Quote Originally Posted by zenga View Post
But then i realized that the very early players actually played this way. Bottomline, I'd love to hear/read stuff from the early days. How it was back then, what problems you were facing, etc ... and maybe hear if the evolution to all the things that are available now have taken away some part of the fun.
I think that it depends on where you came from. I started playing WOW with some friends after playing Everquest for a bit over two years. Aside from the ways that EQ punished players directly (death meant exp loss and a very risky corpse recovery), it really was a grind. Quests were sparse compared to WOW. They were harder to find and waaaay harder to complete, and the rewards (in exp, money, and/or gear) were horrible for the effort involved. There was no instancing of content. For the most part, ordinary exp mobs in EQ were the equivalent of elites in WOW-- they had lots of HP and they hit pretty hard. Soloing was only really possible by a few classes, and it was still very slow and boring.

In EQ, getting exp meant finding a group of people, finding an unoccupied corner of a level-appropriate zone, and pulling roaming mobs to the group. One at a time if at all possible, a few at a time if you had a competent crowd-controller. Each kill rewarded you with a microscopic amount of exp (how much exactly? No way to know for sure, the game did not provide numbers for this). Hour upon hour of killing mobs one at a time, and assuming a good group (ie, a good kill rate and no deaths) you wound up with 5-10% of your level. The next day, you'd do it all over again.

Gear was a pain in the ass to obtain. For years there was no real starter gear, and vendors sold crap armor for outrageously high costs. You were lucky to have more than a handful of pieces of gear with stats by the time you were in your 40s or even your 50s. Gearing up meant grinding mobs endlessly in the hopes of seeing a rare spawn which might drop the item you wanted. And since it wasn't instanced content, you were in one of probably several groups trying to grab that spawn. In your 50s there were (non-instanced) raid zones that you could attempt. A competent raid had 40-60 people working together for a few hours in the hopes of maybe a dozen worthwhile drops.

By contrast, WOW was a breeze. Lots of quests, outdoor mobs and quests could be solo'ed. If you had a group, you could clear instanced zones. Gear was easy to obtain via quests, via tradeskills (don't get me started on tradeskills in EQ), via random world drops, even via merchants. To be honest, I don't think I even noticed the level grind until my first character got to 50 or so.

Even now I don't consider it much of a grind, although WOW has spoiled me into being much less patient than I used to be.