I do find it amazing the rose-tinted glasses a lot of people seem to have regarding MMO 'hardcore' progression. I played EQ1 from late beta, and it had plenty of 'hardcore' moments in its history, especially during the Velious and Luclin expansions. The problem was they didn't do instanced content in those days. So not only did you have your insane grindfests for leveling and AA points, along with insane key camps .. (Gotta get all 36 people in the raid force that dragon drop off one of the three mobs who only spawns once a week that every other guild is also hunting so we can all be keyed to go into Sleepers! Don't even get me started on Vex Thal...) but once we were keyed, we either had to deliberately fight to lock other guilds out of completing their key quests, or risk losing our once a week shot at the raid content! Was there something for your raid force to do every raid night? Probably. Was it fun? Sometimes, but sometimes it was killing Emp for the 2320325th time to make sure people couldn't complete their VT keys when nobody in the raid needed a drop anymore.