Instead of asking for vanilla servers, let’s make modern wow more like vanilla?
Why was vanilla good?
Vanilla was good because you were forced to interact with your fellow players from your realm to accomplish your goal whichever that was. There were no cross-realm zones, no phasing, no group finder, you only interacted with players from your realm and guess what? you get to know them for better or worse. This created the feeling that you belong to something, a higher power, the realm community.
Another big reason vanilla was good is because you had to work hard to get something, just like in real life. The very first starting experience for mmorpg is levelling and that was long and difficult journey where one additional mob tag could be your life. Making game difficult from the beginning what enabled the community to be more hardcore, you got to start from the roots of mmrpg.
Major aspect of mmorpg gameplay is the good old loot. If loot is easy to acquire it losses the feeling of accomplishment and the uniqueness. Blizzard you must stop feeding into the idea that every player just wants free easy things to do. There are so many ways to gear up your character in legion which just defeats the purpose of character progression; if loot is so easy to acquire, why bother putting in the effort which is the exact mindset of current wow players and blizzard encouraged this type of behaviour which makes it even worse.
I remember a moment where even though it was during the Burning Crusade this still applies to classic wow. When I created an account on Tarren Mill and just wanted to see those players like Buzzkill and kungen with all their tier 6 gear looking like Rockstar’s, and that is because they were. Gear back then mattered and if you had those shiny tier sets and in a top guild you were famous, literally people would follow you and interact with you just because you were good at the game. That feeling does not exist anymore because most players can obtain gear so easily, tier sets don’t matter, it’s just a piece of stats nothing else, the prestige has disappeared.
Vanilla was far from perfect with huge design flaws, but you must admit that if so many players to this day still play in vanilla private servers and numerous threads on reddit/mmo champion requesting Blizzard classic servers even with these huge design flaws and crappy graphics there is definitely some good aspect of vanilla wow that is worth keeping. Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, just stick to what has worked in the past especially considering that looking at the subscriber count started dropping from WoTLK which is where Blizzard introduced multiple raid/dungeon difficulties and started catering for the more casual and instead of encouraging players to be more hardcore!!!!!
Just a side note; if you are going back to classic wow for raiding then you will be very disappointed. Bosses literally had only one mechanic, 2-3 if you’re lucky and it is same for class mechanics (aka mage spamming frostbolt and nothing else) which will get boring very quick, and among many other ridiculous limitations of vanilla raiding. Trust me my fellow nerd’s vanilla raiding is going to make you crazy.