>- Top tier players understood that skill percentages mattered
> in many ways, more than today, prereq-based skills/spells
>excepted) and how to bot them up; most players had no idea
>they were even all that relevant.

Skill practice is tons harder now. Nowadays, I don't even try, I just accept the disadvantage of having everything around 80%, because perfecting things is way too time consuming for my level of patience. When you could just fight infinity weak mobs to perfect defenses fast, and every skill went up easy and fewer mobs had troublesome combat moves, it was easy to perfect anything that mattered.

And I can't speak for everyone, but as a newbie I greatly overestimated how important skill percentages are. For example, I just assumed that it affected the potency (not just success rate) of all skills (including mage spells). Furthermore, it was only a couple years ago I really accepted that the whole "skills don't matter" vibe the staff used to promote is bs.