Yesterday I started my Blood Elves, and while I did discover the method to enter back into the pre-expansion lands, I opted instead to stay in the new lands. The expansion set area for the Blood Elves basically fixes everything that was previously broken for the Horde, with one exception: the cities.
Alliance cities are frustrating difficult to raid -- wandering guards that see through stealth, high level NPC storekeepers, areas which are narrow and easy to create a player barricade to defend -- these are all features that are in many Alliance towns. By contrast, Horde towns are ridiculously open and accessible -- so much so that they aren't really towns so much as outposts. In addition, most of the Horde's cities use a vertical architecture, while Alliance towns are generally flat (the Night Elves have a second story to some of their buildings, but that's about it)
The biggest improvement for the Horde is that the Blood Elves, unlike their pre-expansion counterparts, actually have good quest information, because each quest that I've seen also gives a vector. Many of the pre-expansion Horde quests did not include the vector, resulting in newbies shouting to the zone "Anyone know where X is?". The Horde starting area quests were such a rush job that instructions NPCs gave were on the muddy side, and as a result, many Horde players would just give up on a questing and grind (kill for xp) instead of trying to locate the NPCs.
While I'm not playing for speed, it's interesting to note that the Blood Elf starting area (while still resembling Wal-mart on Black Friday) wasn't as bad as I feared it might be, and the areas that I'm fighting in aren't very crowded at all. I suspect that what might be happening is that once low-level Blood Elf players discover the passage to the old world, they return to their familiar hunting grounds, rather than play the new content. Also I suspect that while there are a small number of veteran players like me who started a Blood Elf, most of those players have returned to their primary character to begin the grind from 60 to 70 after playing a bit with the new races. We'll see how it looks tonight -- I suspect the desire of getting to 70 is going to trump the novelty of starting a Blood Elf for a little while.
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