Advice needed - how to gain traction as a truly new player?

[Splorf22]

My rule of thumb is that gaining a level in EQ will require about 5 hours of XP time with a good group - of course that does not include questing, travel, getting trained and dying, corpse recovery, playing with 3 rangers in the group, or the bonus "hell" levels which include every level 51-60, etc. I believe my Magician on live had something like 30 days played when he hit 50, and my enchanter had more like 12-15. To like EQ, you have to be very goal oriented and somewhat masochistic.

That said:

I would echo what the previous posters have said. Go read the ZEM list. Both Blackburrow and Crushbone will level you up better than EC I think, and after that it's all about Guktop and Unrest. After that it's a bit harder to find a zone with a great ZEM unless you can drag people out to Kaesora.

You will level a LOT faster now than I did a year ago because you can group with ubertwinks (see Clever's thread where he plans to buy a Cloak of Flames for his L1 monk) plus periodically people will come by and throw buffs on you which also helps a lot.

Generally speaking the leveling zones are a lot less crowded than they were a year ago.

Finally, what are you going to do when you get to high level anyway? If you get to 50+ and want high end gear of the type IB is preparing to RMT, you have to join a raiding guild, sign up your cell phone, and jump out of bed at 5AM to go kill mobs before the other guild (currently TMO and VD are guilds 1 and 1A on the server at doing this). It's basically a second job. Your alternative is to join a second tier guild like BDA or Taken, which is fun but you'll never even see the endgame content. So the high end game is kinda rough on this server.