Been years since I read this Furor rant but it really captured the feelings of a lot of EQ players at the time. Most modern day EQ TLP players love to take big shits on WoW, and stroke to "how hard" old EQ was (it wasn't) but the people actually playing through PoP and later Gates really were getting tired of all the shitty quality of life and poor game design issues. These weren't your casuals who were crying the game was too hard (although you did have that), it was the top tier raiders that were tired of content that was continually being released in an unfinished/broken state. There's a reason so many jumped to WoW and I've always said Vanilla and BC WoW, if you went straight from EQ into WoW and played through BC it was really the "perfect" MMO experience. That era WoW honestly was like "EverQuest where they fixed all the shit that sucked beyond belief, and where they had professional artists and game builders actually add polish to the whole game."
The stuff about crafting obviously never quite made it into WoW, but there was some cool stuff that involved clearing down to the Dark Iron Forge in Blackrock Depths. Not to mention the whole Quel'serrar questline was pretty amazing and very "EQ-like", it involved looting from a mob or finding on the ground a "Foror's Compendium of Dragonslaying", which was insanely rare. This book sold for 4,000-6,000g on my server back when that was a King's ransom, and I was a guy who farmed Dire Maul like 5-6 times a day in a set group just for fun in between raids and in hundreds and hundreds of Dire Maul runs we found exactly one compendium on the ground. Finishing the blade required a really cool questline that involved having to temper the blade in Onyxia's flame breath and then quench it in her dead body.
I actually think an MMO that a lot of the EQ TLPers would like would be one not designed with old EQ as its baseline, but old WoW. Don't have all the nonsensical quality of life issues of old EQ but don't have all the watered down cookie-cutter blandness of modern WoW.
In my mind the two biggest things to kill the MMO genre (and why I think some of us keep going to TLPs) are:
1. The players. They just got too good for this genre to have the sense of wonder/excitement in it that very early EQ and even early WoW had. Where you could actually spend hours exploring the world and discovering something new. Players have become so sophisticated at not just tearing content apart, but at sharing and documenting it for others, that any modern MMO everyone knows everything about it before the content is even live. I don't think there is any way to ever get this genie back in the bottle.
2. Games believing they have to perfectly balance all the classes in the game. Doing this makes classes cookie-cutter versions of one another and is a big reason so many MMOs are bland as fuck.
