It has been the same in 16 years, but, what haven’t been the same is the amount of character combination possibilities and the leveling speed.
In 2004 we had 8 races to play, today we have 23, quite the improvement, but the character limit haven’t seen any increase.
In 2004 we had 9 classes to chose from, today we have 12, another expansion in character possibilities, but how many characters you can create is still capped at 50.
The leveling speed is times faster than it was in 2004, meaning you can create and level characters much faster, unfortunately you gotta be careful not to pass that same old limit.
Even character customization have seen an improvement, if you wanna try out the new looks on new chars be careful you don’t hit that old wall.
Please consider raising the cap, i’m sure Blizzard have the technology to store allocate more characters per account without issues. Some people may say that “there’s no way you will use and play more than 50 characters” and i used to agree with that idea, but nowadays, after having to switch to different realm a couple of months ago, i had to level characters from all classes on that realm again in order to have a vast pool of classes to choose from to play in SL, and if i ever switch realm again, i will be dangerously close to that limit.