I gave some attention to World of Warcraft Classic - Season of Discovery. It is certainly enjoyable to have a lively world with plenty of people interacting everywhere, but the nuts and bolts of Vanilla are largely the same. The slow leveling, the 1-hour cooldown for my Hearthstone (the item that takes me back to the Innkeeper I set), the fact that I must be physically at the dungeon location to enter an instance, and the demands for being highly social for a bunch of basic stuff feel exhausting. A lot of time I need people for group quests and runes, and the mere thought of talking to strangers is discouraging. I realized that, while I enjoy social interaction, that is not necessarily true for the majority of my playtime. Classic Wrath always feels like a good compromise for me – it is still Classic and the open world is still relevant, but it has a lot of QOL that makes it manageable for me. The Hearthstone cooldown is 30 minutes, I get my first mount at level 20 instead of 40, and the Random Dungeon Finder puts me in an instance automatically. Granted, there’s not a lot of people on Wrath right now, but I still enjoy leveling my character, leveling mining, getting ready for Cataclysm, and making money on the auction house. I found a nice wholesome guild, but it seems that most people are just playing SoD.

I’ve played Xcloud on a good wired connection. It’s impressive but IMHO opinion far from ideal. Input lag is getting better but it’s still noticeable. Resolution varies but it’s never as good as the real thing. Noticeably worse, actually. Loading a game takes longer than locally. For me? It’s not enough. That said, before I was around, my mother-in-law spent years watching everything on the wrong aspect ratio. On a good TV. So I can totally see a lot of people streaming games for years without realizing how much better gaming can be.