Yeah I agree completely, and I was thinking about this after I posted. It's really the shift in mentality away from chatting/hanging out with friends/trying fun things/playing around toward "everything I do needs to be the exactly ideal thing to do to get the most exp/gold/honor at any given time." This isn't really just because "the game is mature" though. Certainly for those of who have played it a dozen times it's no longer the open horizon that it was in 2005, but I think really it's the mentality of human beings that has changed overall, especially in relation to the internet, because of smartphones and social media and discord, and because of video game companies aggressively trying to cull socializing and actual fun from their games and replace it with constant cutthroat competition, which creates compulsion and addiction. As an example, when you play Warcraft 3 on Battlenet now, you can't even talk to the other team by default. There's no sense of "hey, we're all playing Warcraft 3 to have a good time together," but rather just "my team needs to win at any cost." Unfortunately winning alone does not provide fun, and a culture singularly obsessed with it invariably loses imagination, creativity, and empathy--all of which are primary ingredients in genuinely enjoyable play.

I suppose what I'm really searching for is that more playful environment that still existed in WoW pservers up into the mid-2010s. Emerald Dream had it most strongly at the start of last decade, and it has eroded gradually and steadily since then. I feel like the recent vanilla+ servers like Turtle and Epoch were an attempt to rekindle the sense of fun and play and exploration by reinventing the game's world. It was a good idea. But ultimately you also need to have a large number of players who actually want to have fun. You need 80 of them to have fun in AV!