The tradeoff has been in time investment. It takes very little time to get the gear and materials needed to start working on Mythic Dragonflight raids, while Heroic and Normal can get started even faster and are actually quite easy by comparison. Meanwhile in Classic, the skill ceiling is low but the time investment is through the roof. My first time in Classic was SoD and just leveling to 25 was damned exhausting. I can't imagine going to 60, and I can't imagine the materials and money I'd need to seriously consider raiding.
The thing about Classic is that it doesn’t work well if one is trying to race to cap and raid readiness. Leveling and gearing up is as much “the real game” as endgame raiding is. As such, it works a lot better when played at a relaxed pace with less of a focus on the destination, as the majority of players did back in 2004-2010.
Huh, this surprises me, as I tried it around 2010-2012, and I found the first 20 levels or so so dull that I only managed to get two characters up to lvl 20 or so and then dropped it forever.
I guess my mistake might've been in trying to approach it as a typical RPG, while I should have instead tried to find some players to befriend in the game ??
Timeframe makes a big difference. 2010-2012 was the tail end of WotLK through Cataclysm, and by then leveling content had been trivialized (especially after Cata’s release in late 2010).
Not that it was ever particularly difficult relative to other games, but in the original game and TBC, levelers often found themselves in dicey situations that kept things from getting too dull. In WotLK and Cata, baseline player power saw a steep increase and the world was largely defanged, making it so levelers rarely faced significant danger.
> I guess my mistake might've been in trying to approach it as a typical RPG, while I should have instead tried to find some players to befriend in the game?
It's moreso that you were forced to find friends back in the day. Vanilla WoW was still pretty similar to that, but the older games like FFXI and Everquest required that you team up in a party to level at all. It led to a completely different experience, where a server was a community of people who you knew and played with for years. There were repuations, drama, politics, player run events, infamous trolls; everything that no longer exists in MMOs that actually made them great and not just multiplayer games with a big lobby.
That’s the biggest difference - I played classic and there were entire guilds (including mine) who never even bothered thinking of trying to do an actual raid. We had a few raiders but they were independently contracting with bigger guilds as subs.
