Today, someone starting up WoW would be thrown into the mix of their starting area, then they are thrown into the latest "leveling xpac" for new people (BFA, today).
There's a lot going on, a lot that has happened, and a lot they wouldn't really understand in terms of "what to do" and "who are these people and why do I care about them".
Even returning people who took an xpac or more off may wonder why they have to choose a leveling path and what Chromie Time even is or why it's relevant, let alone what's happened in the last couple of expansions that's now sending us to the afterlife (something just about no one saw coming as a possible expansion theme when WoD launched, for example).
To alleviate this, WoW should add to the Adventurer's Journal a 'History of WoW' section.
In this section, they would have each expansion broken out by major events (by Tier/Patch, for example) and explain the history of the game, covering all major narrative arcs, what caused them, and where they led.
From Vanilla and talking about why Ragnaros and Nefarian were important, what they did, who the black dragonflight is, then moving on to the Gates of AQ, and ending with Naxx and who KT is/was.
Move on to BC, through the rest of the expansions until you get to the latest expansion.
In this guide, it would have written narratives to read, image slideshows to depict important/key locations, and even some short videos to tie in any in-game cinematics (or just new ones where they were lacking) to give a new person an optional, yet fairly comprehensive lookback of the last 18 years and what's gone down so they can have some semblance of an understanding of what happened and why they are where they are.
Think of it like a "catch up mechanic" for narrative, if you will.
We already have a "boss bestiary" of sorts in the journal today with dungeons and raids info, but nothing really tells someone what actually happened that has shaped where they are today.
Even current and/or longtime players could get benefit from it by going back and refreshing on certain arcs.
Sure, we have a lot of sites that do this, like wowpedia and wowwiki, that have a bunch of pages of info, but this would be more focused on each expansion with Blizzard-crafted cutscenes (both ingame and custom made) to really tie it into the game world itself.
It's always kind of felt weird to me that the only way to really catch up on anything that's been going on is to refer to resources that are not part of the actual game itself.
So, to the forum users: Do you think this could be something worthwhile to add to the game?
What else would you add to this 'Previously in WoW' concept to make it better?
Maybe there's a completely different way to implement this kind of feature altogether?