I was there to login on November 24, 2004, as soon as the servers went live, started a character on Laughing Skull, human mage. We got maybe 20 minutes of solid playtime that first night. Between stability, loot lag, disconnects, more loot lag, 50,000 people trying to kill the same Defias named, and spawn rate wasn't adjusted for number of people. You had to wait forever just to kill that dude... I hit 60 the first couple days of February 2005. I finished up the quests in Winterspring, the whole, like 3 or 4 of them, then spent literally 8 straight hours farming Furbolgs to get from 59 to 60. After all the clusterfucks of every area before Winterspring, like STV gankfest, especially as a clothy mage, I said fuuuck that and moved over to Felwood (which took fucking-forever to travel to). The seemingly empty Winterspring was incredibly refreshing. I still revere Winterspring for those memories.
These days we have instant travel between cities and shit. How many times I got ganked (or ganked others) getting on boats, or waiting for boats to arrive... or getting disconnected in the middle of the ocean, and not being able to log back into your character. That was a fun few days. The significant impediment to travel really made you consider which dungeons to go to. My second character being Horde and having direct access to Scarlet Monastery, Stratholme, were huge improvements over IF/SW/Darnassus - minus being closer to Blackrock Mountain. Oh, and flight times. Holy shit. You might as well go get lunch if you needed to fly from Undercity to STV.