I think it's an aspect of WoW that is grossly underestimated: it was the beginning of real power gaming for a lot of people. There were no comprehensive, authoritative sources of information about quest locations or rewards. It wasn't built into the game to tell you exactly where to go and what to do. You couldn't just watch Youtube videos of every questline, start to finish, before they even hit live servers. There were things you didn't know, and more importantly that you couldn't easily find out. They didn't give you a shortcut to Desolace from Stormwind to start the Scarlet Monastery quests from the Alliance side. You had to figure that shit out.
Today, everything is known about everything before it even hits the PTR. Every element of a patch is datamined within hours of the patch becoming downloadable. Every new item, every skill change, every new quest is a totally known quantity. Your UI mods can tell you every action you need to take at every moment of a boss fight. Your gearing is decided for you by numerical models built and painstakingly tested by truly insane people. You have data reaping websites showing what is experimentally the best build/gear/playstyle for every class.
All of this lends itself to demystifying the game as a whole. It takes away that feeling of the unknown wonderment that was at the heart of what made vanilla WoW so special to experience in that time and place. It's why going back to it now can never be the same. It's also why no other game can come along and replicate it. WoW changed the face of heavily knowledge-based, complex games forever. It gave rise to the cold, hard process of analyzing and breaking down a game to its nuts and bolts then putting it on the internet for everyone to see or risk falling behind.
Exactly. That's when I started to lose interest in the game a bit. I remember that clearing a raid or a dungeon wasn't enough at one point. You had people starting to say "Hey 'name' you didn't do enough DPS, 'name' why are you third in the healing meter..." even winning resulted in analyzing data and find a way to do 0.05% more damage.
All of that happened at the same time as the uniformisation of stuff and rotation, you HAD to have that stuff because it was the best stuff for your class with the most damage/heal, then you HAD to do that rotation, it's the most mana saving rotation or highest DPS, even though I never had trouble managing my mana and was always in the top healers.
And then you had to install mods that told you what attack was coming and what to do and where to go and you just basically became a robot.
You had something telling you what to do and when, what your stuff should be and how well you performed. Sadly if you didn't have those mods or that particular stuff you would start to be rejected from raids or guilds.
It's something that happens in all game now. The higher you go in a game, the more uniformisation start to happen to maximise efficiency and that's when I lose interest. I wanna play my way, I'm playing, not working.