No, nightblindness for 3 of 12 races did not slow the game down. Players who wanted a faster game dumped their nightblind characters and were not slowed down at all. Players who started as one of the other 9 races because that's waht they wanted to do out of the box were not slowed down at all.
Some of the players slowed the game down. Others took down Nagafen & Vox within a few months of server up despite all of the limitations of the UI & mechanics. I still recall the GM's serverwide shout when Vox went down the first time on Tunare server (26 players from 5 guilds, imagine that nowadays, lol.)
Dunno what kind of nostalgia's filtering your view, but it's pretty skewed from how the game I started playing in July of '99 went down.
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