>>14352120
>About what point in the game's life would you say was the golden age?
Difficult to say, maybe shortly after Factions came out. No Heroes, lot's of new players in PvE in both Prophecies and Factions, major PvP guilds were well established and the Faction war shook things up a little but not too much, start of the Luxon/Kurzick rivalry which played a part in which guild you were in, some people left longtime guildmates to join rival guilds as players disagreed with guild leaders over whether they should be Luxon or Kurzick, The Deep and Urgoz Warren provided more endgame content, it was a time before everything was datamined and rumors and exploration abound in the chat, more bosses to skillcap etc. In general players had sort of found their footing at this point but the content was fresh. I feel like the first expansion might be peak for a lot of MMO's now that I think about it, players aren't going in blind but neither are the mechanics tired. I didn't play GW on release, I started shortly before Factions came out but I remember their being lot's of arguments online about exactly what kind of game it (prophecies) would be, some people thought it would be more akin to EQ and WoW, but by the time Factions came out everyone who stuck with the game was playing it for what it was and because they loved what it was. What exactly it was is difficult to put into words since their is no game exactly like GW to compare it too, it had elements of MTG, of Diablo, of EQ/WoW, of PSO, but played nothing like any of them.
>filled with illiterate emo kids
I don't know about emo, but the mid 2000's were the years when chatspeak was at it's most insufferably and I have to admit, there were more people in PUG's speaking in sentences that looked like they'd had all the vowels surgically removed than I found comfortable, but I wouldn't say this was exclusively a GW problem. Keep in mind there was less of a dependence on voice chat back then (though in my opinion that was a good thing.)