Board Thread:Online Discussion/@comment-10297546-20130602065535/@comment-7153552-20130612134546

They weren't able to focus on the story because everytime they tried to balance anything PvP it changed the balance of the PvE world. It was less the world PvP that truly ruined started the downfall of WoW and more Arenas because it made balancing harder. The stories started to suffer because once Activision took over they wanted to make WoW and E-Sport and they started the Arena Tournament Realms. It is impossible to balance a game around both PvP and PvE, you can only ever have one or the other. What they should have done, and this partly from their devs, is have two completely different set of rules. All of the PvE rules for cool downs, spell durations, etc. should have applied for world PvP, while keeping a seperate set of rules for the instanced PvP. An example would be the mechanics for Sap or Polymorph. Blizzard devs openly admit that balancing PvP took a front burner and sometiems stories got taken off the stove completely. Their lore just wasn't as rich and well thought out later on. It's the kind of thing that made it so you HAD to complete everything in every zone on every character, ever time, in Mists of Pandaria. It's a little silly that I have to work practically all the quests to reach 90 then work all the factions to get gear, especially when systems from BC and Wrath worked just fine.

I played WoW from the middle of Vanilla, and I have seen a steady decline in story focus, quest focus, and urge of exploration. Whereas PvP focus has at the very least not suffered, and in some cases increased. It makes for a game that isn't what it started as. Think about if Skyrim had a series of patches that started to make it focus less on story and exploration and more on just killing wolves and giants for gold. It would be subtle and slow, but after two or three years there would be no need to even start new quests. It's a bit of a stretch as far as examples go, but it's the closest I can equate it to within this community.