Well of course you'd want people to stick around. If people got 65 within a day, how many players do you think Everquest would have? Besides which, some of us actually like a challenge. It takes no more than a week for a player to get to 30-40 untwinked with the recent zones put into the game.
How does the length of time it takes you to level up change the challenge :P? ZAngband is much tougher than most games and I've managed to get to level 15(level 50 is the max) with one kill and it really didn't help much other than speeding up my initial start a bit. Making the leveling up process slow is only a cheap way of adding gameplay time. That was my biggest gripe with Everquest. The only three hours I spent playing was killing rats and bats for 3 hours only to get a few levels. This is way too painfully slow. And even if it takes a long time to get higher levels the first 10 or so levels should go by quickly so the player can get onto doing more interesting and a larger variety of things.
--Like the name change service they have... Something like that, the computer can do and doesn't even need a GM to do it... Of course you would need to pay in say pp, but real money? no
--Like necromancers and wizards can just mana burn an enemy to death (necros actually don't even need to do that), then wait not too much time at all for their mana to recharge, when people like warriors (like my main character) who eather have to be EXTREMELY twinked, or else they gotta group, have to wait like 30 min after every single kill to kill another.
--Yeah, with only like 3 classes... All other classes it takes absolutely FOREVER to get to 65 considering how hard it is for some classes to solo. Even twinked gear doesn't help enough.
--Of course the plains, but places you go in say a group or solo for experience, and then have a mishap and have everyone die in the middle of them is an example. Some places like this are Velks (lower dogs) and Greigs End.
--The thing is, is if you are in a far off area where no one goes, it can sometimes be quite hard to get a corpse summon, let alone a rez. An example of this is when we tried to take out the horse-looking sarnak in the bottom of Kaesora with 3 people at a lower level, and we had a small incident where we were jumped and everyone died. We couldn't get our corpses till the next day when another guild's 51+ cleric was amazingly in there at the bottom (thanks to my constant searching of the "who" command :P)
Anyways, I stopped playing EQ last year because it's too much of a waste of life, as with all the popular MMORPGs.
Bye bye, Ulrech Goreblade, warrior of Tarrew Marr :P