- The world is LARGER due to the difficulty of obtaining a mount and there being no flying and you having to experience most of it while leveling. You actually see people out in the world and have to cooperate with them, the enemy faction as well. In the current WoW, world pvp is kind of nonexistent, it's all instanced. The two original continents in WoW are actually larger than what has been added in expansions. There's no flying and less flightpoints compared to the current version of the game, so the world just feels more daunting overall.
- The endgame difficulty of Classic is a joke compared to the hardest content in modern WoW, but the difficulty is more evenly spaced out. Leveling is PART of the game and is challenging. It's also rewarding and the character progression aspect is more satisfying due to no Diablo-style loot with random stats that results in an seemingly endless grind that only exists to keep people subscribed. In modern WoW leveling is mostly an obstacle to get people to the endgame and is too brief of an experience. Outside of story-telling opportunities is provides, it doesn't offer much.
- The server community is constant, due to there being no cross-server play. You meet people out in the world and can see them several days down the line. People have reputations for being good/nice players, or being griefing shitheads. The modern game is too impersonal, with very few reasons to be social and create relationships in-game.
Yeah, we're nearing the mid 40s, which is considered the true halfway point of leveling as far as XP goes. We'll also likely run out of quests to do towards the upper 50s too... just vanilla things, I guess.
I don't think Blizzard knows how to balance OW, or much of anything. They're too slow to act. I understand your point in it making the game to narrow though, and that was something I sort of worried about. I supposed 3-3 was never super popular outside of OWL and High SR games anyways... but I guess they care about it being boring to watch for people in OWL. I will say that I think 2-2-2 lock should make the game easier to balance though. That way we don't see Tanks and Healers nerfed due to OWL 3-3 play while 95% of the playerbase plays in games where Tanks can't protect shit since they die in a blink of an eye.
Yeah I guess you might be right about what you mentioned. Like I said, my experience with it was only a couple days and it wasn't really worse than it was beforehand. I guess there are positives and negatives to both versions of the game perhaps. Hopefully there can be further improvements to it to make it feel less constricting... or a newer, more interesting pvp game comes out.