Expansion packs destroy RPGs. No game shows this more than WoW. Their new content is right for their current audience, but back in the day, they dropped a bomb with every expansion. I am sure that, after Cataclysm, no one with any artistic appreciation at all hung around, but before that they did everything in their power to ruin the game; from destroying every established guild in the game with the first expansion, to requiring people to "farm" "PvP gear" to compete in what used to be a fun and integral activity in which anyone could participate. I, a high warlord, had to stoop to "farming battlegrounds", and at the start got a green dagger to replace my epic that took weeks of 20 hour days to get. That was the start of the Monty Hall-style loot in the game, with epics dropping in 5-man dungeons (and free greens replacing 40-man epics). Luckily I cashed in to the tune of $1000 before the expansion hit. These days a max level character won't sell for a tenth of that, if they don't give them out for free! Talk about deflation! I will let the modern expansions, from what I have read, slide, since it is clear they are not vying for my dollar any more.
I also did the HWL grind in Vanilla, but I have to say it was a lot more bearable because there was no cross realm BG queuing
I never really cared for battlegrounds too much but I did have some of the best fun I've had in an MMO with world PvP in vanilla. The guild that I was in at the time used to have a sort of a rival guild on the Alliance side who we liked to fuck with. We even had an undercover agent on their side at one point. We had evenings reserved now and then to specifically annoy them en masse. We knew their raiding schedule, so for example one night we went to Onyxia's entrance in advance to gank them. After a while they then decided to change to MC, but our agent tipped us off of the change and we got there before they did. We then proceeded to gank them while they were trying to get from Thorium Point all the way to the MC entrance. In the end we'd wasted so much of their time they decided to cancel their raiding plans. Fun times.
Stacking up on Savory Deviate Delights and capturing Alliance boats while transformed into a pirate was pretty fun too.
The original death stroke to opvp was Blizzard doing an U-Turn of historical proportions mid-development that doomed an entire genre for decades, because a certain designer was a massive faggot. Never forget, never forgive.Original death stroke was the introduction of BGs.