I didn't play at launch, but have heard that it could have probably used a few patches before it would have been so immersive. The pace of leveling however probably was its slowest at launch, and it seems like to do that, you would necessarily have been sucked in, because it would have probably taken a hell of a lot of playing, especially without all of the web resources we currently have. I started probably around 2005/6 I'd guess, before leveling was quickened. I'm not really sure what you mean by hand-holding exactly; at best there wasn't much in terms of assistance through any means. Though it was never a technically difficult game, I found it immersive in that it was slow, if you weren't deliberately trying to hit max level in the shortest possible time. I just played it to do something, that had some gradual reward and power system that felt intuitive and meaningful, and it probably took me a year to hit max level. Doing that with people is really what made it compelling, I couldn't imagine playing it alone at that time, it wasn't that kind of game. In contrast to your experience, none of my friends stopped playing the other games you mention, but WoW uniquely augmented our daily lives with questions about what gear you recently got, what level you hit, doing dungeons and raiding together, bumling into someone from the opposing faction and killing them or getting killed. Runescape had elements of that, but the graphics and gameplay were sluggish and more rudimentary, whereas WoW felt like I was "in" something more than ever before.
It just seems like you expected something different going in, when my impression was that it was intentionally designed initially without the focus on end game content that you might have been hoping for, but that they'd later start building on. I didn't really have any expectations, other than that the graphics were way better than what I was playing, which was actually a huge deal for immersion at the time.
In retrospect, the original questing experience and everything were incredibly tedious, but in my mind that also was actually what kept it immersive. It required a social element to be fun, and it was absolutely exhausting to just power through at the rate you might have been. So I'd quest and grind, and then just hangout doing nothing, or work on a profession and try to make some gold, because there were other bits. That's what I do now too to some extent, because games that are played only because they have some sophisticated mechanic are kind of unsubstantial in my view. My friends would play Diablo 2 or Counter strike, and those games were also miserably tedious when reduced to their core game mechanic or whatever is considered meta at the time.
It just seems like you expected something different going in, when my impression was that it was intentionally designed initially without the focus on end game content that you might have been hoping for, but that they'd later start building on. I didn't really have any expectations, other than that the graphics were way better than what I was playing, which was actually a huge deal for immersion at the time.
In retrospect, the original questing experience and everything were incredibly tedious, but in my mind that also was actually what kept it immersive. It required a social element to be fun, and it was absolutely exhausting to just power through at the rate you might have been. So I'd quest and grind, and then just hangout doing nothing, or work on a profession and try to make some gold, because there were other bits. That's what I do now too to some extent, because games that are played only because they have some sophisticated mechanic are kind of unsubstantial in my view. My friends would play Diablo 2 or Counter strike, and those games were also miserably tedious when reduced to their core game mechanic or whatever is considered meta at the time.