What killed it?
ME
No changes crowd.
We aren't kids anymore and don't have time to spend on massive grinds
twitch
Min maxing pserver autists and the fact that we already know the game by heart. There is no sense of mystery or discovery.
I genuinely bought the meme about how Classic WoW would be filled with chill boomers until I saw the actual aspies inhabiting that game.
the internet
WoW was only fun because the internet was new and nothing was streamlined, people were expected to be incompetent and the main draw of the game was just fooling around in this world that blizzard crafted with a bunch of other dorks
at some point a pipeline was created, not just for the game but for the internet as a whole.
"Chill boomers" were smart enough to know they don't have time to play a MMO (also, they already played it, so doesn't worth the effort). Dumb "chill boomers" played it and quit during the first month.
streamers telling everyone that if they want to pvp they need to go orc or undead, fucking up faction balance permanently on nearly every realm
activision making poor decisions on free transfers and correcting their mistakes after it's too late
not merging dead realms so people have to pay 25 USD to play with other people
allowing multiboxers on popular realms instead of copying everquest's classic servers by implementing no boxing servers
not testing their own content: first boss in bwl would keep spawning adds even after the encounter was over, nefarian would despawn for 15 seconds if you're playing on ally, could abuse layering in instances for weeks, could get full exp in raid groups just aoeing down shit, layering to get a fuckton of resources such as lotus and devilsaur, could batch skinning to get 1 leather per person in ungoro
shitty youtubers telling everyone what patches will make what items valuable and encouraging viewers to stock up on items so all of these newer players stock up on shit and completely fuck up the economy. you need both noobs and experienced players to have a healthy economy but instead even newer players know everything
poor decisions regarding AV implementation and pvp in general: people had to rank in AV because the lieutenant honor was too high for any mid-tier wsg premade to outcompete afk retards in AV, alliance premades completely fucking up alliance pugs, poor faction balance attributed to blizzard and streamers giving horde hour long queues, no bg weekends at launch, no AB, newest version of AV without any of the landmines and herbs
garbage culture in bgs with no one communicating with anyone else, no one making calls in wsg, everyone just following videos of how premades won before premading av was stopped
laggy as fuck world pvp if you have more than 80 people gathered somewhere, lags worse than a pserver in a frenchcuck's basement that had 10k players on simultaneously
probably a lot more shit i'm forgetting