Do you have any "ex-favorite" franchises in gaming, and what made you lose interest in them?

[Farsala]

Many games for me, most due to casualization of said series. I will only list my top disappointment(s) though.

World of Warcraft- It is my #1 game in my top 50, but not because of anything recent. Classic, BC, and WoTLK were so good by themselves that it tops my list. However the Cataclysm happened and it happened to everything. This MMO became less of one and catered to casual single players in the end. Booming populations somehow lead to a group finder tool, which lead to less of a reason to to socialize with anyone from your own server until raids. However if you are on a small server and in a small guild and relied on randoms from your server to fill the gaps you are SoL. A lot of people quit, and the ones left that had any success were elitist 1%ers. Pvp/raid groups became constrained within the elite, and so it became a join or die situation. No more were the random pvp groups formed to raid the enemy capital or Arena/BGs.

Speaking of BGs, all of them were made to be shorter and less complicated for casual play of course. Gone were the intense 1 hour WSG or 10 hour AV. World pvp was made pointless, one of the most complicated procedures to pull off is organized raids to attack/defend capitals, but its effectiveness is gone for the casuals.

Dungeons had similar treatment. I admit walking to the dungeon can be annoying, but group finder generally destroyed server camaraderie, a group finder for just the server alone would have been decent. The dungeons themselves were made easier, and some of the old dungeons even lost parts just to make them quicker. They could often last 30min to 1hour but the reward was always worth it, now its mostly pointless and a 10 min ordeal of mindless aoe. In fact dungeons used to require quite a bit of strategy much like raids, but being 5 man made it nice for the smaller servers/guilds to help each other out. The strat actually involved a hard time with all the roles, tanks actually did no dps and had to actually have skill to tank, healing also took quite a bit of effort. DPS had to really worry about aggro, or get instantly killed.

Anyways this rant could go on and on about other things like Professions, Alts, Leveling, Quantity of dungeons/BGs, Quests in general, Inflation, Epics, etc. etc. etc. But by the time I finished it would be a book, PM me if you really want to know more hehe.

TLDR: My favorite game was good, its bad now.