The Attunement requirements for Burning Crusade's 10 Man Raids and higher ruined the end game content.  While the 40 Man Raids were difficult, often requiring Guild Partnerships, attempting to attune 25 people through to the Black Temple was a bad joke.  The preparation Grinds extended some 400 hours for a single run through.  That never existed in Vanilla WoW.
Combined with the shift in focus to Arena Combat that Blizzard implimented, meaning Battlegrounds were now filled with AFK Honour Farmers, meant that both PvP and PvE were left desolate; provide 10 hours a day to Grind to prepare to run the End Game content, or Grind games for Honour to get gear to be attuned to then grind 10 hours a day to prepare to run the End Game content.  The PvP aspect devolved into "lose faster so we play more games of honour" and the PvE aspect devolved into "grind to prepare to grind for reputation to gain access to the grind for attunement so you can grind to prepare to run a dungeon".
Sorry, but vanilla was significantly better than that.

thank god for the requirements... it kept scrubs out and meant people who were good stood out.

Anyway, don't think you can say BC encouraged longer shit.  Opening AQ?  High warlord grind?  Talk about absolutely ridiculous. Onyxia key quest line, UBRS key, having to run scholo just to use an alchemy lab...

Every expansion has made the game easier for casual players.  While that bothered me before I stopped playing.. it's nice now that I'm coming back and don't think I'll have the time to commit that I did before.

And they were tuned, then removed, during BC (and don't exist in Wrath of the Lich King at all).

Attempting to get people sufficient gear to run Vanilla Naxx was a bad joke, since you needed 39 other people to go run an otherwise obsolete raid. Now you can get up to one tier behind using 5 mans, which means you can pull someone into a raid and have them be useful without having to go farm the previous raid tier.

No, you just had people farming level 40 dungeons like Maraudon and the only available to one guild a week world dragons for Nature Resistance gear in order to do AQ40. Certainly no grind there at all. And of course there was no grind in the massive amounts of consumables used in high end vanilla raids (which was also fixed in BC).

... you mean the PvP system was bad, in comparison to the old ranking system where the only way to get to Grand Marshall was to have other people play your account so you could do the necessary 90 hours a week of grinding battlegrounds? Or the battlegrounds that were great right up until a team of Naxx geared players showed up and obliterated everybody because there was no way outside of raiding to get competitive gear? PvP players got shafted in vanilla, and as much as I hate arenas for other reasons, that was the one thing they did fix. (Cataclysm has done a better job of that with rated battleground play.)

Unless you were a Paladin or Druid who wanted to actually use that tanking tree Blizzard gave you. Then you learned that it was only there for pretend purposes, and raid tanks were Warriors. Period. Or you were a Priest, Paladin, Shaman, or Druid who wanted to use your DPS spec in a raid. LOL! Shut up and heal.

Saying that vanilla is better then the expansions requires the worlds most powerful pair of nostalgia-tinted glasses. Or for people who liked addons that could play the game for you. Those were removed in BC too.

You picked a good time to start, with Cataclysm just out and all. I wouldn't worry about RAF though. The old world was just totally redone, and it's all new stuff to do. The pacing is quite good. Don't try to rush to 85 so you can start grinding dungeons. Half the fun is on the way there, so go ahead and enjoy it.

(Plus, you can pick up professions at level 5 and level them as you play normally. Particularly gathering ones. Mining is a lot less annoying when you're already in the area, rather then spending hours going backwards to catch up.)

srsly.. much better job at summing it up then I did.  Also:

so fucking true.  Shortly after they removed the hyjal attunement, I finished leveling my alt lock.  The next day I was in Hyjal topping meters w/ the gear I acquired that day from instancing and crafting.

I don't play WoW anymore, but while I agree with what Tridus describes, there were a pair of things that bothered me in BC and on:

1) The stat re-work. Instantly made all the vanilla raid gear utterly obsolete as soon as you got your first quest reward green in BC, in many cases. Obviously didn't matter in the end, but that was a pretty big spit in the face, so to speak, to Vanilla raiders. In addition, the focus on insanely high HP created an entirely new dynamic for boss fights, where bosses started hitting for insane amounts and in instances/raids, the squishies were even squishier. And they hung everyone who actually got a Legendary out to dry. I stuck with my Thunderfury as long as I could, but it got to a point where blues in BC were doing better damage and generating more threat. So much for Legendary. 

2) The raids themselves became less fun and less challenging (especially in WoTLK). Despite being 40-mans, they were very well designed, once guilds moved off Molten Core (at-launch raids are never fun). The Vaelastrasz fight in Blackwing was brilliant, Nefarion fight was brilliant. Battleguard Sartura, Twin Emperors, even C'thun, all brilliantly designed fights that took some time to learn and gave you a real sense of accomplishment once completed. The raids now are so much more loot pinatas. I personally had more fun repeatedly wiping in BWL and Ahn'Quiraj in vanilla, than beating the Lich King on the second/third attempt of the first day of attempts in WoTLK.

heroic mode is what made the fights somewhat challenging.  Heroic LK was actually very difficult and took several weeks before world first.  Even after the 30% zone nerf many guilds still struggled up until cata release

They did move too far towards easy in LK, particularly with the "round it up and AoE it" nature of almost every trash pull in the entire thing. They've moved back to a better place on both that and on fixing healer mana (which matters now, so tanks aren't constantly being two-shot) in Cataclysm.

Congratulations to you OMG_pacov! You have done a very good thing! I started playing WoW two weeks after the game first went live. Still the greatest computer game ever made, IMHO. I quit playing about a year and a half ago only because I had run a Druid and a Hunter through Wrath of the Lich King and decided to give it a rest. I will be playing Cataclysm, but not for another couple or three months. I have other fish to fry at the moment in Guild Wars.

WoW is a very complex game that you learn one easy bit at a time. Do not try to level up as fast as you possibly can. Each level is fun, and you want to play for the fun you can squeeze out of it. The game does not really begin at level 85. Max level is where all you have learned while leveling up comes to fruition in some very tough end game raiding and PvP. If you have not learned, you will be toast. Initial report on IGN confirms that they have made end game much much harder than end game in Wrath of the Lich King. Be prepared.

Look around at every thing. Read forums, checkout addons from Curses; these are legal and can be helpful. There are wikis and fansites galore; you can always find help.

The MMO world is like The Hotel California. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave! Because from now on there will always be another MMO out there you will want to try.

MMOs are well maintained. Bugs get fixed, like right now! When you finally need a break from WoW, there are lots lots more. Most do not have a monthly fee anymore. WoW still does, but WoW is still the undisputed leader in MMO. No argument. And WoW gives you so much that in Blizzard's case I think the monthly fee is still justified.

Late next year Guild Wars 2 will be out. With the GW series you buy the games, but they are free to play online with no monthly fees or other charges. The company store is purely optional; nothing necessary to play the game there.

I would not bother with GW 1 at this point in time. But GW 2 is worth knowing about, if for no other reason just to see how it all turns out. See the GW 2 Manifesto.

I would still recommend Guild Wars. It's much cheaper now and it goes on sale with some regularity so you can pick up all the GW games for < $20. They are indeed very, very good, and GW 2 is looking to be awesome.

Thanks for the feedback, wilebill. 

I'll be picking up guild wars 2 when its released and already have all of gw 1. 

Having played through WoW since the beginning I do understand many of ZehDon complains about BC. I don't agree that it was worse then vanilla upon release. But the whole attunement system didn't work very well, and there were definitely significant issues they didn't think through with their initial raid progression setups. Of course vanilla WoW had tons of issues too.

The state of BC on  release is irrelevent though because all the raiding things ZehDon complains about were taken out of the game before too long. They acknowledged that they had made a mistake and changed it. In fact based on his comments and the things he said he misses, I suspect ZehDoh would have loved the next expansion that came out (other then possibly the pvp which still had an arena focus, although not as much of one).

Too true.  While it might seem mind numbingly easy in the beginning.. it starts to pick up and you get more and more skills to work with.  They introduce them at a slow enough rate that you're comfortable with using them.  By the end, you have a billion skills / macros / things on your bars and you know what they all do.  If you've never played and look at a lvl 85's ui, it can be entirely overwhelming lol.  They introduce things at a nice rate tho.

Also, side note for anyone who hasn't started playing cataclysm yet or doesn't know whether they want to get back in it:  They've seriously improved so much.  They've improved the system once again, making things less tedious.  However, other things have been made more challenging (heroics are actually difficult now.. require cc / communication).  I've bitched significantly in the past about BC and Wrath issues.. but so far, Cata has been great.  Trimmed the fat, expanded on the good stuff, got rid of some of  the bad.  It's still a little too easy to get epics, but at least not for a little while (heroics don't drop epics anymore).

Missed this post

Anyhow - I play with some regularity on Blackwater Raiders. 
Vanguard of Norrath is the guild - a group of ex-hard-core raiders that still likes to play but doesn't have all of the time anymore.

My main right now is Hamedo there.  Give me a /w if you are still playing and get on.
We keep a vent going for most 5-mans+