>>719765289
Not all of the 00s.

It was more of an era from 1998-2008, 1998 was considered the best year in gaming history, but the following decade was non-stop bangers year after year.

But there were problems with the 00s too, specifically in the later half. Consoles going online was fine at first, but when we started getting shit like Horse Armor and Map Packs and Microtransactions, as much as people love sucking Oblivion's cock, that thing was riddled with microtransactions. On the PC gaming side of things shit was getting worse with League of Legends and facebook games like Farmville becoming bigger successes then actual due to their garbage microtransactions and chainmail style marketing rewarding players with advantages for spamming their friends to play, and of course WOW got the sparkle pony.

The creation of the iPhone and the utter trash that followed with phone games, touch screen gaming has sent back gaming by decades and utterly destroyed mobile gaming as a concept, the last true handheld was the 3DS, with the Switch, or various Steamdeck style couch handhelds being a poor substitute due to being too big to fit in a pocket, while phone games are heavily limited by their touch screen limitations, and no game developer has had the big brain idea of making a gaming phone with physical controls, like a PS Vita with a sim card.

>>717876475
No.

The beginning of the end started with the beta of the game, and each iteration of their MMO mechanics only got worse.

Instances were a mistake, capping instance sizes was a mistake, lowering raid sizes was a mistake, 10-25 split was a mistake, heroic dungeons were a mistake, heroic raids were a mistake, dungeon finder was a mistake, raid finder was a mistake.

MMORPGs is a social game genre, its about working with others to achieve a goal, in sandbox MMOs its about building the biggest castles and knocking down your enemies, in themeparks its about exploring the world and killing the super boss.

What WOW did was it focused so hard on sweaty poopsockers that they forgot about the rest of the world, they streamlined everything to get people into end game raiding ASAP, but then realized that end game raiding doesn't have a lot to offer and once people beat the raid, they have no reason to stick around, especially when they made PVE gear worthless in PVP.

Vanilla WOW was a happy accident of great things, and the first seemless open 3D MMO without loading screens between zones, just continents, and TBC/WOTLK was compelling to play because it continued storylines that began in WC3.

But by the time Cataclysm hit it had no compelling story to keep people around, PVP at this point was completely abandoned and adding flying to the Old World was the last straw that killed PVP servers so players couldn't make their own fun anymore.

Dungeon Finder is also incredibly damaging to any MMO, pre-raid PUGs are where players are supposed to engage with other players, and where communities would naturally form, instead Cataclysm's PUG scene was dead due to dungeon finder, and the only reason people joined guilds was because cataclysm added in free gold generation for active guilds, so every single person without a guild on the server was spammed to death with spambots that to this day still haven't been banned even if the free gold generation was removed