Everyone's a hero in their own way

"It may not feel too classy
begging just to eat.
But you know who does that? Lassie!
And she always gets a treat!"

It's difficult to start writing this topic, since so many aspects of the game are affected by it. The issue of course is entitlement. There's a lot of discussion on casual v hardcore players, but that is not the issue. There are many players that play 3 hours per week but accomplish a lot more than players that spend 8 hours a day. The problem is that the various ways the game works and is advertised gives players a sense of entitlement to almost everything in the game. Let's examine where this sense of entitlement comes from starting from the very beginning.

When a player buys the game, he is drawn by the advertisements and box art. Both suggest that the player will be a hero in the game. This would be fine for a single player game, where the game is designed to cater to every individual playing it. But, in an immerssive synthetic reality, where you have to play and compete with millions of other players, how does the game make everyone a hero? It doesn't, the advertisement is a lie. No matter how trivial the game is some will still be casuals while others are hardcore.
Different people have different levels of intelligence, skill and devotion.

The second biggest factor that brings this sense of entitlement of players is that loss is meaningless. Dying in World of Warcraft doesn't really matter because the punishment is not severe enough. You lose a bit of armor points and you have to run back to your body(even this was nerfed since now you can run to your body faster and more graveyards were added). When you fail to kill a raid boss it doesn't matter, you can try again next week. And if you're so bad that you can't complete a dungeon, again it does not matter. The developers will just nerf the instance. For example, Occulus:

It's funny. Last week several community managers, developers, encounter
designers, and quality assurance folk logged in to the test realms to
try out the Dungeon tool by playing in pick-up groups with players via
the Random Dungeon option. One of the encounter designers was hit with
Oculus first. In jest, we all had a good laugh at the choice provided
him for his first go. No one left the group and they cleared it in a
flash, I believe getting the 20-minute achievement as well. This was
before creatures and bosses were tuned down a bit, and vehicle
gear-scaling improved on the test realms. It's anecdotal to be
sure, but players certainly didn't shy away from enjoying the time
running the dungeon with a Blizzard employee; and they had little
trouble clearing it. It's one of the faster dungeons in Wrath if done
right. Maybe we should implement a system where, every time Oculus is
selected for you in the Dungeon tool, a Blizzard employee is put in
your group. :p [...] This might not fully address your
question, but part of the reason the changes were made to Oculus was
due to the fact that players were shying away from that dungeon while
testing the Dungeon system more often than they were from other
dungeons. This is the type of data we're watching on the test realms,
particularly when features such as this come along.

Occulus is an easy enough instance, Blizzard knows it, we know it. But because the majority of the players don't know how to properly do it, the instance becomes a nightmare and nobody wanted to do it unless they were running it with friends who did it multiple times. What would have happened if Blizzard didn't nerf the instance? Probably nothing major. There would be a few people whining about it, but eventually most would learn how to quickly kill the bosses, and Occulus would be no different from Nexus. Because Blizzard didn't want to risk the launch of the new LFG tool, they chose to nerf the already easy dungeon.

Is Blizzard correct to appeal to the majority of the playerbase? Depends how you look at it.
From my perspective, it is not. I am not not a hardcore raider by any means. I am content with being just a civilian of Azeroth instead of the hero that slays Arthas. Since WoW is an immersive virtual reality I get the feeling that I contributed to the success of the top raiding guilds on my server by providing cheaper consumables, raw materials, glyphs, gems, enchants and by buying some of the items they bought from raiding.

On the other hand, WoW is not reality, it's escapism. Someone who deals with the reality of getting laid off or simply having a difficult day at work does not want to log on into a fantasy, only to make himself feel like he accomplished even less there. Looking at the game as a business model, it make perfect sense for Blizzard to trivialize the game, if it brings in more subscriptions.

Everyone's a hero in their own way:
you, and you, and mostly me, and you!