I disagree somewhat. At the very beginning of the game (before any expansions came out), leveling was very slow. It might have been an order of magnitude slower ().
The consequence is that people took the time spent leveling seriously at the time; since you'd spend so much time doing that. It made sense to run some low-level dungeons to gear up, since you'd get to keep these items a long time. Before the dungeon finder, people mostly skipped leveling dungeons. After, they kept doing them (easy way to gain experience points) but the difficulty had been brought down to accomodate random groups of rushing players.
The sheer volume of time you spent leveling made it so that people tried to have fun doing it. Nowadays it's something you have to get through. You can even pay Blizzard to bypass it, the message is clear.
() Consider that the leveling record was about 7 days at the time, to go from level 1 to 60. My first lvl 60 character took me north of 16 days. In the latest expansion, some people I know went from lvl 90 to 100 in less than 24 hours, and leveling is supposed to get longer as you increase in levels. I remember the leveling between 50 and 60 during the holidays and each level took me a solid day of ~8 hours.
The consequence is that people took the time spent leveling seriously at the time; since you'd spend so much time doing that. It made sense to run some low-level dungeons to gear up, since you'd get to keep these items a long time. Before the dungeon finder, people mostly skipped leveling dungeons. After, they kept doing them (easy way to gain experience points) but the difficulty had been brought down to accomodate random groups of rushing players.
The sheer volume of time you spent leveling made it so that people tried to have fun doing it. Nowadays it's something you have to get through. You can even pay Blizzard to bypass it, the message is clear.
() Consider that the leveling record was about 7 days at the time, to go from level 1 to 60. My first lvl 60 character took me north of 16 days. In the latest expansion, some people I know went from lvl 90 to 100 in less than 24 hours, and leveling is supposed to get longer as you increase in levels. I remember the leveling between 50 and 60 during the holidays and each level took me a solid day of ~8 hours.