That is one of the biggest reasons I fell Destiny 2, that WOW TBC Gold and the absurd cost of the expansions and the season moves that had hardly any value in their benefit tiers, just zero to look forward to and get excited about. Seeing QOL upgrades being touted as selling points was that the last nail, however. Manipulative and sleezy and lazy, absolutely fucking lazy and I have zero qualms saying that.
It stings a bit, but the title of this principal post also made me immediately think of Bungie, together with Destiny two. They did not care about all of the participant time spent grinding for their desired rolls, watching their things power-capped, then having to re-grind the exact same weapon and rolls, just with a new power cap. They did not actually make the new drops different in any meaningful manner like sunsetting was supposed to do.
Like the title, it is possible to assert they were totally incompetent, they wanted the boosted player time, or heck, maybe it is not black and white - they were okay knowing that their incompetence rewarded them, therefore they dragged their feet on addressing it until much more than a year after.
Wow has had 20 decades of development effort and experience thrown at it. Besides shitty decisions and systems... It works, the game functions and has a complete world constructed already. That's a lot more than we could say about a lot of mmos already. For the most part there are no game breaking issues that prevent a large portion of the player base from playingwith.
WoW also offers the sunken cost fallacy attached to cheap TBC Classic Gold it. Everyone put in 20k hours to the game feels connected to it and it's to get better. . Right? Those 20k hours weren't for nothing. . Right?