Ahaha... man... Asheron's Call memories. Excellent! I played on Leafcull.

As far as the social aspects of it, I used to play on the Venture Co. server as Palehoof. (I didn't realize there was a forum MVP named Palehoof until after I'd ralled him, cause Pale was my first wow character).

I created Palehoof on day 1 of the server and only reach 60 like a week after TBC came out. Hit 70 about 2 months later. The running gag was that if I finally reached max level, the server would crash. Sure enough, I dinged 70 while we were in Old Hillsbrad (and I rarely instanced) and the following came up about 2 minutes later:

<SERVER> Restart in 10 minutes.
Then about 15 seconds later....
<SERVER> Restart in 1 minute.

You have been disconnected from the server.


It was absolutely hilarious. I still have the screenshots.

Anyway, point being, I spent SO much time socializing on the forums and, invariably, in game, that I rarely leveled. Also, I went exclusively from 30 to 40-ish on BG token turn in xp. (Considering I was a hunter and needed ammo, I didn't get my 40 mount for quite some time. oops). I eventually quit wow for about 9 months.

With that having been said, I leveled a 70 lock on Ravenhold, unguilded, in about a month. And I had about 4500g when I dinged 70.

It all depends on what you're getting out of the game, I guess. I enjoyed playing both ways. I'm really enjoying the anonymity on Ravenholdt, because I couldn't go 2 minutes without a whisper on VeCo. I even had a "The official Palehoof Fanclub thread" on our server forums that reached maximum posting amount (500 replies) twice. It was all a little ridiculous.

You know... but awesome.