WoW leveling wasn't hard by comparison to your legacy games in EQ/Lineage2/FFXI, but WoW leveling was drastically harder than almost any game that's come out post WoW. Getting to cap in vanilla for people who weren't going out of their way to optimize shit was anywhere from 9-12 days of /played time. Modern MMOs don't come anywhere close to requiring that time investment.
This doesn't have as much to do with the games themselves as the players and archaic features of those 'great' games in the past.
The people who make it to the top nowadays are very eager to write guides to tell other people how they did it. Put their personal tag or guild ID on it and... famous! That wasn't as readily available back in Vanilla. There were some but not as proliferated as today and that has more to do with those players at the top end than those at the bottom leveling. Many times in the past, a guild or person only revealed certain important tips/hints mainly because they got tired of hearing So and So claimed it first, so they wanted to document proof so they got the credit for w/e happened. Not for fame always, but for principle.
Now a lot of high level players want fame for fame's sake;
'This is my guide. I trademarked it."It used to be that ways to level fast and make money were closely guarded trade secrets. In FFXI, you kept secret when your link killed w/e dragon you got so you could put it on farm or a boss in SEA/SKY. Nowadays, that guild will livestream the kill. There used to be few macros and only anyone with a computer background knew how to make/use them. Now there's guides to your guides to one-fingered endgame raiding for games like Rift. Things that used to be rare are now commonplace or in many games,
required.Let's not even get started on equipment like keyboards and mice. I used a fucking trackball and thought that was the shit.
It's not that games can't be made to satisfy players anymore; they are. A lot of games still put out decent amounts of somewhat challenging content that the average casual would still struggle through if left to their
owndevices like the past. Hell, most still can't get out of the large Glowing Pool of Stupid on the screen. The problem is when game communities (from the top down) tell noobs
"What? You don't know this dungeon? I don't care if it's your fucking first time. Go watch all six videos out, go read all 20 guides until you know it backwards/forwards and then get geared up and we might take you."And I'm not talking about the endgame dungeons either. The mentality that breeds that comes from the top players at level 15 or w/e level that first dungeon starts. So then one nub learns and now he's elitist and shouts for 30 minutes trying to make a team to
"must be geared and kno all fights. will kik you if not"...for a level 20 dungeon.
The other main factor? Transportation.
In Vanilla, there was no level 20 mount and the bird didn't even hit all the places they do now. You had to walk to quite a few of them. So time to get to half of them was doubled/triple/w/e back then. Now, people don't want all that walking shit where it takes 1 hour to get to a place, then you die and forgot to bind and now.. all the way back. That's a time waster, not a challenge. Devs realized people wanted it so they put instant travel in more games and took out things like only certain classes having the teleport (mage in WoW, BLMs in FFXI, sorcs/druids in EQ2, etc) and just made it standard for everyone. In FFXI, you missed the ferry or airship? Tough shit. Wait 20 minutes for the next one and don't miss that one either or same thing.
None of that time that it took to get from A-B had anything to do with 'harder' or 'better' content back then but yet it does factor into your overall time assessment vs today, although I don't think you acknowledged it. Apologies if you did.
