>>717902285
Likely not, Metzen is just a different guy these days

>>717913206
Doom 2016 was able to do it just fine, its about putting the right people in the right position. Modern Blizzard is utterly incapable of doing this, the CEOs are not founders,they're investor puppets, and the rest of the studio is being run by HR and Marketing retards who are more concerned about representation and investor scores than actual video games. Metzen himself offhandedly complained that even though he's back as the creative lead for WOW, he has his hands tied

>>717913837
Corporatism, nu-Blizzard shit wouldn't sell if there wasn't nostalgia tied to it, if you released retail WOW in its current state as a standalone game, it wouldn't even break 100k players because no one would put up with a $15 sub for such a broken, dogshit experience and excessive gacha tier timegating without the option to skip

>>717880303
Because WOW removed all of its social elements out of the game for everything except end game raiding, they had to start timegating the playerbase, When you have a game that you want people to play for months, but you turn a 200+ hour adventure to 'end game' into a 2 hour dungeon blitz with hierlooms, you force people to the end game, at which point you're stuck raidlogging.

Raidlogging, Timegates, are the biggest crutch, and makes the social aspects of the game even worse, not only are you competing with your fellow players for limited raid slots, you're now competing with them over the limited amount of slot machine rolls per week that actually gives you incentive to even play the game in the first place.

Then after all of that, all your raid gear gets replaced by welfare catch up gear in a single patch, meaning spending months wiping on bosses because billy the guild retard keeps dying to groundfire, forcing wipes because you can't beat an enrage timer without a full DPS roaster

>>1776804
WOW is the anti-social MMO, everything about its design is made to make you hate other players
>Compete for group/raid slots
>Compete for 10% drop rates on a weekly lockout
>You can beat the entire game without ever talking to another player

The only thing that made WOW enjoyable was the fact the leveling took a while if you're a newbro and was actually social, finding people to do elite quests and leveling dungeons, trading for gear, ect. Once the game was streamlined to push you into end game, and the end game was streamlined so you never actually had to work as a team until some arbitrary hard mode

You can never actually talk to a WOWfag about how shit their game is because they refuse to understand how cucked they are, they're legit paying $60+15 a month so they can run the same 10, 15 minute long dungeons ad nauseam for 2 years, with their gameplay kneecapped by daily and weekly timegates.

Imagine paying monthly so you can only play a game for 2 hours a week before running out of content