Actually, a lot of people found it worth playing. It's just that WoW players still kept playing their game long after they lost any love for it, and let out their negativity on the rest of the community instead of unsubscribing. LFG sucks, Cataclysm sucks, LFR sucks, Pandas suck, WoD sucks, etc. etc.
And it only got worse. So bad in fact, that they fucked up WoW Classic with a very loud and vocal "nO cHaNgEs", and exactly that happened what a lot of private servers experienced: world buff meta and super toxic playerbase , especially if you make an error and have players killed or even a raid wipe. This was the last attempt of many WoW players to get back a resemblance of love back for the game, but many lost their rose tinted glasses for history instead.
As I said somewhere else: WoW can be totally the better game, but if only dickwolves play the game no sane person is going to touch it. And MMO games are by definition depending on other players.
By the way, I am not blaming the players for the state of WoW. I am blaming them for giving Blizzard their money when they saw how it evolved. "But the next expansion will be good, they have learned their lesson!"
And I blame Blizzard for not doing anything about it's core problems, especially the botting, the paid boosts (especially in PvP), the blatant advertising and the general toxicity.
