After playing the original diablo and going back to look through World of Warcraft gameplay, I gained insight to why Blizzard has been struggling to retain much of its player base over the years. The reason for the decline of the studio is the studio’s unwavering commitment to complexity in their game design.
For those of you who’ve never played classic WoW, you should be aware of the fact that that version of the game is substantially easier than retail WoW despite what some community members might tell you. The reason for the disparity in overall difficulty between the two versions lies in the number of features present and influential to the player’s experience. Additionally, retail WoW is horribly optimized for PC players despite being a PC game. These two problems are the byproducts of a two sets of terrible design decisions, and they are replicated in much of Blizzard’s other releases.
The former set is caused by the fact that Blizzard keeps adding currencies (paid or unpaid) to retail WoW, keeps adding new progression features disproportionately to the number of new levels and zones, keeps adding new ‘optional’ mini games that slowly become mandatory for certain gear and zones, keeps adding new mounts that break the purpose and pacing of navigating through the map, and keeps adding new items and stories that fuck up the meta and lore. The latter set is caused by the fact that blizzard has failed to centralize HUD elements to a single menu, failed to provide complete keyboard control over all elements of gameplay, fails to keep the number of key binds required to play the game as low as possible, and fails to keep most of the existing hud elements meaningfully informative.
These factors put together can make WoW feel like a complete headache to understand. Understandably, most new players quickly drop the game either out of confusion because they don’t understand what’s going on, or out of boredom because they don’t understand the purpose of the game’s structure. Veterans have left retail WoW permanently for the same reason. Unfortunately, it is likely that tho departure of these players is intentional.
If you were to go back and look through Blizzard’s presentations on game design, you would know that WoW was originally designed for questing. The game at its core was meant to be a simple and casual experience. Your only real task was to hit max level by completing quests. This made the game accessible to people of all kinds. Lonely, popular, rich, poor, disabled, able-bodied, and more, anyone could simply plug and play WoW however you felt with ease. However as time progressed, Blizzard kept adding in more shit into the game in the hopes of attracting more people. More features didn’t make WoW a better game, but they did make WoW a harder one.
From the looks of Blizzard’s recent actions, it’s unlikely that the developers there will turn away from their push towards complexity in all their games. In fact, its more likely that they’ll add so much shit for players to spend time on until only the most die hard basement dwellers are capable of understanding the horrendous design of the crafts these developers put forth.
The former issues you mentioned are tied directly to the subscription and expansion business model, where the devs introduce new currencies and gimmicks tied to specific expansions to keep players grinding out dailies. They try mitigating the sheer number of currencies by having special event currencies that supersede them all, but it's still a mess covering almost 20 years of dead content. I disagree with the idea that mounts break pacing, as it was the case for years that you couldn't use flying mounts in an expansion until after getting certain achievements in that expansion. Flying mounts were a convenience granted after players already went through all the content. And with the current expansion, they designed the zones with flying mounts in mind from the start.
The latter issues are more complicated but I think it has to do with Blizzard catering spec design to people who play WoW competitively for a living, and everyone else who emulates the competitive players when it's not necessary at all. WoW isn't the only MMO to suffer from keybind bloat; FFXIV and SWTOR have comparable numbers of keybinds. I think one reason they don't trim down the number of (useful) abilities is because they want DPS to have distinct rotations while also having interrupts, CC, and other stuff. Classic WoW had some braindead rotations (mage and warlock) and certain specs were just useless in PvE (balance druid, enhancement shaman, and retribution paladin). Classic before it got completely solved focused on what each class brought to specific encounters, but when retail end-game content like Mythic+ expects every spec to be able to clear every encounter they all get lumped into "DPS" with the same basic abilities on top of rotations and procs to keep them from falling asleep.