When EQ was new, the player base was so small (and with mostly no other frame of reference) timed mobs, etc, worked. Not because it was a good system, but because the game never exploded in terms of popularity so to speak. When WoW launched, it became popular quite fast, but the only fix they had to do was mostly hardware. We all remember the opening months, where lag was so bad that when you did the animation to bend down to loot something, you kept moving in a floaty bent down position. It took months to fix that. But adding millions of players to the game didn't really impact peoples enjoyment of the game other than login queues and in game possibly crowded quest locations. But an increase in player count never limited your ability to do X content.
So, while I am not a game dev, that is the way I would look at any base system of a game. "What if the game exploded like wow?" Say suddenly a new, not thought of market, started playing for whatever reason. Suddenly your servers are chocked, it is a luxury problem for a dev, as they need to invest in hardware/servers, but they're being paid for by a massive customer base. However, once they get in, how do the number of players affect the players themselves? If a limited beta of two to three guilds can create such ridiculous drama thing as the one a few pages back in terms of world/raid spawns, then that is not a good system.
I am not saying you need to make a game that tries to cater to everyone (that would probably end up catering to noone). You can have lots of old school systems like slower leveling, no/limited maps, more focus on group play, slower group play where you sit around a camp and don't constantly move, corpse runs, trains (and not have mobs tethered). All of these are EQ like, and while for sure limiting the amount of players interested in it, the game still works so to speak no matter how many players you add to it.
There are many things EQ did that I miss from MMOs today, but a PvE world where everything is contested? That's not good design imo. You can absolutely have some things contested, and I love larger zones/dungeons where you do camp checks and see other people playing. Especially some high level areas mixed with low level areas where you suddenly get mega buffed by a 30 level higher player that runs by on the way to some dark corner of the zone. But to have all content required to "progress" contested? No. That's not something that would not cause problems if your game became a success. Unless the idea is to have very small servers, but again... 2-3 guilds are enough to cause such issues, it would be the death for any "casual" raiding guild. So they would never form, why would they?
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