That is… a hole new level of nostalgia driven foolery.
Wow was a success because it was able to pull into the massive multiplayer genre a lot of people that had not tried it before, while mixing it with special aesthetics and a popular franchise. But it was full of problems, including lot of unfun and tedious grinding, bad pvp, specs and even classes that were not viable (I am not saying “not as good as other ones”, but directly unplayable) or playing requiring too much preparation and grinding and little actual playing. Plus no real reason to visit the world beyond the raid you were challenging-
Mechanics are better, a lot of the unnecessary grinding has disappeared, etc. Yeah, Blizzard has made lots of mistakes, but trying to say that Vanilla was a"timeless game" (hint, in a technology based enviroment like computer games there are not timeless games) is just a lie: Vanilla without TBC would have died in little to no time.
(Offtopic: Ill go with star wars prequels over original/sequels any time … its not about being “original” its about being good, only reason I hope classic will be success is to make blizz think: “hmmm maybe wotlk server can bring even more cash”)
Blizzards secret weapon is actually china, soon WoW and many other games (already happend to hearthstone) will censor things to suit the laws of china in hoping for more money from them.
The fact that the game was imbalanced made it fun. You could deck out a lvl 8 paladin with max level enchants and go ham on the orc questing areas, no one could even stop you. Today you have 3 major problems preventing you from doing that.
Everyone has heirlooms, you can’t use those high level enchants, besides that, the scaling is messed up.
Anyone can easily jump in on the action on their main with a flying mount, which back in the day you would need to travel far on a ground mount.
The scarcity of players to gank due to phasing in retail.
The game was a sandbox, it literally took a player 240 hours of playing time just to hit level 60, and that was if you knew what you were doing and leveled efficiently.
Take a look at any of your modern characters, it takes maybe 120 hours to level to 120 (5 days played). And you can sleep through the leveling process on retail.
The reason why vanilla is timeless is because you can level all the classes to 60, which is a ton of fun if you manage to do it. (2160 hours of playing time).
Leveling in vanilla feels way more rewarding than on retail, because it’s engaging and doesn’t just teleport you from instance to instance and pulling 2 mobs at a time can only be accomplished by pet classes early on.
I could go on and on about all the philosophical differences between the modern game and the original.
I’m saying that if I had to choose one game to play over and over for the rest of my life it would be Classic, you only had 60 levels and you don’t jump from expansion to expansion doing dead content.
Do your raids and m+ on retail, fine, as long as you have your friends and you’re having fun, more power to you. If Blizzard would somehow manage to bring the vanilla philosophy to the modern game, which I believe is impossible, I would play retail as well.