Not sure how I feel about the current state of WoW. I played the game for a long time... I was there for the launch, and I played right up until my guild had Firelands on farm.
There's a lot that the game does right, but there's also a lot that's been seemingly on the decline. So... this is all my own personal opinion on the game as of the last time I logged in...
1.) Simplification. Many of the game's mechanics keep getting 'streamlined,' and while I can understand that this makes the game more accessible to newcomers, to an old-timer like me it just made the game feel shallow. I wasn't particularly happy when they simplified the talent trees for Cataclysm, so when I saw what they were planning to do to them with MoP I couldn't help but facepalm at it.
2.) Community. Like most MMOs, the community was never really a shining beacon of maturity, but things have been gradually getting worse over the years. When dungeon finders (especially cross-realm) were added in, people no longer had to worry about their reputation. There was no incentive anymore to be polite and competent with regard to getting into instance or PvP groups. Then they created the Armory, which had a pretty negative impact on the forum community since your thoughts and opinions ceased to matter if your gear or talents weren't "good enough" - regardless of whether or not it had any bearing at all on the conversation. Then there was Gear Score for a while there, which added an easy in-game tool for people to be elitist pricks when putting together a party. Then there's achievements, which on their own are just fine, but get frequently used by elitist pricks to exclude people (being denied raid spots for characters that haven't completed a particular instance or raid before). Then there's the in-game chat trolling, which was admittedly always present, but as of the time I left it made up the overwhelming majority of what was said in any of the city channels.
3.) Gear. Epic gear is no longer epic. At this point high quality gear is handed out so frequently and effortlessly that it takes a lot of prestige out of having it. What's the point in busting your ass to get top-of-the-line gear, when someone who has never even stepped foot in a current raid can get gear that's fairly close to what you have? It got even worse when they added a PuG raid finder tool, which nerfs the raids down to make them ludicrously easy and the bosses drop gear that's only a tiny bit inferior to what you get for fighting the full-strength bosses regularly.
4.) Economy. Thanks to ridiculous inflation that I blame mostly on cakewalk dailies that practically hand out hundreds of gold to players for no real effort, the economy is pretty messed up now. Things that used to cost a few silver could now set you back 50 gold or more. It's so aggressively hostile to new players that they may as well just not even bother using the auction house at all until the upper levels.
5. Leveling. Having a max-level character is no longer an achievement. They've made leveling so insanely fast, especially with heirloom gear, that you can easily hit max level in a matter of days. Some would argue this is a good thing. I have mixed feelings. For one, it makes the leveling process feel like nothing more than a wall you have to climb over before getting to end-game. Story, characters, etc. don't matter anymore, because now it's just a race to hit max level. Though I can't disagree with the people who say it's a good thing, because Blizzard apparently doesn't give a shit about anything but the end-game content. Sure... they revamped all of the old-world quests with Cataclysm - but in doing so they made the whole thing incredibly linear and made it take you far less time to get through it, as if even they didn't want you to spend any time there. Notably, they also only revamped the vanilla questing content, so it creates a lot of continuity issues when you get to Outlands and Northrend where you've more or less jumped backward in time.
I could go on, there's more stuff I felt strongly about around the time I decided to quit the game, but I've been ranting long enough already.
As such, I don't think it'd make a good location for an expansion, wouldn't be much to do there.
