The Rush to Endgame

My first introduction to MMORPGs was actually Ragnarok Online, a fairly thriving game that came from Korea in the early 2000s.  There, it took an excruciatingly long time to level, and thus every loss of experience on death felt even worse.  A lot of people never made it to max level, but still played the game and had fun.  There were hardly any quests, and no pointers on what zone is the next area to level -- many times you would wander a bit too far and a very aggressive enemy would sprint at you and lay you out in the dirt, putting you back to where you saved.

When I moved over to World of Warcraft, quests were far more abundant, death was far more of a nuisance than a fear, and you had a pretty good idea where you needed to go next.  Still, there was a sense of a journey being taken when you leveled up, and there were a lot of toons who never quite made it to the level cap.  This was a fine and good thing, because the majority of the content was in the leveling.

Let's approach this from a different angle.  I'm not a designer or developer for World of Warcraft, and declaring the makers' motivations as if I were one of them would be absolutely foolish.  Thus, this is a theory from the player's side of things.

To me as a player, the vast majority of a player's experience was expected to be from 1-60, not at 60.  A lot of care was put into that world experience, which when a player hit max level never particularly saw that much of, unless farming for specific materials.  And those materials very often didn't necessitate being max level either!

No, Vanilla World of Warcraft was far more like that Korean MMO I started with than it is like the current expansion, where zones and leveling are just glossy extended tutorials for the real game at max level.  Leveling up was an achievement, and the experience pre-60 was a lot of the content.  And that's one of the reasons why it's so beloved.  Gathering experience and leveling up, getting measurably stronger in the process, is a very simple but effective pleasure no matter the game.

In other words, the core draw of the game changed drastically throughout expansions.  Leveling versus end-game theme park being just one of them.  This sort of effect splits your userbase every expansion and alienates your earlier players.  Expansions change things, yes, but if you change the core concept of a game, it becomes a completely different game.  It has failed to accomplish its primary objective when its objectives were changed, much like SJW convergence in companies starts rotting it away from the inside.