Convenience features are not the issue. Sure, there are people that don't like them but there are even more that would never bother playing without them.
It's a convergence of multiple factors that's destroying WoW, and not all off them is entirely in Activision Blizzards control. I cannot remember playing any games in recent history that had a community as toxic as WoWs to non veteran players.
Their effectively P2W Cashshop didn't help either, as it created the situation where people basically cannot find normal content groups anymore. Everything pushes you too buy gold and then get carried through relevant content for gear.
> not all off them is entirely in Activision Blizzards control. I cannot remember playing any games in recent history that had a community as toxic as WoWs to non veteran players.
I think community toxicity is very much Activision Blizzards's fault. There are no community guidelines anywhere, griefing is explicitly allowed (almost encouraged) in World PvP, game masters are few and far between. The report system is more often abused for griefing than used for actual community management.
It's very easy to look at FF14 to see that this needs to all start from the top. They have a very active community management team, and enforce very strict guidelines that go way beyond 'don't sexually harass other players'. They have a new player's guild where the guidelines are often discussed, with players taking on the roles as mentors who are supposed to drill these values into people. They have a very strict policy of never attacking someone for how they play the game, unless they are completely griefing (like a healer who never heals their party). Discussing damage or other performance numbers is grounds for a time out (outside dedicated groups for the hardest content).
Additionally, the relationship between the development team and the player base is much less confrontational. The development team is relatively candid on the games direction, they often explain choices they've made in satisfying ways, and seem to actively listen to player feedback. There is a famous example of a player asking about a quality of life feature in a Q&A, and the dev lead saying something along the lines of 'you know what? That makes sense', and delivering the feature in-game a few months later.
These are all things that require some serious investment in community management, and they pay off immensely in long-term good will and loyalty. Instead, Blizzard fired a few hundred people from QA and community management positions shortly before Battle for Azeroth.
That's a convincing argument, I never looked it like that but it does ring true.
The community still shouldn't be considered entirely on Activision Blizzard, but they haven't tried to really address the issue from their side either, so I can definitely see your point.
But the introduction of that LFG tool (more specifically the raid finder) also coincides with the start of wow bleeding subscribers, and they haven't recovered since and instead just kept bleeding.
I don't think there is any evidence that there would be less players in wow if they never introduced that feature, on the contrary there are plenty of things pointing in the opposite direction.
But other games that have a Raid Finder are doing well and rapidly increasing their player numbers: Final Fantasy 14 has had the exact same system since the beginning, and it's definitely not hurting their growth. I think that, despite the hate it gets, LFR was far from WoW's main cause of downfall.
It's a convergence of multiple factors that's destroying WoW, and not all off them is entirely in Activision Blizzards control. I cannot remember playing any games in recent history that had a community as toxic as WoWs to non veteran players.
Their effectively P2W Cashshop didn't help either, as it created the situation where people basically cannot find normal content groups anymore. Everything pushes you too buy gold and then get carried through relevant content for gear.