I played World of Warcraft from late 2006 through Castle Nathria in Shadowlands. I am attempting to come back, and wanted to start with a clean slate on an entirely new account. I forgot, however, that Chromie is disabled for new accounts. All new players are forced to level up through the Battle for Azeroth zones & dungeons. This may be okay for some, but I really didn’t enjoy these zones or the expansion as a whole. I have a few questions:
- Why did Blizzard decide to limit a new player’s choices?
- Is there any way around this (Ie. selecting the race’s original starting zone as opposed to Exile’s Reach)?
And a bit off topic, but–
- Is it still possible to play the “retail” version of World of Warcraft as a traditional role-playing game? Should I just bite the bullet and move backwards into Vanilla Era servers?
- Are there any actual social guilds in the current version that don’t push raiding? All I see on the guild recruitment forums are “Seeking (x) for progression.”
If you are a part of one of these guilds or know of one, please link your website or discord. It would be awesome to join a Dad guild where I can relax and socialize. I will make my new character on your realm. My goal is to take my time with the game, do old content, etc.
Thank you in advance. 
1 — It’s because the amount of content currently in game can be overwhelming to a new player, so they want to be able to focus them for their first character.
2 — I’ve seen some people say that creating a trial character will satisfy the requirements to unlock Chromie Time, so that’s the first thing to try. Without Chromie Time, you can probably get to 50 pretty easily in Legion. You’d still need to pop into Shadowlands or BfA at that point if you didn’t want to do a million quests to get to 60.
3 — Without knowing what you mean by traditional role-playing game, this question is pretty hard to answer. What traits are you specifically looking for?
4 — In my experience, most social guilds don’t recruit on the forums. Watch trade chat in game or use the guild finder tool to search for social-focused guilds.
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The rest of the game is still there, it just funnels you into BFA as a streamlined experience. You can choose to ignore those quests and figure out your own path using the traditional methods. Keep in mind you’ll just need to pay attention to the level ranges of the zones you’re playing in and move around accordingly, and you will still need to level in BFA from 45-50 as that’s the natural progression of the game. It also won’t be as fast if that matters to you at all, and will likely be a more lonely experience as most people leveling will either be in BFA, chromie time, or dungeons.
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