I went from EverQuest to vanilla WoW and I never understood how people said leveling was hard here. I got 4 characters to level 60 and didn’t think anything of it. I was just thrilled at how easy it was.
I only had one character I got past level 40 in EQ 
I just couldn’t do 40 to 50 more than once.
I played MMOs before they were MMOs. They were called MUDs. Multi user dungeons.
But my 1st 3D MMO was Everquest.
I never want to think about level 39>40 and 55>60 ever again. Literally login sit and camp for hours screaming at your bar.
To some people, WoW at launch was exactly that. It was their first MMO.
However, in comparison to EQ, DAoC, and I’d even argue EQ2 (which had a terrible launch and fell on it’s face for a year), it was easier.
Notice my stressed words.
That still doesn’t take away from someone’s first MMO experience being WoW. To them, it was challenging.
And, yes, I started in EQ.
Yeah, EQ was crazy hard core even the PvE side of things. People spending weekends, entire weekends, in PoSky or PoFear. Good god.
Surprisingly, EVE is like a popular sci fi mmo still… miss wildstar!!!
And then you spend a whooooooooole night and morning farming, go to bed, and wake up to a… SERVER ROLLBACK! It’s like it never happened!
Sparrows were dangerous in UO. Seriously, first enemy I tried to kill was a bird. My weapon skill was non existent as I had just started. My baptism of fire of what Ultima Online was me being pecked to death in the middle of town buy a small red bird while screaming for help while everyone watched, waiting to pick my corpse clean. Those were the good o’l days.
Helbreath and for a little time Lineage (didnt like it)
White wolf rpgs… then was Muds and mush? Lol
I played EQ and EQ2
Dabbled a bit in RuneScape, but WoW is the first MMO I played avidly. True to the fact WoW is made for budget setups so they can have more players
Chua were the Vulpera of the dominion…
I started with Ultima Online before switching to EQ. I’ve also played EQ2, SWTOR, DAOC, & Rift.
I appreciate the people who reminded me of Vanguard, Anarchy Online, & Asheron’s Call.
Yep SWG, and it was awesome pre-patch 9. Once they added the village it started getting silly.
FF online which was a slog to level in.
WoW was considered simplistic when I started in Vanilla. We had fun but everyone in my guild complained about being boxed in.
Yes, Runescape was my first MMORPG followed by a few P2W mmos from the eastern translated.
My parents sent me to therapy for EQ
RIP
Mine confronted me one night after school about my addiction to RS.
I played UO. WoW, even classic WoW, was so extremely dumbed down it was unbelievable. It was still enjoyable enough, but nothing really compared to the depth that UO brought, but that was also largely to do with the fact that UO was a sandbox MMO, not a theme park carrot-on-a-stick MMO.
I’d love it if another company would make an MMO in the styling of UO, where skills weren’t granted, but earned, character customization didn’t boil down to your class but your actual skills that you wanted to mix and match to build your character.
My brother played a blacksmith warrior, with traditional 5x combat stats and smithing/mining. I played a classic dexxer with hiding to start, and eventually went to a mage with hiding. Coincidentally, the entire magery aspect of modern games feel less and less fantasy. You had 64 spells in UO that you could use, and the higher levels were progressively more taxing on your mana pool, but generally more worth using. Only the strongest mages could resurrect players, it wasn’t a skill given at level 12 to everyone that could heal.
The fantasy genre of games is dead, and games like WoW unfortunately are the reason for it. Even games like Skyrim draw more style from WoW than from DnD and I think that’s a shame. Bring back reagents for spells. Bring back player choice for builds. Professions shouldn’t be something that you happen to have on your primary class, it should be a class. Warriors shouldn’t be tailors without sacrificing some of their combat ability.
I digress; those days are long gone. The “I want it now and I want it easy” generation of gamers will never rally behind a game where they have to make their own decisions or create their own goals. Killing a lich should just mean being the same leveling at spamming abilities, not working your way up in skills until you can fight an undead mage.
I always smile when I think back on my master privateer pilot bounty hunter.
If there is one thing about SWG I miss more than anything from any other game its the piloting gameplay. I loved it so much! And now its gone, unless I want to risk viruses with stella bellum emulator.
I miss swg so much…