One aspect that WoW really brought out, in contrast to Everquest, which is not really considered is this:
The longer it takes to level, the more
potential familiarity and skill a player can have at a given class. If you level a character up to 50 in 3 weeks, how much skill will you have at that class? You've only played it for 3 weeks and haven't had many difficult learning experiences! And so this is one reason why (imho) we had so many unskilled raiders in WoW and easy-leveling games like it.
Compare Everquest. A person could spend a large chunk of time leveling. But by the time they made it, they had some clue how to play the game and how to play their class. I recall original EQ raiders on my server as actually having skill almost regardless of what guild it was.. something that I didn't find much of on
any server in WoW except in the top rated guilds. (I didn't stay in EQ2 DaoC or WAR long enough so I won't comment on them.)
People like feeling progress, which leveling gives. It's common and popular to this day and as yet there just haven't been many good alternatives. Imagine posting on the WoW forums that the days of leveling are long gone
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