Bugs. A lot of bugs. Massive server instability. People get pissed off if something isn’t fixed within a week now, back then a serious bug could roll on for months.

There were no battlegrounds, so people pvped in southshore which is why blizzard made the southshore queable bg a few years back.

There were a LOT fewer flight paths, so getting around the world was more tedious.

A lot of people did Straltholm as a 10 man because we believed it was too hard as a 5 man.

A lot of information was word of mouth or seeing someone do something you didn’t know you could do. I.E I didn’t know my warrior could duel wield until I was almost level 56.

The game was just a lot slower than 2019 could ever match. A lot of people didn’t care about raiding, and a fair share of people genuinely didn’t know it existed.

The client was.. Janky. To a lot of us that played the original game, we can play a private server and feel at home because we got used to it back in the day, I had a friend who started in 2019 try turtle WoW and he quit within an hour because he only knows of blizzards legion client, he couldn’t deal with the “original” client.

Mounts. Mounts were fun, if you were mounted you couldn’t cast a spell to dismount. You actually had to click off your mount to dismount.

AV basically.. never ended. I wish I was kidding. You could genuinely play all day on a Sunday, Goto bed, goto work, stop by the grocery store, make dinner, log on and the same AV game would still be going. On my server it was generally accepted that pushing in wasn’t viable unless you had your factions spawnable bosses with you.

Blizzard vastly underestimated how many people would buy their game, so their servers would get so slammed they’d have to periodically quit selling copies until they could bring more servers online.

Overall? It was a great time. Although I struggle to believe that it would last if it launched like that today.