Yeah you even had special set of implants you only used to equip gear with. Ones that would put you just over the edge to get that gun or piece of armor on. But you needed other "stepping" implants to get those on in the first place. It was like a puzzle you had to solve. Shit I remember like at lv 130ish or whatever it was you could equip lv 200 stuff. Lv130ish engineers running around with lv200 pets. It was its own little meta game.
The game was a mess in the beginning but still, it had a certain charm to it. It was also very innovative for the time, introducing shit like instances, beginning of procedural generated content. It even had social dungeons that would pop another instance if it was too full. Shit that was all new at the time. Also shit like their chat engine, man how creative was that? You could literally set up bots that would track your guild, attendance, DKP, they were the first to have linked items in chat....