I don't think they ever can go back to how it was because they want a mass player base. The way the players play has to be accommodated to make a mass product. People will die rather than change how they play. Today I joined as a healer on a panderia boss that has a mechanic where it depletes everyone's health and you have to heal the party through it but at the end everyone's health and my mana was depleted. So I sat to drink and restore my mana, meanwhile the party, all at 60% health just run off and fight the trash. They will not stop and eat. Often now parties will not stop and let you resurrect players. Then you can't get time to restore your mana, and they play to expose weakness in the party then blame the individual. Their behaviour is the problem but it becomes manifest as an individual's problem. When I couldn't heal the party who entered combat at 60%, then lost more, then ran on again until they died it was "WTF healer" and this is the culture of the game now. No time, nobody will eat after rez, nobody allows time, it's played in perpetual motion, not just without down-time but without any civility. Today I was tanking and the healer started saying "WTF tank, just get mobs so we can aoe them". Blizzard face the same problem as a player, the players are forcing you to play a certain way. They have to accommodate that. My guess is that all future MMOs will have to be designed around these kinds of style of play or else be marginal small scale affairs. And can developers really afford to produce something that is anything less than a mass affair? The thing is, in the older days, those breaks allowed some civility and sociality, little bits of interaction and joking, all that's gone from the game. It's like being driven on a production line or something. You enter, race through the instance and leave. There is almost no spontaneous interaction in the game world either. Nobody invites you to group spontaneously, it's played in cliques and lineages of people who got to the same level around the same level and who are intent on using their network to sustain their difference relative to others, it's like a social structure!