I've played three characters to mid-30s and then given up on them all. First up was my Mage on Whisperwind. Got up to 30-something and started getting bored, so I started a Rogue "alt" that I proceeded to play exclusively until I passed my Mage in level. Got to about 35ish, got bored again because my guild was crap, left.
Then the whole Penny-Arcade thing happened, so I signed up again, made a Rogue & joined Annarchy. So like, I had an awesome guild & everything and was running dungeons and getting some nice equipment. Then I hit mid-30s again and it started to get boring.
In the first instance I'm pretty sure it got boring because it went from being easy to solo the interesting/useful content to close to impossible without a group. I remember the final straw for me being a cavern full of troggs in Arathi. I was doing a quest that was supposed to be ok (yellow? green? can't remember) and non-elite. Went into the cavern and started killing the troggs, because they dropped something or other, I guess. Or I had to mine something in the cavern? Whatever. Thing is that where I used to be able to take two things at a time easily it was quickly becoming a case of "you can kill one thing at a time ok, but if something else comes along then watch out".
Basically it was reminding me of Everquest, where I was grinding through mobs one at a time, slowly edging my xp up so that I could get up to the higher levels where the "interesting" content was. However, I don't understand why, because I'm not going to be taking part in the supposedly "interesting" content, because raiding takes a lot of time and is pretty goddamn boring. Basically I was trying to grind my way towards the good stuff instead of enjoying myself along the way, which is totally awful when you think about it.
In the second case I'm pretty sure that it was getting ganked by multiple lvl fuck Hordes over and over and over and over and over again whenever I tried to do anything anywhere that made me give up. I know I can call in support and so forth, but seriously, We'd call in support, wait maybe 15 mins, maybe an hour for them to arrive. They'd see them off, then they'd pop up someplace else on the map. The night would turn into a game of fucking whack-a-mole, with me trying to avoid the moles while the hammer did its work.
Is it so goddamn hard to make an MMORPG where it is feasible to solo without getting bored and leaving? I mean, right up to around the Wetlands/Duskwood I was totally sold on WoW. I had some really fun times in the excavation site there, then I figured out a way to break up that Orc camp warchief's little posse solo and had probably the best fun I've ever had in a MMORPG. You try to make the move into STV and it just turns to shit. I just want to be able to keep doing that & have grouping as an option, not be shown that grouping is basically the only way that I'm going to be able to do anything interesting past a certain point & that I better just put my head down, ass up & grind up to 60 anyway if I want to do anything fun. That's not fun to me. I can powergame with the best of them, but I also like taking my time about it.