First time around, Troll Mage. Played from release in 2004 until the day after the guild downed Yogg for the first time in WotLK, was just burnt out from playing/raiding. Was AFK for 10 years, came back to retail a couple months before classic started, didn’t recognize the game. It’s an MMO you can ignore other people in. You can get all the best gear without much effort or work. Hated it.

But playing Classic again, was super nostalgic and really brought back my love of the game. It IS still different this time around.

The game is “solved” in a sense: there is information out there for the mathematically optimal gear you want, talents to use, ability rotations, etc and if you stray too far from optimal, people will react negativity.

There’s no “unknown” anymore, to discover how raid boss mechanics worked, to invent and try new strategies, to theory craft, etc and as a result, there is a VERY low tolerance for most players for failure or even adversity. People want to watch videos that tell them exactly what to do to beat a boss and then just do it. Everything must be fast. I’ve seen some dungeon groups refusing to bring mana users, because they don’t want to have to wait the 10 seconds for them to drink every few pulls.

People refuse to even read quest text, preferring to reply on mods now that mark your map and tell you exactly where to go and what to do. I’ve had several interactions with people complaining that a quest was “broken” because their mod was wrong and when I suggested reading the quest to see what they were supposed to be doing, they acted like it was a ridiculous thing to suggest. READING. Imagine.

Right at the very beginning, first few months of Classic in 2019, it was very obvious to tell who played MMOs from that era before vs those who were younger and/or only played the newer versions of the game. The people who never played before did not quite understand that at its core, WoW used to be a SOCIAL game. You had to make friends and work with others to win. There was no “auto put me in a group of strangers, where I never have to talk to them and we all get personal loot” There were a lot of people who had to quit/server transfer/reroll because they treated others poorly, abusive language, griefing, ninja looting, etc and didn’t quite understand that getting that sort of reputation means no one wants to play with you!

I think the main reason WoW was so popular back in the day, was because at its core, it was really just a giant chat room. In the early 2000s, things like AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, IRC were still prevalent. Lots of folks would login to the game, stand around in a city and just talk to people. Or go run the same dungeon, for the 1000th time, because one of your buds wanted some silly rare drop hat for cosmetic purposes. A lot of the social/people aspect that used to be the backbone of the game is gone and people are only willing to help out with stuff if there is a tangible benefit to them as well.