Right after BC.
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How has it changed since Vanilla?
Elite mobs?
Atunement quests?
The “World Dragons” and other “open world” raids?
Vanilla had a bunch of one shot quests and that was it. It ran out very quickly (as witnessed by those who felt they had to grind their last levels rather than continue questing).
Other than that, you were stuck in IF spamming for groups, unless you were out farming (which is no different from today).
Vanilla certainly had an allure with these world raid areas, (elite demons in Winterspring, elite demons in Blasted Lands, Seradane). Basically areas you could not explore on your own.
But the only difference between that and a raid is that they’re open world and not instanced, and that’s a minor distinction. You can readily zone in to a raid and look around if you want. These areas were typically empty anyway, and what we learned was that open air raids kind of sucked because of the griefing that could happen.
All of that Classic stuff that made the world “dangerous” is exactly what everyone is whining about in the Maw. Elites beating on you, training packs you can get away from, patrols from “nowhere”, plus the fun with Eye of the Jailor.
Same with Argus. Argus early on was really dangerous to low equipped characters. Lots of mobs, lots of elites, lots of things you could accidentally pull and get killed.
But the masses don’t want challenging solo world content. They want to teleport to the glittering box, loot it, aggro the 10 kills required for the quest, and AOE them down in 5 seconds, then teleport to the next glittering box.
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WoD was one of my favorite expacs. I loved the raids, the world content and the garrison.
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The more I converse with others, the more I see how much they dislike world content, questing, and so on, and just look forward to more raids, dungeons etc…
I do agree WoW would benefit from actually have a friggin WORLD to participate in and do fun things in BUT this game has been an instance lobby game ever since you could queue for things or well since like the first few expansions when people would sit around in the city hubs advertising for a group to run something.
Blizzard is great doing raids/dungeons.
Everything else, open world wise is poop.
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yup.
Been saying this same thing for a while now.
STUN-ROOT-SLOW isnt fun. It isnt challenging. Its just annoying and time wasting and shows ZERO creativity.
If it were my game, Id do funny crap like Trap door spiders dragging players down into their hole lol. Not just putting SLOW-ROOT-STUN on every stinking thing in the game and calling that ‘content’.
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It never did. What do you mean by “lobby game”? The world still exists, despite being easy. Infact, i thought the world is pretty good in retail. Not amazing, but certainly incentivizes me to explore and say hi to people and such. 
Fun is subjective. Some people find the easy difficulty fun.
Again, Fun is subjective. Just because their having fun with something you dislike, doesn’t mean their wrong for doing it.
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Your missing a key point here - you never qued and got teleported to the dungeon/raid in Classic-Early Wrath
It really started with TBC.
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Instead, they chose the path of least resistance. They absolutely could have really made those areas their crowning achievements. Another missed opportunity there, indeed!
It’s been like that since The Burning Crusade. There was a small renaissance of open-world content with Legion’s implementation of world quests but Blizzard made a change to discourage grouping up.
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Wait, that’s what this is about? LFD?
Even though the vast bulk of the group interaction today is in M+, since normals and heroics offer little in terms of reward. Normals and heroics which are, essentially, “passover” content. M+ which foregoes the queue and teleporting system. M+ which the forums cry out to HAVE an LFD system?
That M+?
The LFD impact is much smaller than it was before. Calling this a “lobby” game because of normals and heroics and LFR seems a bit of a stretch.
And, most folks it seems are our questing and in the world while waiting for these systems, since if they’re running normals and heroics, there’s still leveling and likely have a boatload of world stuff to do (renown, callings, covenant quests, the maw, etc.).
Vs folks stuck in town spamming REFRESH on the M+ group finder.
In fact, the LACK of a queue prevents players from being in the world and playing since they have to actively try to get in to groups rather than passively being assigned one, thus they can’t easily “go about their business”, but have to sit wherever they’re sitting managing group finder.
So, maybe it is a lobby game, but it’s got a REALLY BIG lobby.
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remember the screams of rage when nazjatar was released?
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It started in this expansion called “World of Warcraft”.
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Danger can’t take the place of convenience As with all things Blizzard does they have to land in some perfect middle ground
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I’m trying to imagine where convenient danger can work in the open world.
See, if the world were MORE dangerous, we’d be accustomed to just not having our way with it and staying away from dangerous areas, sticking to roads, etc. (anyone else try stepping in to the Western Plaguelands with their Level 10 Undead character from Tirisfal back in the day? “Whats in here” kind of thing? Bet you never did that twice after the bear or spider ate you.)
But since the world is far less dangerous than it could be, we take it for granted.
The Maw, especially early on, you can not take for granted. It will punish you if you do.
Nah, striving for “the middle ground” was what gave us the terribly boring 9.0 Maw in the first place. The Maw was supposed to be more dangerous, outright hostile to bad players who would be beaten mercilessly, it was supposed to be "Dark Souls, but WoW’, but the content was nerfed and the Eye of the Jailer was changed from a progressive difficulty scaling system to simply being a glorified time-gate.
Nobody is happy with “the middle”. 9.0 Torghast is “the middle” version of Torghast, 9.0 Maw is “the middle” version of the Maw. The middle is the worst place to be. Go big or go home. Do something bold and ambitious or don’t do it at all.
WoW had some of its best times when the creators had their own vision of the game and simply made the game they thought would be the best version of it, rather than metrics-driven compromises.
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At end game. The original leveling up experience was a true open world experience. Even the dungeons you did you tended to do just because you stumbled across them with your group.
Difficult to recapture that. When people leveled up an alt, their knowledge of the game alone began to turn it more into a lobby game.
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It can work anywhere, just don’t try to take peoples mounts away 
I would guess more people would avoid the maw if it were that original version.
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And in my mnid that’d be perfectly fine. I think it’d be better if people focused on content they enjoyed rather than engaging with content they can stomach.
Instead the Maw is just a big ol’ nothing burger. No real rewards to speak of - some very minor gem sockets and that’s about it, because the content is so nerfed that Blizzard can’t justify giving proper rewards (because only challenging content is meant to offer meaningful rewards).
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I don’t hate it because it’s difficult, though; I hate it because the Eye of the Jailer means the best way to play is to not engage with any of the difficult mobs if you can avoid them. And I am not playing this game to NOT kill things, thanks.
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