Agreed.

I started playing in early/mid Vanilla WoW, mostly to hang out with my older sister and brother in law who lived in another state. It was probably one of the coolest gaming experiences I've ever had. I had never played anything like it, and the world felt alive and huge. Back then MMOs were fairly new. Looking back on it now, it's mostly nostalgia, but the memories were great.

However, Vanilla is arguably the best and most unique WoW ever was, in my opinion. TBC had some great additions, but it felt too corporatized and streamlined. It began to lose a lot of the uniqueness that WoW had in Vanilla. Vanilla could absolutely be improved upon, but what they did was treading down a path that was the wrong direction. For example, in Vanilla WoW the 40v40 Alterac Valley battlegrounds that could last for hours or days were absolute fucking awesome. Even if you would join up, play, and never win the match, it was really damned fun. I pity the people that never got to experience the true epic battle of original AV. All changes to it since then have streamlined it, "improved" it, and made it a lot less fun. It's an apt microcosm of WoW in general.

It's why I was turned off from MMOs in general after what Blizzard had turned WoW into. Most MMOs are just hamster wheels to keep the players placated and addicted, to keep playing and paying for as long as possible. They intentionally inflate the time required to do things and put ridiculous things behind unneeded time sinks, making a lot of it feel artificial, implemented only for the sake of the keeping the player addicted rather than having fun, which reduces the immersion and reality of the world. Even though there are obvious achievements, dungeons, raids, and items to work toward that should require investment, and be earned, the way they're implemented in the grindfest that most MMOs today have done is just bad. Simply put, they're not fun.

Agreed.

I started playing in early/mid Vanilla WoW, mostly to hang out with my older sister and brother in law who lived in another state. It was probably one of the coolest gaming experiences I've ever had. I had never played anything like it, and the world felt alive and huge. Back then MMOs were fairly new. Looking back on it now, it's mostly nostalgia, but the memories were great.

However, Vanilla is arguably the best and most unique WoW ever was, in my opinion. TBC had some great additions, but it felt too corporatized and streamlined. It began to lose a lot of the uniqueness that WoW had in Vanilla. Vanilla could absolutely be improved upon, but what they did was treading down a path that was the wrong direction. For example, in Vanilla WoW the 40v40 Alterac Valley battlegrounds that could last for hours or days were absolute fucking awesome. Even if you would join up, play, and never win the match, it was really damned fun. I pity the people that never got to experience the true epic battle of original AV. All changes to it since then have streamlined it, "improved" it, and made it a lot less fun. It's an apt microcosm of WoW in general.