Did World of Warcraft lack content when it first launched?

Answer 1

Considering that World of Warcraft was one of the first MMO's of its kind (barring more strategy-based or textbased games) I don't think anyone felt a lack of content - there simply was nothing to compare it to.

In the earliest days of WoW, it took weeks or months to even level a character all the way to maximum level, and there were tons of quests to do. You had to do attunement quests for Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, which took you to Blackrock Depths, an instance that was still quite challenging at its time.

And even then, if you were in a guild that ran Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair, you had to spend a lot of time farming potions, resist gear and other means of running the content.

If you focused on Player-versus-Player, there were the starting Battlegrounds, but most efforts were focused on world PvP like the battle between Southshore and Tarren Mill. People were also running Alterac Valley, which at its introduction could literally last three days to finish. People would go out for lunch and then return into the same AV they left before.

A great strength of WoW has always been that content was added just as the old content was getting stale, and even if it did, you could always roll a new character and see things from a different perspective, like tank vs. healer vs. DPS.

Some classes had mount quests (warlock, paladin) or epic class quests (hunter, priest) which took enormous effort to achieve. This kept people busy for weeks getting ready for the quests and getting the help they needed to complete it.

So in short, while it may seem today like content is less and getting old, in reality the players breeze through it and it has been made much more accessible. That, and the release of many competitive (albeit less successful MMOs) has provided more material to compare the current game with.