF, aka I didn't bother with it, now I am waiting and checking everytime I log in if the Storm is the right one and in the right zone so I can progress the meta achievement which is incredibly frustrating. Especially because there doesn't seem to be a proper rotating or system to the storms so you're just at mercy of rng gods every 3 or so hours. Pretty much everything else I have already but I'm pretty sure there's a bunch more that you're just artificially waiting for but you'd only notice it when you're stuck on said achievement.
If the mounts and toys had a reasonable drop or vendors, I'd be fine as a collector. It feels so bad after 100 times and no progress, even with alts and spawn times.
"It doesn't take away from other teams" is an obvious cop out lie. The company has finite resources to allocate; those people devising a new game mode could be working on retail game balance(which needs a LOT of work still), and if they can't, they can be laid off and the right people can be hired. Same goes for stuff on the shop; the people working on this could have been working on raid tier sets to make them better looking instead.
"How do you make content for collectors without forcing them to do it." STOP MAKING IT TIME LIMITED AND PSYCHOLOGICALLY ABUSING THE COLLECTORS WITH FOMO TACTICS. THIS ISN'T ROCKET SCIENCE.
been saying this for years. WoW feels like a job. I've limited amount of time to do content and i need to log in everyday to do the same shit just to make a slight bit of progress. It's why i quit.
This is why I unsubbed last year. It was just to much. I do have to sleep, eat, pay bills, and go to work… Not to mention play in a couple of D&D games with friends…
That and I could not find an opening in a raid team (and I am a healer). Heaven forbid if I actually got into a raid team, on top of everything else I had to do both in and out of game. Something had to give, and that was my time in WoW. Its crazy that I would have ever complained about to much content, but 90% is grind…
Currently with the World Awoken meta achievement the only problem is the Into the Storm achievement as there's a 43% chance that the Elemental Storm that spawns is in Azure Span. Since reset a storm has spawned in Thaldraszus once…..
I am a PVP player, and last season I pushed for the Legend title in solo shuffle. It took me 32 or 33 lobbies to get it. Meanwhile I waited on average 42 mins per que for each lobby.
I sat just in que for just under 24 hours total for just the legend part of the grind. This doesn't include all the lobbies before that 100 win grind started.
I will NEVER do that again, it was awful and I hated it. Not to mention I got the title for a while 5 weeks, that's it.
It’s not a job… if you want it do it if you don’t want it then don’t do it…. 😂 bro the complaining. Almost 20 years in and for 20 years just complaining left and right like children…..😂😂
I have no problem with the plunderstorm renown because I enjoy the gamemode and you can actually farm the renown and be done with it without it being timegated. But things like the Big Dig, the Emerald Dream outdoor sets, dragonriding manuscripts, Zaralek outdoor sets, these ones suck so bad.
For example I only need the legs to complete the winter theme Emerald Dream set and it only drops in the weekly caches. And I just can't get it because I keep getting rings and I have to wait another week to try again. For Zaralek sets or dragonriding manuscripts, you have to wait for specific WQ to spawn or wait for a specific rare that spawns once every 14 hours. It's just so annoying because sometimes you're just like "I don't have much to do in WoW, I'm going to collect a few things" and you look it up online and realize how time gated it is and how annoying it is to farm it and you just lose motivation immediatly.
It was the same with Warfronts, the sets were really cool but you could only try your luck once a week. At least for raids things are going to get better next expansion but damn. Collecting in this game is not always fun, and it's probably even worse this expansion. And I'm not even talking about mounts like Breezebiter or Karokta who had a ridiculous drop rate and that you could farm once every fourth day (for Karokta)
The issue isn't the grind, its the timegating and FOMO.
For a casual player, demanding that someone logs in every day/week to grind out a timegated system is what turns WOW into a second job, and when that system is seasonally reset, its a massive feels bad moment.
The reality is a casual player want to log in maybe an hour or two every night to knock out a few quests or level an alt, and spend most of their time playing on their weekend. And this is an issue blizzard has created for them, blizzard still demands that you run M+ dungeons and raid every week to upkeep your ilvl FOMO, and there is no 'banking' system that keeps rolls from previous days/weeks to be used at once, such as the world quest system in legion where you could do your daily WQ bonus every day, or bank 3 days and knock it all out at once.
Also the game simply isn't persistent or well paced, everything is designed to rush you into end game content ASAP, at which point the game becomes repetitive, thus becomes a job, there is very little progression past that point and what progression you do get isn't persistant, grind out your EOD M+ welfare gear for pre-Vault/Raid BIS? Well a new season drops and you have to do the same exact set of dungeons all over again for the same exact items to replace your mythic raid gear, its just an awful feeling to be sent back to the M+ mines every single season, if I farm full Mythic BIS, I should expect that to be better than M+ welfare gear next patch, but that just isn't the case.
No other popular MMO does this, FFXIV has its content, you beat it, then the devs just expect you to go play other games, or grind out transmog and RP. If you farm out your Barrows set or Bandos set in OSRS, the devs aren't going to add in a new questline that replaces that gear, they made that mistake with RS3 with dungeoneering. EVE Online too, Titans are still relevant even after 20 years, if you had one in 2014, its still a useful tool in 2024. Similarly the gear cap in ESO IIRC caps at 160 champion points scaling, and it scales all gear in the game, so anything that drops in the Morrowind expansion will be at 160 scaled with its own unique effects, while something farmed in the latest expansion too will be 160 scaled, new gear just has new effects, it doesn't outright replace old content, just gives players more options on where and how to get gear.
Also there is the issue with "Content" in WOW, difficulty modes are not content. In any other game, playing on easy, or playing on hard doesn't change the content of the game fundementally, it just makes the game more challenging numerically, but the content is the same. WOW devs and sadly WOW players have created this nonsensical logic that doing the same dungeon repetitively with EHP modifiers and mutators makes it new content, but it doesn't. If I play FF7: Rebirth on hard, it just makes the fights I would do harder, however when it comes to Content I could do the main quest and not do any side content, or I could do the Gilgamesh side quest and unlock a superboss, with new lore, new cutscenes, and of course, the new boss to do, WOW used to do this with optional super bosses in raids like Ouro and Alganon, but now they simply copy paste the same boss, add on another instant raid wipe mechanic and 20% EHP, and call it mythic.
The WOW burnout is a WOW issue, because the devs demand your time, but don't reward you with content or progression, and worse is the gacha style timegating that prevents people from just playing the game normally, and they don't want you to take breaks either, I currently took a break from OSRS, where I was doing the Bandos grind on my Ironman, when I go back, I will stil lbe at the Bandos grind on my Ironman, that content is not going to be invalidated by a new update, power crept? Maybe, but not outright obsoleted.
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plunderstorm is S#it…tried it….within seconds I was being hunted down and killed by other players. With a 180ms latency I don't do pvp…and PS just proved it.
I get that Plunderstorm isn't for everyone but its really not that hard to reach Renown 40. If it had no cosmetics, people would complain, if it was primarily PvE focused, people would complain. It is impossible to please everyone. Instead we should be happy Blizzard is trying new things. Even if they "fail" its better than keeping the same stale gameplay (that people already complain about).
I love the leveling and exploring. Once I have to do raids or mythics or pvp to progress, I lose all interest. That stuff stops being fun. Wasn't fun supposed to be the point? Cause it isn't anymore.
You work morning in actual work and evening in WoW doing thay REOWN. Plunder, retail, classic rep
Did you look at how much you have to do to get all rewards from the archivists?
This is the consequence of both Blizzard and the players demonizing, and then being absolutely terrified, of content drought.
We now have grind after grind after grind being thrown at us at break-neck speed. It's nearly impossible to keep up, and all the catch-up gear in the world won't help.
We're right back to the same problem we had at the end of BFA. Too many things/chores to do.
That's why Plunderstorm is so hated right now. It has a 40 level renown track. That is 10 levels more than the highest Dragonflight renown tracks. The Plunderstorm renown track should of been 20 levels at most. (Yes that means each level of renown would award multiple rewards. Oh, the horror.)
It not being time-gated does help, but not that much. Being able to jump right back into the pool you were drowning in is of little comfort to put it mildly.
I haven't even gotten into how this patch cadence has resulted in shallower and buggier patches. It all because they're rushed to avoid the dreaded content drought.
So here's a hot take: Content droughts are not a bad thing. They give players the number one thing they need to keep up and catch up. TIME!
Shorter grinds with more time = Less FOMO.
singular expansion wide universal currency – do what you want buy what you want – if someone wants bash their skull in maw of souls a million times to get the currency thats their problem. – plunderstorm could of just given you the universal currency.
the problem lies in Blizzards need to make things competitive, so the game design philosophy is one of making the game feel like a job. people confuse competitive with challenging though, because when I say that, I can hear all the sweats getting extra sweaty with cries of "dumbing down". the game should never feel like you a required to commit to a stringent 9 to 5 level commitment to get anywhere. things like timers and limit events are just an extension of that. one of the main reasons the game is slowly dying off is that the people who play this game like its an e-sport are a large minority, and catering to them is whats destroying it.
I’ve yet to encounter an enjoyable battle pass in a game. Every time a game implements one it’s always a time crunch factor FoMo fest where they sell skips to solve the problem they create.
How’s this relate to blizzard? Plunderstorm is just a battle pass test for wow. Yeah the first one is free, but don’t be surprised if the next experiment has a premium track.
The only reason the experimental team exists is to find ways to get you to drop money. That’s it. Now I’d like it to be by making interesting content, stories, enhancements etc, but this is modern blizzard so their focus is going to be problems that they will sell you the solution to, and that solution will be allowing you to buy plunder or buy some plunder boost of 2x 3x etc.
Cynical? Sure, why wouldn’t I be. It’s modern blizzard and they’ve been in a fail state for a decade.
Expecting to play the game 1 hour a week and getting ALL OF EVERYTHING is very entitled. Idk I like earning my stuff in games. It wouldn't feel special if we just got everything in the game just for logging on. Bellular making exaggerated hate content once again. If you think the rewards are cheap then dont do it! I'm so sick of seeing this guys face shit talking a game that makes over a billion dollars a month
Just give me core story about the fate of Azeroth and the World Soul and cosmic forces. Make it grey with a bit of moral ambiguity around the choices that key characters make. And give me cool gear and visually appealing cosmetics. If I have to complete another quest where I sweep up an area, or collect some honey or rocks or something, and then get a brown/dull grey garden hoe cosmetic… so help me… It's World of WARcraft, not World of Crafts.
"world of warcraft feels like a job" has been a phrase said since 2004. Whether its cheap rewards pumped into everything or grinding to exalted on reps that becoming meaningless a patch later; this WHOLE game is a grind. Can we please stop the retardation? You don't have to get these rewards. You can EASILY do M+, pick it up and put it down when you see fit, get your vault rewards and eventually hit max item level. Maybe we should make a new MMO called world of socialistcraft and then we can make it so if you log in 40 days straight, you get a reward. Also it will be funded by the federal government and the subscription will be free.
No shit, I can't believe you guys still play this shit game
Plunderstorm feels like pandering to the types who would normally play Battle Royale type games in the first place. I never got into those because for one I was too busy playing WoW and for two it’s just fast paced gaming for kids with ADD.
Wasn’t what I expected nor hoped for. But to be fair I only even slightly heard about the supposed big pirate 🏴☠️ patch from T&E.
grind, grind, grind, yuck
If you have to tie a FOMO grind to your content to get people to do it, your content sucks.
Geez don't you dare to criticize bad blizzard decisions or US sunday streamers will label you "negative" Kappa
Blunderstorm would be fine if they didn’t jam tons of filler in the renown rewards and stick most of the good stuff at 30-40 levels. That’s insane for limited time event. Also would have been nice to stick some rewards in the game from elites or chests so I’d have more to look forward to other than certain doom.
Dude this game has been an endless treadmill of shit for over 10 years. It started in cata pandaria and has only gotten worse and worse with the fucking dailies and weeklies and blah blah fucking blah busywork. The best dungeons and raids they ever did all happened in BC, if they did it like that again it would make late game so much better.
I played DF until I got my Legendary and only stopped because of dictatorship within the guild. I didn’t think it was much of a grind but I can see how it can be.
Classic however is just a grind start to finish. But I’m doing my second toon in less than a month as well as just getting 5500gs last night I am enjoying it.
I guess don’t play if you don’t like to grind a little bit. Those that do will be rewarded for whatever they are doing… much like life 🙂
'how do you make content that is for collectors, without forcing them to do it?' easy. you just put it in the game, and leave it so they can get do it when they choose to. they'll still have to do it, but they can do it on their own time.
Plunderstorm was fun for like 15 games until I realized I'd have to play nearly 200 games to get the mount, or more. The inconsistency in the fights was just too frustrating to continue. I would have a higher level, maxed out abilities and I would still get clapped which just made my effort feel too random to enjoy.
Ironically, since I stopped playing PvE and have been playing a F2P on a RP server, a toon that actually lives and makes her living on Azeroth the game no longer is a job… …even though my toon has one.
Rep rep rep…
infinite cheap rewards that really do nothing… yep.
Any forced engagement feels really bad in any game. We want to come keep coming back, but not because we feel like we "have" to.
There is a story around my town about feeding straw to deer. Straw has no nutrition like hay and alfalfa do, but they eat it anyway. So it is basically a filler. If the deer are given only straw, they will die of malnutrition. So the lesson here is that they should be wary of how much "straw" they give their players. Player sentiments can reflect their level of "malnutrition."
They just can't make the game fun…
Or hook people sneaky to where they don't know it somehow lol.
Like make it a grind as mmos are but make it fun to play so it isn't a big deal.
I dont know hiw its on dragonflight quitted SL but wow really started feel like second Job. Started in legion collect AP and same thing just keep going till in SL finaly personally got enough. There is just too much stuff what "you dont have to do but you do" playing wow just started feel like you are stuffed turkey and alltime comes that wait take this too
WoW stopped being WoW after the Lich King died, then it became a "live service". That's why I deleted my account in 2021.
A grind is fine. It's the fact it is FOMO that is a problem.
Plunderstorm 1000% just enhances the fact it feels like a job , here is an another horrible grind you need to grind and it’s limited time ! So start grinding keep paying.
It doesn’t matter if it didn’t take away from the core team at the end of the day 10.2.6 added 0 content to the core game so in a way it did take away from the core game and I’d argue couldn’t that separate team add fun stuff into the core game ? Instead of this FOMO trash
9:38 Across the Isles have into the storm which have an annoying achievement in it where you need to do all the 4 different elemental storms in all the 4 different zones, the feature that was explicitly stated to not be for the hardcore players or players that play a lot early in DF, aka I didn't bother with it, now I am waiting and checking everytime I log in if the Storm is the right one and in the right zone so I can progress the meta achievement which is incredibly frustrating. Especially because there doesn't seem to be a proper rotating or system to the storms so you're just at mercy of rng gods every 3 or so hours.
Pretty much everything else I have already but I'm pretty sure there's a bunch more that you're just artificially waiting for but you'd only notice it when you're stuck on said achievement.
If the mounts and toys had a reasonable drop or vendors, I'd be fine as a collector. It feels so bad after 100 times and no progress, even with alts and spawn times.
"It doesn't take away from other teams" is an obvious cop out lie. The company has finite resources to allocate; those people devising a new game mode could be working on retail game balance(which needs a LOT of work still), and if they can't, they can be laid off and the right people can be hired. Same goes for stuff on the shop; the people working on this could have been working on raid tier sets to make them better looking instead.
This is why i play CS. Can just log on and play and have the same items as the ones who play 12 hours per day.
"How do you make content for collectors without forcing them to do it." STOP MAKING IT TIME LIMITED AND PSYCHOLOGICALLY ABUSING THE COLLECTORS WITH FOMO TACTICS. THIS ISN'T ROCKET SCIENCE.
been saying this for years. WoW feels like a job. I've limited amount of time to do content and i need to log in everyday to do the same shit just to make a slight bit of progress. It's why i quit.
This is why I unsubbed last year. It was just to much. I do have to sleep, eat, pay bills, and go to work… Not to mention play in a couple of D&D games with friends…
That and I could not find an opening in a raid team (and I am a healer). Heaven forbid if I actually got into a raid team, on top of everything else I had to do both in and out of game. Something had to give, and that was my time in WoW. Its crazy that I would have ever complained about to much content, but 90% is grind…
Currently with the World Awoken meta achievement the only problem is the Into the Storm achievement as there's a 43% chance that the Elemental Storm that spawns is in Azure Span. Since reset a storm has spawned in Thaldraszus once…..
WoW has a slow patch cadence: players complain
WoW has a faster game cadence: players complain
It's cool to see blizz adding new things. Shame it was pvp based.
Because it is, WoW has been run and operated as a platform to run a 3rd party business on instead of a game for a long time.
I am a PVP player, and last season I pushed for the Legend title in solo shuffle. It took me 32 or 33 lobbies to get it. Meanwhile I waited on average 42 mins per que for each lobby.
I sat just in que for just under 24 hours total for just the legend part of the grind. This doesn't include all the lobbies before that 100 win grind started.
I will NEVER do that again, it was awful and I hated it. Not to mention I got the title for a while 5 weeks, that's it.
The meta achievements work best when they can be solo-ed
8:08 that is why it's a special reward for certain people. it's not necessarily supposed to be for everyone. not everything has to be for everyone.
It’s not a job… if you want it do it if you don’t want it then don’t do it…. 😂 bro the complaining. Almost 20 years in and for 20 years just complaining left and right like children…..😂😂
I have no problem with the plunderstorm renown because I enjoy the gamemode and you can actually farm the renown and be done with it without it being timegated. But things like the Big Dig, the Emerald Dream outdoor sets, dragonriding manuscripts, Zaralek outdoor sets, these ones suck so bad.
For example I only need the legs to complete the winter theme Emerald Dream set and it only drops in the weekly caches. And I just can't get it because I keep getting rings and I have to wait another week to try again. For Zaralek sets or dragonriding manuscripts, you have to wait for specific WQ to spawn or wait for a specific rare that spawns once every 14 hours. It's just so annoying because sometimes you're just like "I don't have much to do in WoW, I'm going to collect a few things" and you look it up online and realize how time gated it is and how annoying it is to farm it and you just lose motivation immediatly.
It was the same with Warfronts, the sets were really cool but you could only try your luck once a week. At least for raids things are going to get better next expansion but damn. Collecting in this game is not always fun, and it's probably even worse this expansion. And I'm not even talking about mounts like Breezebiter or Karokta who had a ridiculous drop rate and that you could farm once every fourth day (for Karokta)
The issue isn't the grind, its the timegating and FOMO.
For a casual player, demanding that someone logs in every day/week to grind out a timegated system is what turns WOW into a second job, and when that system is seasonally reset, its a massive feels bad moment.
The reality is a casual player want to log in maybe an hour or two every night to knock out a few quests or level an alt, and spend most of their time playing on their weekend. And this is an issue blizzard has created for them, blizzard still demands that you run M+ dungeons and raid every week to upkeep your ilvl FOMO, and there is no 'banking' system that keeps rolls from previous days/weeks to be used at once, such as the world quest system in legion where you could do your daily WQ bonus every day, or bank 3 days and knock it all out at once.
Also the game simply isn't persistent or well paced, everything is designed to rush you into end game content ASAP, at which point the game becomes repetitive, thus becomes a job, there is very little progression past that point and what progression you do get isn't persistant, grind out your EOD M+ welfare gear for pre-Vault/Raid BIS? Well a new season drops and you have to do the same exact set of dungeons all over again for the same exact items to replace your mythic raid gear, its just an awful feeling to be sent back to the M+ mines every single season, if I farm full Mythic BIS, I should expect that to be better than M+ welfare gear next patch, but that just isn't the case.
No other popular MMO does this, FFXIV has its content, you beat it, then the devs just expect you to go play other games, or grind out transmog and RP. If you farm out your Barrows set or Bandos set in OSRS, the devs aren't going to add in a new questline that replaces that gear, they made that mistake with RS3 with dungeoneering. EVE Online too, Titans are still relevant even after 20 years, if you had one in 2014, its still a useful tool in 2024. Similarly the gear cap in ESO IIRC caps at 160 champion points scaling, and it scales all gear in the game, so anything that drops in the Morrowind expansion will be at 160 scaled with its own unique effects, while something farmed in the latest expansion too will be 160 scaled, new gear just has new effects, it doesn't outright replace old content, just gives players more options on where and how to get gear.
Also there is the issue with "Content" in WOW, difficulty modes are not content. In any other game, playing on easy, or playing on hard doesn't change the content of the game fundementally, it just makes the game more challenging numerically, but the content is the same. WOW devs and sadly WOW players have created this nonsensical logic that doing the same dungeon repetitively with EHP modifiers and mutators makes it new content, but it doesn't. If I play FF7: Rebirth on hard, it just makes the fights I would do harder, however when it comes to Content I could do the main quest and not do any side content, or I could do the Gilgamesh side quest and unlock a superboss, with new lore, new cutscenes, and of course, the new boss to do, WOW used to do this with optional super bosses in raids like Ouro and Alganon, but now they simply copy paste the same boss, add on another instant raid wipe mechanic and 20% EHP, and call it mythic.
The WOW burnout is a WOW issue, because the devs demand your time, but don't reward you with content or progression, and worse is the gacha style timegating that prevents people from just playing the game normally, and they don't want you to take breaks either, I currently took a break from OSRS, where I was doing the Bandos grind on my Ironman, when I go back, I will stil lbe at the Bandos grind on my Ironman, that content is not going to be invalidated by a new update, power crept? Maybe, but not outright obsoleted.
WoW is one of the only jobs in the world where you pay to work lol