I played WoW for quite a while; i'm one of those who leveled their 1st character over the course of 2 months back in vanilla.
That was quite a different experience. Albeit it had a few similar stops along the way it didn't suffer from hard-brakes like most gatchas do.
I know that... i've actually rerolled when i got it to work, but then i realized i consider an hour of my life worth more than the 3.54eur i ended up paying for a razor/diluc account in the end...