In my opinion the core issues that were prevalent during the beta weren’t fully addressed.
Something that’s important was identity building within the game and while there are ‘factions’ they all experience the exact same mobs and progression. WoW whether you love it or hate it, gave a varied progression with a strong identity from the get go (each race within a faction with its own struggles).
Wow has a long, varied, and continuing history of major bugs, glitches, and oversights of significant consequence. NW may not be a WoW killer but it’s hardly alone in being buggy and exploitable.
What’s the totem stacking bug? Would you consider it on par with granting e.g. invincibility?
Oh yeah. We had a bunch of threads about it before and during release. lol
I suppose the better question is: “Did anyone sincerely say that New World was going to kill WoW?”
Right… in 2005 we were still having to write each other letters and send them by carrier pidgeon to our friends. I’m kidding with you of course , but near instant knowledge of such things was not at all far from todays standards.
The game is new, it has problems. It isn’t even going to compare until they ironed everything out. WoW had the same problem but was the only major MMO of its time when it first released when you got like New World among many other notable titles now. Its definitely going to take a LOT more and a longer time to be a “Killer” in this current game climate of MMOs.
GD’s memory resets with server restarts.
Many concern threads over it and probably just as many troll threads. So it was a mixed bag. Most got deleted.
This is probably true. The difference is that WoW continued to rapidly grow with those bugs…while New World is quickly crashing.
But as you pointed out, the time period was probably the key to WoW’s success.
OP must not follow wow news.
In Legion, there was a WQ you could repeat infinitely for endless artifact power.
Just last month when TBC Phase 2 dropped, there was a bug where you could get endless free flasks.
Blizzard naturally banned the exploiters, but it still happened.
The thing that surprises me most is that people genuinely didn’t see it coming that new world would be meh them not get traction after the initial buzz. That surprises me more than new world being bad
i believe you could dupe in WoW LONG… ago. we also had gold exploits as well i believe WoD garrison was one of them thus it got nerfed but was too late.
It allowed for players to essentially have infinite stats, so yes I would.
The possibility existed but had not been realized. The expectation of using the internet to gain knowledge about every aspect of the game didn’t really exist for most players back then. We saw this shift in philosophy/mentality play out in real time when Classic released.
New world is trash. Their lack of a clear direction with the game ruined it.
Wow players: don’t take youtube as gospel
Also wow ayers: look as this youtube video about another game!
Flasks and AP? Sorry but that’s hilarious if you think that’s comparable. Now this totem stacking bug I’ve just been informed about. That’s something.
You can keep the flasks. I’ll take the invincibility 
WoD garrison wasn’t really an exploit. That was just a terribly designed system that could spew out far too much gold for no effort. That was created in a world where someone only viewed it from the perspective of playing a character.
One garrison wasn’t bad.
They just neglected to factor in people play alts. And those alts could fundamentally print money for nothing and only required logging on, clearing out the table, starting up new missions, logging off. And could be done in a minute or two.
I worked on some smaller scale games and ran into this from some “designer’s” system once. I should have checked their design, but didn’t until later. They built a system designed around how they expected players to interact with it. They didn’t bother to think what players could do at the extreme. And when you design a system you have to think of that. Not just how you expect players to use it. But look at what they could do with it if they tried.
We were a small company with a handful of people. Mistakes happen. I had to nerf the drop rates to heck and back.
Blizzard is not a small company. Blizzard most certainly should have known better and looked at what you could do with garrisons. Especially when some people started having 20-50 of them running and flooding gold into the economy.
Just following the scope you defined in the OP. Those are just 2 examples i remember off the top of my head. Feel free to search for yourself.
It’s like playing Diablo I then.