My favorite gaming magazine had a monthly column about Ultima. It was an interesting read. Then I bought a disk with Ultima around... probably 9 years ago. I don't remember whether I played on the official servers. But my first experience was clicking on a dummy a hundred times to raise my attack skill. Then one of my friends gave me a set of better armor. And then I was randomly killed by some higher-level player. And then I stopped playing. Then I quit.
Frankly, I don't understand why all those "interactive world" features people keep talking about cannot be decoupled from grinding and crappy PvP system.
Though the thing that completely cured me from online gaming was a certain MUD I was playing at the time (for several month, for at least an hour most of the days).
The PvP system was decoupled from UO when they introduced "Facets" with Trammel being the non-PvP facet. Unfortunately, it completely dis-balanced the game in my opinion and was the beginning of the end for my 6 years of playing.
Trammel end-up being over-run with players killing everything NPC in sight. For example, Destard (dragon dungeon) had so many players in it that my client crashed from time to time. Dragons only spawn every few minutes, so with 100+ players, as soon as one would spawn it would be killed. That's hardly fun. Same thing happened throughout. With no risk of being killed and losing what you had, the game became too easy.
The last 3 years of playing, I played on shard called Siege Perilous. It was a shard with skill caps, no non-PvP areas and much higher prices for anything you bought from NPCs. It was a lot more challenging than normal shards and had a much smaller following, but the sense of accomplishment was much more for me and those that played the shard seemed to be on average more respectful than players I encountered in the early days of Trammel.
They probably could be decoupled to some degree, but it's the grindy/pvp games that are popular.
The result of this is that the interactive world aspect of online games have advanced remarkably little. Instead we get some minimal interactive world features added into successive generations of grindy/pvp games.
The power differentials in WoW are a lot bigger than 2%. I would wager that less than 90% of the players even are LFR geared, but assume a casual player with a mix of LFR gear, crafted, legendary, heroic BoEs is probably sitting around ilvl 663. Depending on their spec and the fight and playing well they are probably doing 30k DPS [0]. Someone in full mythic 4p (ivl 700+) is going to be doing 55-60k+. [1]
These numbers aren't going to be a perfect comparison because of fight length, strategy changes when you overgear content, skill differentials, etc but gear is pretty important.
One could easily argue that having the highest end gear does not really serve a purpose if you aren't doing any actual raiding or PvP though.
edit: I should probably mention that the last expansion (released last November) did a massive stat squish. In the last tier, t16, an LFR geared player would be doing 30k (ilvl 496ish), 100k (ilvl 528-540), and 1.0m+ (mythic/580+). Player power was increasing so much they had to start working around not being able to increase raid boss HP higher than 2^31 - 1. 25 man heroic Thok had ~2b HP for example.
Not really. There is a LOT of churn in the subscriber base. People will come back when a new expansion comes out, play all the new content and then unsub after a few months.
Frankly, I don't understand why all those "interactive world" features people keep talking about cannot be decoupled from grinding and crappy PvP system.
Though the thing that completely cured me from online gaming was a certain MUD I was playing at the time (for several month, for at least an hour most of the days).