First time I played WoW I liked that you were given a guided tour of your races homeland as it explained the world. The last time I played WoW I had to to a tutorial island that explained nothing about the world and then dumped me in an expansion with characters I had no fucking idea who they were and why I should care about them. Even ESO doesn’t prevent new players from playing the base storyline and FFXIV still requires you to complete ARR before moving to the first expansion. I dropped WoW pretty quickly again because I felt too lost.