Last night (8. DEC) i rolled my dwarf alt, so in the dwarf/gnome starting area, and there were like 4-5 of us relatively close-by at any time. Just a little taste for quest-mob competition, but a far, far cry from the day one madness. Glad to be given the chance to experience that, it was fantastic. I noticed the online population numbers have shrunk a bit, especially the after-midnight time, so, mostly the USA gamers, numbers dropped to about 1300, while the 'prime-time' when most of EU players are active is still going strong. Apparently some people had enough of it rather soon and bailed: lots of dead player corpses lying arouns just like that, abandoned, and relatively significant influx of new players (visible in the staring areas) means a pretty fast trend of joining/quitting the game. In my opinion, the vanilla version is too er..boring and tiresome for many new players compared to retail.
Another thing: I noticed several types of mobs had some new abilities i didnt remember from the original vanilla, like tthe murlocs in eastern Elwyn have some mysterious secret spell that deals flat ~30 damage (which is a lot when you are lvl 8 or so), some orc caster mobs in wetlands have now a skeleton minion by their side, which i dont remember seeing on Emerald Dream, or Kronos, and similar. I ike it, makes the game (grind) a bit more challenging and less stale.
