"Blizzard moved the game to be unforgiving in many areas. This in turned made the player base be unforgiving to each other.
Blizzard breed their own discontent through game design.
One little misstep and the group wipes. That turned the player base intolerant to any and all forms of wiping in game. that ended up causing crazy amounts of /kick and weird grouping for instances and was a host for massive amount of back stabbing other players to limit the change a run would fail.
All that was brought on by designing a game that was tuned to tight for the majority of players and it because unforgiving. Then the player base because unforgiving to each other and there is where we currently sit."
-Quras
Myopic.
In TBC and to a lesser extent Vanilla the game was far more unforgiving than it was now, and the result was not that it divided people but that it united them.
Such is human nature. Day-to-day life and the wider perspective of human history consistently show that individuals will set aside their quarrels and cooperate in the face of immediate danger, establish order and stability at great cost, then start fighting amongst each other when it becomes possible and affordable to do so.
Real life examples abound. If there is a fire or car accident or violent crime or bombing or whatnot, you may think your co-worker or neighbor or some random guy on the street is a sack of trash, but you'll work with your fellow citizens to do what must be done to save him. When you're back at the office the next week, you'll go back to your petty little back-and-forth feuds. This is even more obvious in the military - bullying and general uncivility is part of the military lifestyle, but in the heat of battle, or even in peacetime, doing potentially dangerous maintenance or practice, soldiers trust each other with their lives all the time.
It's true in history as well. The Roman Empire was most politically stable when it was held together by external threats. When those threats became less immediate, the Romans turned their weapons on each other. The Peloponnesian War which ended the golden age of Greece began because the Greeks were no longer united against either the Persians or the immediate threat of famine and civil strife. The World Wars, hugely destructive conflicts, originally began because in the early 20th century humans had unprecedented wealth and leisure and, being humans, chose to devote those resources to starting meaningless wars rather than uplift and enlighten themselves.
And so it is in WoW. TBC heroics and entry-level raids were tough, and players worked together and learned to play in order to overcome otherwise insurmountable challenges. In Vanilla, same deal - a player or leader might not like the individual pug, but if you could not get everyone to walk to the instance, click the portal, understand that bad things happened if you stood in certain places or did certain things in BRD or Gnomer or BFD, or oif the individual player was too stupid or inflexible to get these very basic messages, then the group would be unable to progress, and in the longer term, these people couldn't make it in WoW.
The obvious downside, of course, was that those people who just couldn't make it in WoW, because they were inflexible, stupid, socially retarded, whatever, were inclined to quit the game. Blizzard didn't like that.
The community started to go downhill when this natural human process was defeated by trying to create a "no-lose" scenario: where no matter how much of an idiot, baddie, ninja, or generally defective person any given player happened to be, one could still zerg fivemans and ToC/ICC and get loot. If an undesirable was booted from a group or ninjaed loot he could fade back into the masses and plague groups in the future. If an undesirable engaged in despicable or just plain fail behavior and was named and blamed on the forums, CMs would ban the victim and the perp was free to continue to abuse other players' goodwill.
For the playerbase in general, it wasn't necessary to learn to play the game or, more importantly, share information or cooperate with others. And so the community went downhill.
The WotLK equation really didn't change in Cata. Any given group can get through a heroic without saying a word, and if the fail factor rises above a certain threshold, the group will of course disband, and individual fail members will be diluted back into the LFD pug pool, to be carried by other "non-fail" groups, in the sense there are other players who are capable of playing well above what the content requires. Of course, those players will, in time, be driven away by the profound lack of community. And GC's Luck of the Draw buffs and infusions of epics will only accelerate this process as greater and greater levels of fail and antisocial activity continue to be non-obstacles for increasingly meaningless game progression. It's true in raids, too. Bads get raid achievements all the time because the fragmented community has no means of self-regulating.
If content were individually challenging and required communication (i.e., more than AoEing down hallways full of packs of 4-6 mobs), and the lack of accountability were corrected...the community would begin to regulate and repair itself. The viability of the game as a whole would be preserved at the expense of the individual pariah.
TLDR version: You clearly have no experience outside WotLK and do not understand that difficult content is good and not bad for the community.
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