I had never played a private server prior to trying Epoch.
I prefer the leveling experience vastly compared to the raiding exp.
After more than a couple of tiers of raiding came out, my in game life had to revolve around doing something that got old fast. During Vanilla, on my server, my guild was the first to clear MC, missed the first BWL clear by 1 day, and pushed to the Twin Emps before imploding. AQ was so fucking terrible and pointless that guild after guild imploded trying to clear it when it orginally released.
As raiders dropped out due to the fact the raid sucked and the gear was mostly a side grade at best, back to MC / BWL we went to gear more people. So now instead of 1 night of raiding, it became 2 nights of MC / BWL / Ony clear, then progression clear. They didnt have Chronoboom back then, so you farmed all your world buffs, farmed a ton of coin for consumes, then logged out. Raiding took all the fun out of the game for me once we had to continue to clear the same raids for almost a year. This of course is before each top tier guild was pushing 20 Rank 14 warriors for sub 11 min clears as well. Guilds were lucky to have 1, and every rank 14 was known by name.