>>509125516they sold out to activision in what, 2008? immediately covered up the fact that an employee leaked EVERYONE'S account info for a payday and THEN instead of reporting it (california sued and won because of this, it's illegal there and that's where HQ was) they released authentication tokens and made $7M on them overall. that story only broke because digitalcastration (some investigative blogger) broke it but they went after him legally with all their corporate lawyers and seized his bank account, his assets, sued him 18 times and he disappeared and nobody ever heard from him again but that did spawn the california lawsuit situation
point is, since activision took over, blizzard has died and will never come back. you can't go back, ever. the world is different, people are different and there is no recreating 2004-2010 wow and since then, activision has been part of everything which is why you can't collect all mounts/pets in-game, some have to be skipped or purchased with cash. it's a different game created by different people and it's inferior to that product
even the classic release was nothing like vanilla, not only was it literally tuned to be about 30% easier overall (like 2.0 pre-patch meant for people to catch up) but they changed so many things to "make them viable" that it just ended up being vanilla through the lens of modern fucked up wow.
wow died in 2010 when they started losing tens of thousands of subs per day, mostly because wotlk brought in casuals who couldn't handle cata heroics having mechanics you couldn't ignore, but also because the game had peaked and was dying. 12M people with maybe 1M being competent wow players. now competent wow players who still want wow just use non-retail methods, whether it's hardcore classic or just repacks/private servers
people playing now need validation so they pretend it's not garbage but they have a one button rotation now, come on. a literal PRESS ONE BUTTON WHEN THE SCREEN SAYS rotation.