I played WoW from Vanilla (technically. I was lvl 58 when the Burning Crusade launch event started) up through Battle for Azeroth. I took a long break, came back for Legion, and dumped the game again before hitting max level. My favorite part of WoW was always the leveling experience; doing dungeons, exploring, slowly putting together your character from quest blues and consumables. The RPG aspects of vanilla clicked perfectly with me. When Cata rolled around it soured me on the game a lot. Not just because of how much stuff changed but also because the entire design of the leveling zones was revamped to make things way more shallow, and they gutted all my favorite parts. Epic class quests were gone, globetrotting dungeon quests were gone (mallet of Zul'farrak anyone?), contained stories were traded for zone-spanning storylines that make the questing experience feel more like a lazy river ride than exploring a place, which hurt even more because the writing quality dropped. What makes it worse is how easy it is to find cracks in the new content; Stonetalon mountains basically doesn't exist outside of its quest chain, and large chunks of the map remain in weird time bubbles after you leave; in a weird twist of fate, the systems for advancing the world along that Blizzard introduced in Wrath make the time stasis phenomenon even more egregious than it used to be in Vanilla, where nothing changed but also everything still kinda made sense.
I miss the game a lot though. I was in an active RP-PvP guild on Venture Co. and had a blast with them even through Cata, although I don't remember being any good at PvP myself. We would organize little stories in the guild chat, which was in-characrer and took place in the guild home at the time (which I think was the Horde fort in Grizzly Hills). New recruits were (In character) punching bags and got a lot of raw treatment, but it was all in good fun. I remember the first thing my character had to do was help all the other grots dig a trench around the fort. Not for any practical reason, just because one of the officers was mad and wanted to wear us out. And there was another time I got roped into fetching dangerous alchemical ingredients for the Clan witch doctor and ended the bit curled up, trying not to puke in my sleeping hole (grots were only allowed to sleep in foxholes outside) because the ingredient I had to get exploded into noxious fumes if you handled it improperly.
My proudest In-Character moment also happened like two days before I quit the game. My warrior got into a fight with one of the clan's warlocks. Somehow this turned into getting invited to am initiation ritual the shadow magic arm of the clan was holding that night. One of the clan shaman was class-changing to a warlock as part of their story. What's weird about this interaction is that my character disliked Warlocks a lot. Very loudly and publically. It wasn't a secret. I still have no idea why this invite was made. So when he got to the site of the ritual and was left alone with the shaman for twenty minutes while the branch officers worked on ritual prep, he spent the entire time talking the shaman out of it. And he was successful.
... and then he was subjected to physical beatings for interfering in branch politics above his station, except class balance realities at the time meant he beat the present clan officer bloody and had to be properly disciplined later, where he was beat senseless by the clan 2nd and busted back down to grot. It was a great time.
I really miss my roleplay realm characters. The Warcraft setting has a lot of room for fun stuff, but the modern version of the setting is badly written and modern zone design does not really accommodate anything except for solo questing.
To save this from ending on a bummer note, postan my favorite ambient tracks. Blizzard's music is still some of the best in the business after all these years.
