Draehl

I'd say its more due to WoW "jumping the shark" since Cataclysm - when your world is saturated with more and more pop culture references, silly jokes, and the game slowly becomes less and less serious people begin to take it less seriously. Tack onto the that the open world having no meaning and the endgame consisting of instances queued from major cities the game really loses a sense of polish. The game was at its peak in Burning Crusade + Wrath leveling experience. Once Wrath endgame PvP/raiding started I feel it went downhill pretty drastically. Anywho. That leads me to ESO- the game's aesthetics are going to be darker and the open world (especially cyrodiil and open world dungeons) will truly matter.