Yep. It may have started as a second job if you wanted to raid, but that was a huge step up from prior MMOs, where it was a second job if you wanted to even play, and a third to raid. And various improvements were made through Pandaria that made everything easier, and crucially, more fun to play. Something changed at the end of Pandaria with the Timeless Isle of Grinding - at the time I stopped, I was still logging an hour or two every week I was actively playing grinding there, I never even saw all the rares, let alone got all the drops - and the start of Warlords with the garrison and its godfucking mission table.
From then on, everything was designed to not be fun, or hard, or anything other than strictly time consuming, and both of those play patters being at the centre of everything was the cause. Any time a patch or expansion came out, there'd be new layers of grind and bullshit and it became a second job to play again. It'd be disheartening how much more stuff there was to catch up on every time I wasn't maxing everything out every week. And, yes, I didn't have to do all the stuff, or keep playing, or anything like it, but... I'm a collector, a completionist, and it makes my brain chemistry sad when I don't indulge. So I got caught in a kind of paradox, where it made me grumpy to play and also made me grumpy when I wasn't playing.
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