Vanilla/Classic didn’t have shared mob tagging for quests, among other things. It was infinitely more open for misbehaviour (as the OP seems to define it) than retail.
And yet…
People are the deciding factor in decency or toxicity. The devs could never design a game in which toxicity was impossible. Even a multiplayer Sims would be rank with toxicity. Blaming your crappy behaviour on the devs (and your appalling driving behaviour on “if there were better roads we wouldn’t have traffic jams!) is childish and betrays the fact that you lack a basic understanding of how these things work.
With that being said the problem in this thread is that the OP is conflating the issues of people behaving badly—ninja looting, mob mass farming, “roadside riding”, whatever that is—with the issue of removing emotes. Those things are not in any way related and acting like they are (by the devs or the OP) is either ignorant or dishonest.
I’ve played WoW for, what, seventeen years or something since release? And I’ve never ninja looted. I’ve been driving for almost twenty years and I’ve never used an off-ramp to jump past a traffic jam. Emotes have been in the game since beta and they’ve never been a problem before. When there’s a problem is because people are being wankers, but in the case of emotes there isn’t a problem. The devs have just made them into one.
I respect your opinion, @MoanaLisa, but I think you’re missing the forest for the trees here. I don’t mass murder tens or hundreds of <Insert Opposing Army> in order to carry a flag across a valley in real life, and certainly shouldn’t, but I do it sometimes three or four times a day in-game. I’ve played on the same PvP server since WoW came out and hating the opposing faction has been a core part of the game basically since day dot. Spitting on the enemy and their corpses—hunting down your enemies in Ashenvale and slaughtering them (but not camping the body)—isn’t some kind of perverse behaviour in a game constructed around a fictional inveterate tribal hatred. It’s not toxic either, it’s just the game we’ve chosen to play and the side we chose to pick. I’ve bought Horde players beers before when we’ve bumped into each other, but when I get an orc shaman on the ground I’m spitting on his corpse.Spitting on other people has always been offensive and I've never understood what sort of 12-year old mind put it in the game to start with. It was offensive before there was a shop. It's been offensive afterward. You don't spit on people in real life—at least I fucking hope not—so you shouldn't do it in a game.