People are max level in a little over a day, on both servers. On wow you can't even hit max for at least 4-5 days on a classic private server. You have cried and complained till everquest became one of the most casual mmos... just stop. If you want more than this, go play a non mmo.
I will honestly never understand the need for excruciatingly slow experience. Grinding, by far, is one of the most uninteresting and unfun aspects of any MMO I have experienced to date. Seeing people demand to sit in the same area for hours / days strikes me as some sort of Stockholm syndrome. The fact they had to put a minigame inside of the game (/gems) to somehow compensate for the absurdly slow pace should speak volumes here.
Here is the problem - there is not enough content. Hardcore players will burn through nearly everything within a couple weeks. If there was unlimited content I can understand speeding up exp. As it is, there is NO reason to do any quests at all or farm anything while leveling. I'm level 48 on selos atm and half my character is literally naked. That's stupid. Yesterday our tank had half his slots missing.
This would be a problem if the content weren't so easy. As it is, there's no issue. When you've got four weeks, being able to burn through everything in two weeks isn't a bad thing.
You have a 50% bonus atm. When that wears off, keeping up with all the content on selos is going to be pretty difficult for the average player. The people playing hard will do fine until the later expansions, and at that point even they will struggle. Selo's xp isn't bad I suppose but it is not as good as people expected it to be, and I think it could be bumped up a bit to help people stick around on that server. I'm a little surprised to say it, but Mangler seems like the better option. Classic may be horrible but you won't feel nearly as much pressure to keep up on that server. They made the xp rate match up with the unlock timers quite nicely.
The funny thing is what you call the grind, is the game of everquest. Raids were not the end goal of the game, it was the journey. You werent supposed to level in a day, you were supposed to spend time researching spells to get your skill up to make that spell for the one level in the 20s because you would be in that level range to use it for a long time. Its only with time that what you call a grind even became something other than the main objective of the game. I find it very amusing that you dont understand why people who enjoy a game created completely around a slow leveling experience would like a slow leveling experience.
