Welcome to the life of a 10+ year old game.

I've seen this happen with other MMOs in the past and it's sad to watch every time.

As older games, such as WoW, fail to attract the attention of newer players, they basically receive less and less attention from the developers. To the newer generation, they're basically dated relics at this point with antiquated technology utilizing game design and mechanics that may have been worthwhile 10+ years ago but have long since been proven to not be as popular with the current generation of gamers.

As these games continue to bleed subscribers, the publishers will distance themselves further and further away from it pushing the onus onto the design house responsible for creating it. They shift the burden of responsibility and remove the budget making it nearly impossible for large updates.

As WoW's continued existence is proven less and less worthwhile, Blizzard is devoting its attention and resources towards other games and demonstrating that they care less and less about this massively expensive machine they built which requires more and more attention and receives less and less revenue annually.

Inevitably, the game will die off... they still have a few million subscribers left but their servers are shadows of their former glory. You'll start to see more and more server consolidations and less and less updates.... They want the game to die, I can promise you that. It's old and costly and simply doesn't make enough money to justify continued development. It's a novelty for them at this point.

I don't mean to sound doom and gloom with this and I know more than a few of you will likely disagree with me... thing is, I've seen this happen with just about every single MMO that's ever launched. Some of them are still around, some aren't... all of them have walked the path of shame.

There's a reason why you aren't seeing many new MMOs these days.. there is no money in it long term. You may make some money initially but the cost of maintaining them and updating them far outweighs any initial gains.