Looking at the game when others play it makes me think that I would be so happy if I could experience it with a group of friends.
Maybe if I retire and by some miracle know enough people, we can get together and form an awesome guild, and explore the world for the first time?
But the experience of Classic WoW now is nothing like its early months (now 20 years ago!). It's a 'solved' game now, everything is known, documented, data mined, and optimized.
Players rush to max level using optimized routes to then join guilds of like-minded players to speed-run the raids. Little tolerance for 'noobs'. The sense of adventure and exploration is long-gone.
Sure, there are always a few days to weeks while the min/maxers are figuring things out, but that's generally not enough time for someone that's not a streamer to experience the content before a "solution" is provided.
I had the same experience with CoD Warzone. It took off during Covid and I could play with a bunch of mates and people could run different loadouts and strategies. By the time Warzone 2 came out, everything is, like you said, optimized and little room for error.
I honestly think streamers have ruined games with progression. There's too much drive to be at the top and too little focus on just enjoying the game.
I’m the exact opposite from you, always rushing to the end game content and competing on the leaderboards. I dislike nothing more than updates that dismiss serious end game players because the noobs (99% of the player base in all honesty) dictate the difficulty and rewards of the content.
Destiny is like this now. There is a cottage industry of Destiny scientists who make YouTube videos that fill in the knowledge gap intentionally created by Bungie's vague descriptions of class abilities and traits. For instance, Bungie might write a description for a class trait like "while you have an elemental buff, your class ability regenerates more quickly". Then the scientists conduct experiments in the game to answer questions like how quickly? Is there a cap on the maximum amount of ability regen? how long does the buff last? does it stack with other class regen buffs, etc. Then the build theory crafting happens based on these findings and the community settles on a few meta builds.
Of course, Bungie will nerf or buff things at will. And so with every new patch, comes a new round of experiments, theorycrafting, and meta builds. The community has little tolerance for those not using meta builds and you'll sometimes be kicked out of LFG if your gear is non meta. Have a build that is fun to play but slightly less efficient at damage output? Too bad, you're kicked.
And because of the super vague descriptions, you can't just reason about builds with only in game knowledge. It requires you to spend a bunch of time on YouTube, reddit, discord, etc and to keep up to date with patches. It's like a part time job.
The problem I see with games in general is that so many of them are now designed to dominate your time the way wow does. I somewhat recently used to play Warzone once a week (or once every other week) with a group of friends, and that’s a game that you should be able to pick up, play for a couple of hours, and come back whenever you want and play for a few more hours. But it’s not. New content comes out all the time, and a whole new game comes out once a year. If you don’t stay on top of it, you just don’t get the proper experience of the game. So once my casual level of interest drops below the level of time the game demands from you, I just give up playing it.
This trend of a constant demand for grinding and micro transactions has creeped into way too many products imo, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that most of these games are just not made for people like me any more.
For example, I knew people who played WoW who joined a guild and then had to keep their weekend evenings open so they could raid with the guild. Nowadays, these games come with matchmaking so you can find a group of players to complete a dungeon with (the only exception is the hardest content, where you are unlikely to find 7 other random players who are prepared enough to play them). It turns out playing an MMO is a lot more manageable now.
WoW has better core gameplay (more fun to click buttons and kill simple mobs), more responsive, much more active open world, better quality of life. Final Fantasy has better boss fights, much more immersive and coherent storyline, no need for alts to try different classes.
But it really is addictive once you give in to it. I was playing 10+ hours per day, every day, for months.
But I feel like I'd need some real world friends to be interested, and it's been a significant chunk of time.