bridge_too_close

I didn't say anything about actually believing you are the character. Immersion doesn't have anything to do with deception and is more about being engrossed or deeply involved with something. You can be immersed in other things too, like a tv show, book, or tabletop game.

I think it's less about being "tricked" into believing you aren't actually playing a game, and more along the lines of having the mindset that you are actually playing as your character. It's more like the difference between performing tasks, going from A to B, and checking boxes on a list, versus actually feeling like you're going on an adventure.

I gave him a dolla

It's next on my list to play!

Whew, what a relief!

JK, though I have been waiting since before 1.6 to play again.

I don't want to get my hopes up, but I'm getting my hopes up.

I didn't have any connection issues when I used it. This might help:
https://support.anydesk.com/knowledge/disconnecting-sessions

My personal opinion is stay away until they show positive change. I stepped away from WoW in 2018 when it became increasingly apparent that they are designing to keep players grinding, rather than actually having fun, then the infamous Blizzcon that year (Blitzchung debacle and "Do you guys not have phones?") cemented my stance on not playing anything Blizzard. They have shown that they only see their players as wallets to extract money from and their employees as cheap labor to exploit and discard.

So has there been positive change? Not that I've seen. It's still too early to tell if the MS acquisition will do anything on that front. From what I've heard of Diablo 4, it's pretty boring once you get pas the initial "ooh, ahh" factor, and Overwatch 2 has been more or less a dumpster fire since it released.

I couldn't tell you since I quit WoW 5 years ago, but it wouldn't surprise me.

No worries, it happens.

As someone who has put countless hours into various MMOs (including FFXIV), I totally get people getting anxious about their characters looks potentially changing. I remember when WoW had their character model update as the feedback from players then. Blizzard resolved the issue by adding a client-side option to toggle between old and new character models.

It is the same model, but the difference is in the horns and scales. Those pics don't do a very good job of showing it, though. From the paragraphs right above the pics:

Following community feedback after the announcement of the graphical update back at the fan festival event in Las Vegas, he shared an update of the Au Ra race, whose updated horns and scales had been initially revealed as looking very reflective but a little too much like enamel.

“This reflectivity looked very high quality so it was good for showing off, but it didn't really match our vision of what we wanted the Au Ra to look like from our original design back in 3.0, so we continued tweaking,” Yoshida admitted before sharing a new headshots of a male and female Au Ra where their horns look less reflective and more natural. “This goes for all of the updates for the other races as well. What we showed in Las Vegas wasn't the final product but a work in progress.”

You're only a customer if you pay them. If you don't, then you're the product, and they can't sell your eyeballs to advertisers if you block their ads.