I don’t really wanna put myself through that at the moment, lol

But, the really really really short version is that Mr. Ideas or whatever he calls himself puts a hefty amount of over-emphasis on the role of the playerbase in shaping the actual mechanical development of World of Warcraft over the years and completely neglects to mention two enormous factors in the thesis of his video, which are:

1. firstly that only a minority of players did 40-man raids at all in vanilla - back then, the enormity of the leveling experience and amount of stuff to do in the game that wasn’t raiding was a massive time investment and there was way more game to play than most single player games, or games at all. It isn’t like today, where many people playing some version of Vanilla-WoW just skip as much of the actual game as they can to get to the shitty, under-developed raids at the end. Meaning that back then, most of us were definitely not thinking about WoW solely through the lens of being a game where you just grind for raids, get gear for raids, go do raids and then log off because raids are the only thing that matters in the game, and if you suck at raiding it’s okay to be mean to you because that’s the only thing that matters. There was a ton of discussion about how we wanted to see more emphasis on the more immersive, role-playing potential of the game (people were begging for player housing from the fucking beginning, it existed in other games at the time like Star Wars Galaxies which had a staggeringly robust housing system). Blizzard, its developers, chose to focus on raiding, and ignored much of what players back then wanted, leaving a majority of players to fall off as the game’s life went on. And why is that? Because

2. the worst pieces of shit playing the game in Vanilla - the actual, infamous, “elitist jerks” - are the guys who became the lead devs, so no shit they focused on building up the raids, making that the only thing that matters (outside of PvP, don’t get me started), and making it okay to be toxic to people when they’re not good raiders. They are the ones who are to blame for the way WoW developed. They literally control the entire world and mechanical functionality of the game, and are fully responsible for the shambling, unrecognizable corpse that World of Warcraft has become.

I’m not saying the behavior of the playerbase didn’t contribute at all, but he didn’t acknowledge either of these enormous factors in his long-ass video that a bunch of people who don’t know better watched and are like “huh okay this is reality now, nothing more to the story”.

(yes that is the very very condensed version of this rant)