Vanila WoW raid on Molten Core was eq1 style hardcore, but a lot more entertaining. It was 40-man raid, and it required top notch performance from your guild.
Of course as time went on, and number of players sky rocketed from 500k to 2miln+, the "Casuals" began to whine that they never gonna see any cool raids, so with each next expansion difficulty kept going down. First the raids were reduced to 25-man, then to 10, and you can kill Lich King with 1 group...
Another stupid decision on Bliz part, was that solo-available gear can easily match raid gear from previous tiers. Yes, of course the solo-gear should get better in next level range, but not THAT much better that it easily matches gear that people fought hard for in 1-group instances and especially raids.
Today all the 1-group instances from 20 to 70 are DEAD. No one in their right mind will go to lev 20-40 instances, when they can solo-grind for 1-2 hours, move 1 zone up, and get equal quality loot from common trash. And when in WOTL the casual zones went up to lev 80, you could get T1-T3 + quality gear from common trash in Northrend.
What can I say - to corporations, business comes first. They don't care about your "immersion" and "achievements"; they care about casual solo grinders who generate income.
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