Looking for perspective... An MMOs first year

[Brannigan]

When WoW first launched they had no caps on crowd control. The spell polymorph (think Sleep if you have no other frame of reference) also instantly dropped you to the bottom of any given body of water. Naturally I would lure enemy players into the water and repeatedly polymorph them until they ran out of breath. But that's just some dumb balance stuff.

As far as bugginess and general playability goes, WoW was pretty polished on release. Looterskating was more of a server load issue, I think. Molten Core was unfinished (not itemized) and level 45+ was kind of barren for leveling up. Those are minor issues compared to what FFXIV still suffers from. WoW beta lasted like 2 years or something though so they had plenty of time to hammer things out. FFXIV was rushed out the door for some reason.

By the end of the first year of WoW I think they had added Onyxia (single-boss 40 man raid), finished Molten Core (like 8 or 9 bosses in a 40 man raid instance), added 2 mid level dungeons to fill leveling gaps (Dire Maul and Mauradon were both missing on release but Im not sure about when exactly they were added), and added Blackwing Lair (40 man raid instance with like 9 bosses or so). I think that a couple of PVP battlegrounds and the honor/contribution points system (a really crappy primitive PVP ranking system) were added as well.

Lots of this stuff was probably partially done before release. Also Blizzard took like 2.5 years or some crazy amount of time to release the first expansion.