not surprisingly i have stumbled across an article that deals with the question “Why are people leaving WoW?” well, i can only speak for myself here and what i experienced in my “WoW life” in over two years; for me the expansion ruined the game. true, it added some content and new areas to explore, but the real game starts when you enter endgame raiding and this took a serious blow with the introduction of The Burning Crusade. decreasing the raidsize down to 25 man tops (with not enough 25 raid content) and creating a 10 man raid instance (Karazhan) that is just downright dull (too much trash, too fast trash respawn, too long corpseruns) and unrewarding (sub-par loot) was a mistake. it made established raiding guilds build around 40 man raid instances struggle and falter.
so people are leaving WoW and are looking for greener pastures for various reasons. summertime may be a valid explanation but i think that WoW is really on a downward spiral. i was a pretty “hardcore” player raiding 5 to 6 days per week and still the eternal grind became too much to be enjoyable.