So there we were.
Cenotaph and Ombria, the wife’s and mine Deathknights, in the Bone Wastes, at Auchindoun, looking at a quest giver.
The only living beings we’d come across were a Forsaken and another Blood Elf Death Knight.
There was a Gnome Mage out fighting spiders in the lost corner, but they don’t really count as full living beings, do they?
Anyway, we’d just collected some bone piles for some mad Draenei standing near the entrance to an instance, and there was the shimmering portal. I forget which instance he actually stands in front of. Shadow Labyrinth required a key, so that was out. Maybe the Auchenai Crypts.
The point being is nobody new is going to see those places, and that’s sad.
All that effort gone into designing places, and they’re left behind, in the virtual dust bowl that the Outlands have become, serving only as a pass through location to get 10 levels while you cruise to the end-game back on the world of Azeroth in Northrend.
Kinless Chronicles 
Agreed. The same applies to the instances and endgame material in ‘vanilla’ WoW. Heck, there’s NPCs that don’t even have a use now (Helloooo, Windsor!) but are still lurking in the deep places of the world.
Blizzard reminds me of that Star Trek parody song I once heard: “Boldly going forward ’cause we cannot find Reverse!”
(that line itself means less these days with fewer oddball manual transmission shifting pattern standards, but /c’este la vie!/ as they say on my planet.)
Point being, Blizz isn’t so hot when it comes to the long view. They seem to be afraid of planning for success or something. “No, we can’t assume that people will keep playing this game through even ONE expansion, much less two!”
Blizzard has accepted the fact that things move forward. They haven’t gone and completely removed the old content, it’s still there for people to experience. But it’s just a fact of life that it won’t ever be quite the same as it was when it was all the rage – same goes for any fad or popular culture item. They were great for what they were, but people move forward onto the next big thing.
At least the content is still there for those who want to explore it – I’d be much less happy if Blizzard had instead created a whole new game rather than releasing expansions, since then no one at all would get to see the old content!
If only they’d consider making new use out of the old content. Just like they did with Naxxramas.
Few got to see it the first time around. My guild was in BWL, and I’d departed the country and stopped raiding before they got close to clearing BWL, much less entering Naxxramas. This time around I got to see a lot more of it, I think, before I stopped raiding again. (If there’s a dragon in Naxxramas then that was the quarter I didn’t get to.)
Westfall, for example, would be a great location for new content in an old zone.
Those folks in Northrend know the Westfall Brigade has been stationed up in Northrend. So who’s minding the shop in Westfall now?
Why not do this: Remove the Brigade from Westfall. Send in some reserve cadre to keep the peace. Have the Defias take more control of the zone, including the tower and the Inn. Retreat the flight point back to that farmer with the wife, wagon, and horse. Make the Deadmines a non-instance, and set up some quests to go in there and root out the Defias leadership. (Much like we do in Stranglethorn in the non-instanced caves that belong to Kurzen.)
We know Van Cleef is dead. Maybe his successor is having a real bad hair day and Westfall is suffering. Now you’ve got an old zone, and an old instance, put to new use with new quests, and making the Deadmines non-instanced, inviting for solo play.
An easy expansion to the current content, at the level that would please folks leveling up, would be to make some of the oldest instances non-instances and fill them with quests and quest destinations.
@Kinless – even better, they have this phasing thing, so the Westfall story could be more progressive. As a lowbie you see things one thing, and after you arrive at the Brigade’s site in GH, they no longer appear in WF. Maybe the King got the message and sent a garrison. Phase 1, VC is still a problem. Phase 2, he’s gone and … something happens, who knows? Maybe the Nagas.
@Brajana this also bears on what you’re saying. It’s not that people want new content in old places, so much, but that failure to change the world logically leads to loss of immersion. It’s such a nice game, but it could be nicer and more interesting in so many ways.
Well I think it is all relative. I know that I started playing my first toon about a month after BC was released so I missed out on all of the Vanilla wow end game content but you know what? I didn’t know what I was missing. Heck for the most part I still don’t. Revamping Westfall really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If you hadn’t played through it in its current form then you wouldn’t understand the new version.
All the old content is still there. Before WotLK you could go back and do Naxx 60 man though no one ever really did. You don’t see a whole lot of Sunwell groups either. There will still be the new person who explores or is told of these dungeons but for the most part they don’t know what they are missing. Heck my first character skipped the bone wastes entirely while leveling. When I was 64 I thought Mana Tombs was a lvl 70 instance so I never even touched Auch instances till I was 70.
Revamping Old content doesn’t help new players it only serves those who are rerolling and are bored of the same old content while leveling because the new players simply don’t know what they are missing. If people are missing out on some of the content because they are currently in instance form more then likely those same people are going to miss out on the content if it is quest form as well.
I mean does anyone even go to Netherstorm anymore???