I find myself with an urge to try WoW again...

[Kevin]

I remember the game being pretty fun back when I played (granted, this was a month or two after release, so a looong time ago) and have a strange compulsion to try it again.

Do people still play at the lower levels? Or has it 'matured' like EverQuest and the only people playing are the max-level players with tons of time invested? I ask mainly because I tend to play group-centric classes in MMOs.

I'm sure there's other stuff I should be asking, but I have no idea what they would be. I guess I'll go and google up info as if I was a total newbie to the game (which by now I'm sure I am, anyway).

You can still find lower level toons out there. Mostly alts, some new to the game, but the vast majority of toons are level capped or very rarely played alts scattered between L 20-50. In general if the toon gets above 50 they'll get pushed to cap relatively quickly in my experience, but there are enough that once you get to 55+ that you can start finding PuG groups for the early Outlands instances. Often groups that will looks something like 70, 65, 61, 60, 55-60 for a L60 instance like Ramparts or Blood Furnace. Getting a full group of toons that are actually level appropriate, unless you end up in a guild group that levels mostly together is pretty rare at this stage.

Leveling is significantly easier for all classes and specs though. Gear is better and simpler to get, experience from quests has been increased, experience needed to level is lower. Many mobs have been nerfed, many skills have been buffed. At least when you compare it to release or really anything prior to 1.3, things have been pretty noticably skewed to make it easier and faster for the players. With how much easier it is to get gold if you have a friend on the server it will be easy for them to lend you sums that used to be big money. 200-300 gold is pretty much chump change for most anyone with a 70 now as you can make that back in a day or 2. So getting twinked out with a few hundred gold, 16 slot bags and maybe even a few twinkable greens and blues isn't unexpected, if you know some folks on that server at least. AH prices for gear are still generally higher than at release but not as much as folks might think because demand for a lot of the lower level stuff is pretty low too so things don't sell and get relisted at lower prices.

If you run say 10 instance runs before L60 or so, you might be able to reasonable expect to get 1 of those runs to be populated by toons that aren't wildly over or under level for that instance. It's not too horrible to get instance runs for loots though as you can generally find a kind 70 who will blow it up for you, if you keep looking off and on while doing other stuff. But it could take a few hours. And again it's very server dependant too. Some servers have more lower level action than others.