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.

Correction: final fantasy xiv requires you to play ALL of the story to get to the rest of the playerbase, which is, and I’m not exaggerating, probably 700 hours

You are exaggerating, I played it all and it took somewhere between 200 and 300 hours (including side content and most raids at least once).