WoW's coming on 20 years old soon, believe it or not. In that time, dozens of teams, official and pirate, have tried to improve on it, and all of them fell for the same trap: trying to build on the endgame, max level, external-grouping experience. modern retail wow is built entirely around doing your Content tasks for the week, to prepare for doing your content for next week, ad infinitum. most pirate vanilla+, wrath+, etc servers tried to add raids, or expand on arena mode, or focus on WPvP balance, and all of them petered out before Activision even bothered to send the lawyers knocking. only the Turtle team (and probably someone with an RO server) have understood the true soul of the MMO: hanging out with a bunch of computer weirdos while leveling though an RPG at your own pace, phasing in and out of adhoc overworld groups with a mechanically distinct character (a concept that doesn't even exist in Runescape or XIV). people on here don't powerlevel, they play, specifically because of the approach the team took to balance, faction mechanics, professions, the hardcore mode, etc etc. it's great! even Blizz is cribbing their ideas now, with official challenge modes in Classic, and now a misguided attempt at "rebalanced," funserver-y mid-level content with Season of Discovery. but there is a reason TWoW's cities are full of people playing the game, where Classic's cities are full of identical max level, fully geared characters sitting around, hoping someone walks by and thinks they're cool.

This is the only good theme park MMO there's ever been. I will cry when it dies.