What newcomers have to understand is that Classic is a 15 year old game. It was THE FIRST big mmorpg, so it was the first big amazing experience for millions of players.
After Vanilla ended and people could no longer play it all they had of it were memories. With expansions passing, these memories turned brighter and brighter, because no matter what the new expansions brought, it was never THAT FIRST mmo experience.
15 years have passed and all people had of Classic until now were childhood memories and awesome first impression stories read on the internet. Praising Classic and the good old times became a very strong trend. Many people aren’t capable of understanding that the first good game you try out in a genre isn’t necessary better than the 100th one, it’s just a much more amazing experience because it’s totally fresh for you. It won’t be better for all the newcomers to the genre.
What you should understand is that the vast majority of people aren’t objective or responsible when it comes to new players. Praising Classic and hating Current wow became the cool thing to do, it generates reddit karma, forum upvotes, youtube views, etc. It became a strong trend, and with time people actually believed their delusions. They stopped seeing cool first time experience stories, they started seeing a game forged in heaven programmed by gods, supported by angels. Note that during that time the only option to try it out were garage project private servers, so people just kept dreaming without actually trying it out.
Now that Classic is out you can definitely see the hype falling down, because from now on people can see that it’s a dated 15 year old version of wow with barely any end game content, the leveling is more tedious than ever, there are no cool reworked quests, only the archaic, unimaginative “kill 20 loot 20 gather 20” quests that worked back then, the game is not challenging as promised, people were simply super bad at the game back then. People have leveled to max and killed all the raid bosses without a full raid, without even all of them being max level players. People were also in lowlevel gear. They did it within 5 days of Classic’s launch.
The praised big social experience is hit and miss, but people expect it on Classic so it has a bit higher chance to occur there. Again, that’s thanks to the mentality and expectations of the people, not because of the game. It has lots of player-harassing old game mechanics that don’t really serve any enjoyment purpose, they were just the trend 15 years ago.
TL DR:
Current WoW will always be the most refined version of WoW, it’ll always be the best for totally newcomers to WoW, you wouldn’t play GTA 1 instead of GTA 5, same thing applies to WoW. It has 100 times the content, 100 times the features. It remained the top 1 mmorpg for 15 years for a good reason.
Don’t bury modern wow based on what you hear about it from the deluded fans of a 15 year old game, in which community Rule #1 is basically to Hate modern WoW. They often nitpick very hard to find stuff they can spit on, and dismiss literally everything else that doesn’t support their agenda. Try them both out and choose yourself. Never trust the media before you give time for the hype to die down.
Nobody, just a random guild that had enough players at or close to 60 to form a 30+ ppl raid and they killed him. I mean they prolly prepared for it, I dont wanna take credit away from them, perfected leveling routes, grinded XP and got enough players to do the raid.
I don’t know about retail so I’m not comparing, I haven’t played retail and I will keep it that way because of how Cata ruined the old world and streamlined the leveling process, making it feel overdesigned and very game-y.