[bearlikelion]

I've recently started my first adventures in Azeroth, and its been quite an experience.

Being very familiar with the genre I knew what I was getting into, but didn't quite understand the differences of WoW versus Guild Wars, Wild Star, or another MMO.

I really enjoyed how they continue to have players level through the expansions, the over joyous feeling of a new loading screen when I reach the next leveling milestone was super rewarding, but quickly became overwhelming.

There's SO much content in the game, thousands of quest lines you quickly out level and never see, stories told through quest dialogs I had been skipping over. I passed right by the entire culture of this hand crafted digital world in a rush to raid, and now have no incentive to see what I've missed.

I finally got my druid to level 80, and now entering the Cataclysm expansion it quickly shows how much has changed from each iteration of the game. I went from running dungeons over and over in hopes of a single drop, to now being overburdened with item and item, all far superior than my previous expansions hard earned gear (ilvl ~170 to 300+).

It feels so forgotten, what I was first looking as like an archived museum of this game's vast history is beginning to feel like its own changes are detrimental to reliving the experience of a veteran as a new player.

Seeing complex constructed runes, swirling tornadoes out in the distance, living see creatures in the background, all without content or content worth doing makes the game feel vast and empty. Although its still very enjoyable.

[bovermyer]

There are over ten years' worth of stories and content in WoW. There are very few people in the world who can claim to have experienced all of it.

One of my favorite "wow, that's random" discoveries in WoW is the Plants vs Zombies minigame by the Dalaran crater in the Eastern Kingdoms.

[zanny]

You are well beyond the level you can go back and run the raid content from past expansions by yourself. The Blackrock Mountain raids specifically, saw hundreds of thousands of players run through them in groups of forty for hours every night for over two years. You just cannot get that scale anymore, and games that try (hic, Wildstar) don't see popularity like WoW did.

So you don't know empty in WoW until you run up and punch a giant rock monster to death in fifteen seconds that would have taken forty people fifteen minutes of coordinated combat to slay a decade ago.

[jlees]

Yes, one of the more depressing things I did recently was level up a new character in WoD after having not played since pre-Cataclysm, basically. Going back and soloing instances that I remember grinding for months and months, encounters I remember working out for the first time with my guildmates (no videos or strategy guides!), bonds I made and the sense of achievement we all had at the end... totally destroyed by a fifteen second punch to the face by my brand new level 100 character. Though I wanted the gear for nostalgia's sake, it wasn't worth the heartache.

It felt a little like going back to college a couple of years after graduating, where a layer of nostalgia wasn't enough to disguise how much I, and the place itself, had changed. (Because college, like WoW, is a lot more about the people for me than the physical buildings.)