Quote Originally Posted by Ualaa View Post
Comparing Everquest, during the years I played (Classic through Planes of Power) to Warcraft.
I played from Luclin to the expansion after PoP. I always said that EQ punished players. I don't think they did it to be mean, but they wanted you to bleed for every bit of progress you made. And bleed profusely. Aside from the leveling grind (which you described pretty perfectly) there was the raid grind, where you'd spend hours organizing, dying, recovering from wipes, and occasionally killing something and hoping for a chance at rolling on one of the eight-to-ten drops that you'd get over the course of the evening. And 8-to-10 drops for 40-70 people for several hours of work made the leveling grind seem kind of quaint. Especially when some of those drops required other raid drops before you could get the actual gear item.

I never complain about WOW's leveling grind, because I have been permanently scarred by EQ's leveling grind.

I think WOW is mostly suffering from having squeezed what they could out of this type of game. EQ was the hard core difficulty. Vanilla WOW ramped it down a fair amount, and tBC ramped it down a bit more, and WotLK ramped it down too much, and now they're trying to find some middle ground that keeps people playing without turning the game into a complete joke. I don't know if they can find it, to be honest. Just gimme my Diablo 3 already and we can call it even.