i joined when WOTLK had pretty much just came out. i don't know how it compared to TBC or vanilla but i enjoyed it quite a lot, northrend was the most fun place to level by far imo. i have no idea how the endgame compares to other expansions because i've only ever had a top end character in wotlk, but i thought it was pretty fun (especially ulduar) until our servers merged with another and gearscore took over and made it pretty much impossible for me to get a PUG (my once active guild was kinda dying a bit). i got bored pretty soon afterwards, like many others.
i tried cataclysm about a year later and thought the leveling was also very good there, northrend standard kind of thing, but it was only a 7 days trial and i couldn't be arsed paying for it again
ended up on a WOTLK private server now, been on it for about 2 weeks or so mabye, its just about as populated as an official server and dosen't have too many bugs. fun stuff, it's made me neglect elma for a few days
As far as leveling goes northrend wasnt bad, but i powerleveled that in around ~1 day and never looked back. From my perspective it wasnt even a mentionable part of the "wotlk experience" for me. I was just out for endgame raiding.
Before wotlk there was no such thing as pugs, it was virtually impossible to go with full randoms even if they had some knowledge of the instance in question. First you needed attunements, meaning you had to go through all raiding instances completing objectives before even being able to enter a higher instance. This way when recruiting for your guild it was rather easy to spot if he, sometimes she, would be a good addition. Only late tbc when everyone had imba gear and the nerfs started to come and attunements was removed could you invite randoms.
But im only looking at this from the point of view as a raidleader, i can totally understand if ppl enjoyed pvp and questing and stuff like that and just normal raiding in a more lighthearted manner wanting to live and explore all aspects of the game. I just saw nuisances with pugs and people being easely boosted that way in gear and managed to squeeze into top tier guilds. Only after numerous raids did u start to see which people that were actually not that dedicated or experienced and got tired of whiping a lot / only showing up for "farm" nights before reaching the progress bosses later in the week. Resulting in kicking and going back to recruiting over and over.
