A Super Casual Fathers Review On Vanilla Private Servers

A little background about me:Father of 35-10 Hours of Gaming a week topsOldest son introduced me to WoWSuper CasualSo recently my son and I decided to try a vanilla private server after all the hype the other one got after it was shut down. Going into it, having never played vanilla, I thought I was going to hate it. My son told me vanilla isn't like retail in the sense that it requires a lot more time to do everything. This turned me off big time but I proceeded because I had nothing to lose and figured I can finally get my own personal view of what it is all about.The first day we got in was pretty crazy since there was like 100s of people in the human starting zone. I guess everybody was switching to this server after the other one got shut down around the same time. Killing kobolds was a hilarious task because it was whoever could tag the freshly spawned mob first won. It took over an hour to do 2 quests.Fast forward a week later and about 6 hours in, my son and I are level 13. Just scraping the beginning of Westfall quests. It was awesome seeing an environment filled with people everywhere you ran and an active /1 chat. We did end up downloading an Addon that helped us figure out where to go with quests. It made all the difference. Today we are 16 and about 10 hours in and are both loving it. Our next goal is to put together a Dead Mines group next Saturday morning because apparently it is going to take awhile to finish it.Basically the point of this rant was to let people know this vanilla experience can be enjoyed by a super casual like myself. I don't feel a rush to hit the max level because the leveling seems to be a huge part of the experience. Just goofing off and doing random things like putting together a search party for this 19 twink rogue ganking people in Redridge for an hour. Its amazing how big the world is when you can only walk. One thing that I feel made this server feel so real was when we went to Stormwind and there were people everywhere, but it wasn't the sheer number of them that put me in awe, it was the fact that I could see the progression in each person just based on their gear. Some had robes and a stick for a weapon, others had goofy shoulder armor, some looked like retail geared players in their end game stuff. It was awesome.I love retail, it caters to me more, but I can definitely see the lust for a game like this as well. I "accomplish" more on my retail toon in less time, but the minor accomplishments on this level 16 that take an hour feel much more rewarding. There is definitely a lack of some quality of life stuff that we needed to fix by downloading Addons, but none of it took away from this vast "new world" we were experiencing. ...I died to a murloc 1v1