>Please reply. Thanks.

Well, you did ask for it. ;)

I'm going to limit myself to going in a different direction than I've seen thus far in this thread, rather than 'me too' all the things that've been said so far that I do agree with.

The fundamental disconnect seems to be this: For you, the real game seems to start at hero. For me, it's anything but.

I may have my biases there because I discovered, at some point, that if I had a character running around at hero, people would tend to know who it was, but in the lower levels I could keep my anonymity a very long time. CF ceased to be a race to rank to the top for me, if it ever was.

If ranking seems like an N hour rat race to hero, that's something I might be inclined to correct, but *not* by making it shorter. Rather, by making the journey more fun:

1) You shouldn't be able to auto-pilot ranking, or, if you do, it should be a relatively unrewarding choice. There are areas in the game in which one can choose to gain experience that are extremely dangerous, either because of a dangerous environment, high risk of PK, or relatively smart mobs. These should be the most rewarding, experience-wise. As an example, some of us remember when the Mausoleum first came in -- for the proper level range, you'd level twice as fast there as anywhere else in the game... but you'd also die just that fast if anyone in your group did something dumb. I assure you, levelling there was anything but boring.

2) Do people just not PK, RP, cabalraid, explore, etc. pre-hero anymore? If so, why not?

That's all I have time to post at the moment.