Dedicated a hundred or so painstaking hours to trying to understand this hulking monolith of MMO Discourse. Nigh impossible to believe a newcomer attuned to the niceties of FFXIV can find any enjoyment in this hamster wheel of hideous, thankless design, and bear asses. Either this is a piece of transgressive art I'm simply too stupid to appreciate, or just a radiant entry in a then budding 3D MMORPG genre with growing pains as noticeable as its ambitions. Thanks for paving the way for other, better games. Maybe in retail WoW they actually remembered to put the story IN the game.

vanilla/classic-era wow has a vibe of it's own that none of the expansions can ever hope to beat, but as someone who leveled no less than 10 characters to max level (60) on a 1x rate blizzlike vanilla private server years before classic ever came out:

don't

mileage may vary on servers with custom content/tweaks, but pure vanilla is a chore, and that's not even getting into the raid progression. i've heard horror stories of classic's raid progression.

Vanilla WoW in 2020 is a radically different experience than vanilla WoW in 2005. The leveling content is still a great adventure, but the endgame meta is absolutely choking the life out of this game. In the ancient days, these raids were considered hard because we were idiots, but also because we were playing unfinished classes with unbalanced gear and information wasn't publicly available. More importantly players weren't stacking every available consumable and world buff. Those buffs and consumables when layered together are obscenely powerful and make an already easy game even more trivial. Unfortunately for basically everyone, that lack of difficulty leads to people competing with each other in order to find some kind of challenge. Classic WoW PvE is now essentially PvP, and the social pressure to spend hours accruing those consumables and buffs before every raid is intense. The group's performance is of course impacted by how many people get these buffs, so in a sense by refusing to get them, you'd be be bringing the team down. It may sound then like the simple solution is to just join a casual guild that doesn't care about the dickmeasuring competition, but the reality is that the players that AREN'T competing are bored as hell and moving on to other things. Your options at the end of the day are to join a guild that IS interested in this competitive rat race, or join an incompetent guild that wipes on easy bosses for frustrating reasons.

Honestly this was so much better than I ever expected, I expected to try it, realize how old it was and stop playing. But oh man were people right, classic wow truly was something special. Never have I felt so much joy in just being a lowly adventurer in a vast world. The connection to the community and the people you meet along the way is so rewarding. Not once was I in a rush to get to 60 because I enjoyed the journey so much with my Tauren Shaman :) Its only been 2 years and I already get nostalgic about classic. Definitely the single best WoW experience ive ever had.

WoW Classic consumed most of my life during the pandemic. The game is charming but most of the people that play it at a high level are cunts, to be frank. "If you don't have a bloodrage cancel macro at this stage of the game you should be embarassed" uttered the skillful, 12345 pressing raid leader. It's a circlejerk but the world itself is incredibly charming. It's tough for me to appreciate this game for what it is because the people I surrounded myself with were genuinely mean spirited fucks in order to be "competitive". I regret not being a part of a more casual circle of players but even when I attempted that during the burning crusade I had a bad time. I just don't like the gameplay loop at endgame but leveling is fun. I leveled four characters to maximum level with no boosting bullshit.

I made good friends too though. And those friends really accompanied me through lonely times. I think on that basis alone there is a lot to salvage with my WoW experience but the negative certainly opaqued the positive.
I love this game but I also think it's hot trash. I can't really recommend it even though I enjoyed it.

I had nostalgia for WoW from days spent playing as a kid, but the memories I made playing this version are far more dear to me.

I think that is at least partly because vanilla has so many things that make it unique that I just prefer:
- weird talent trees, especially the druid’s balance tree (omen of clarity supremacy)
- “endgame” starts before max level
- leveling/questing isn’t guaranteed to be a cakewalk
- classes have things that they alone can do (warlocks can summon players, druids can battle-rez)

Classic is perfect in it's own broken and unplayable way, but Blizzard crapped all over the 2019 release so it sucks, I'm playing this version on a private server and it's a better experience.

I could have gotten 3 engineering titles in the time I spent playing WoW. So yes, the game was really really good and very addictive, the last expansions suck and will never be what I want them to be. But about the original vanilla WoW, it's fun but clearly unpolished, they fixed it on the re-release but still, I didn't enjoy it as much as WotLK or Legion.

Positives:
Even with all its flaws it was still very fun. The gearing feels great, running group content usually feels great. Leveling feels great.
Negatives:
There are ridiculous mandatory grinds.
Finding a group is annoying af.
Ugly.
No voice acting.
Leveling as anything other than dps is frustrating.
Sometimes it's hard to figure out what to do next.
The community is the worst I have ever seen.
No restrictions on loot so you have to count on the players to not be dicks.
Generally unintuitive in all aspects.
The raid system is bullshit.
All group content has been made irrelevant with the expansion so it's dead content you basically can't play.