It was very cool and wonderous to actually see all of the places that you had read about and fought over in the RTS games for a decade. Theres a vast history there. And the first 3 expansions of WoW were more-or-less about finishing that story, so everything had the gravitas of the past 10-15 years of story behind it.
While I can imagine how cool that would be, I think a pretty small subset of WoW players brought backstory knowledge. I never played any of the previous Warcraft games before I got into WoW in 2.3. With 10+ million subscribers at its peak, I figure a large proportion of players landed in WoW with the same impression -- the "good god, this place stretches on to forever" feeling of how truly big the world felt. That's why a video like this hits so hard in the feels:
(credit to whoever posted that here before)
40 minutes to traverse a fraction of the world? Mother of God, that's big. And old timers can tell where the runner was 80% of the time by the sound alone....that's a (for the time) immersive world.
But here's the thing about twinking...
Sadly: we're all way past that point in WoW, and our "discoveries" amount to a needle in a hay stack, a needle no one else was looking for. Our twinking discovering may mean a lot more to us than anything else in the game might mean to a leveler, but that's only because we're more likely to be stuck with results of that discovery.
...twinking encourages discovery of a lot of old content to get those needles in the haystacks. Sure, nobody cares about twink gear except twinks, but twink pursuits impact other areas of the game for the same reason that transmogs, battle pets, mounts, etc. encourage discovery of old content. The more brackets in which we play, the more those opportunities come to light. We all can wax poetic about the things we did over the years that we otherwise never would have even attempted, if it hadn't been for twinking. Every single expansion brought interesting changes to every bracket. Rather than go on about that, I'll take a moment to talk about the missed opportunities in Shadowlands in dead brackets.
Dismissing for a moment the critical need to nerf grandfathered riding, the 19 bracket would have allowed us to use our 20 gear unscaled. Between that and removing a bunch of abilities gained at level 20, I think the 19 bracket would have made for interesting, high-intensity PvP. If 29s had become a thing, most other classes would gain abilities to stand on better ground against hunters. Beyond Siege of Orgrimmar, 39s occasionally ran a couple of additional MoP raids to get BiS pieces, plus they soloed TBC heroic dungeons until gems got nerfed, and cherry-picked some TBC dungeon pieces. 49s did every last daggone quest Shadowlands had to offer to gain faction rep until rep gear got a level requirement, and even now, 49s would navigate a strange mix of Shadowlands plus all previous bracket content to get their gear.
While a lot of changes happened in Shadowlands compared to other expansions, each expansion still saw twinks making an impact in WoW thanks to our niche pursuits. For Shadowlands, I spent hours farming in areas I never saw before, across four different expansions. Maybe my long break skews my view, and for sure WoW doesn't bring me the initial awe that it used to, but I loved delving into the systemic idiosyncrasies of WoW all over again.
We left behind a lot of what WoW used to be, and some of that is a loss. But we also outgrew WoW as it was, and I'm glad WoW moved forward, warts and all. Ask me again when they release classic Wrath, and we'll see how I feel.
When I get to 10 years that is.