While I still actively play and raid, the expansion has been a huge letdown to a lot of people.

For example:

- The raiding environment has been absolutely horrible; no fun, no reasonable reward, lots of mindless stuff (trash)

- The PvP environment has failed to live up to promises; although arena is fun, it seems like either you're in the top 0.5% or whatever, or you get the same gear as every other scrub who does it, there is no real way to separate yourself plus the same old class imbalance

- The solo/casual environment is nothing more than reputation grinds for mediocre rewards, and even with the recent patch, all we got was more... reputation grinds. There aren't many/any long, challenging, expansive quests in the game beyond maybe Cipher of Damnation and a couple others. I would love to have seen something akin to a combination of the Ahn'Qiraj gate quest and the hunter/priest MC quests, where you have to complete a long and challenging line that actually requires some very solid solo play.

- The crafting systems are more or less broken. Professions like enchanting/JC on many servers can't make any money since people just give the expensive stuff away to skill up, blacksmith plans now require 25-man content for the best stuff, leatherworking is completely useless, and tailoring became a "you need to have it if you're XX class" thing. And I won't even mention engineering... haha

In the past you could have both "hardcore" and "casual" raid guilds, you could have hardcore, organized PvP groups and more casual solo PvP, and there were a lot more long and interesting quest chains and dungeons throughout the game (IMO).

Now, raiding beyond Karazhan is almost exclusively for the hardcore guilds and even they don't get much of a reward out of it, the focus of PvP is on smaller 3-5 person teams, leaving many casual players constantly in search of a team willing to take them, and everything else -- including all the 5-man instances in Outland -- has been reduced to reputation grinding.

The game can still be and often is fun, but I think quite a few people who came back for TBC expecting something different saw a lot more of the same and a much less friendly environment for the casual player, and split.

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