The Everquests certainly seem dated today, but for their time, they were pretty neat! The gameplay was simple (especially by today's standards), but it was a pretty unforgiving game that required a lot of teamwork. It was the social aspect that kept most people playing, I think, especially in guilds.

I remember a lot of the playerbase kept asking for significant changes to make the game less grindy and hardcore, but the main game designer would always push back and reiterate The Vision™ (in their words) and stick to their plans. Not only did they not ask for feedback, they would actively fight back against it and reinforce their stance. Well, they must've done something right... 25 years later, EQ is still alive, celebrating its anniversary, and making new expansions (after several sets of publisher/developer changes, though).

If not for EQ, we wouldn't have had World of Warcraft and all the other MMOs. But today's MMOs have all become basically "massively singleplayer" in that grouping is rare outside of guilds and limited end-game raids, with bots and boosters of various sorts taking the place of what used to require multiple real people (AI really IS ruining everything!)

The social aspect has been heavily deemphasized nowadays (Diablo and Destiny don't even have global chats anymore) and you mostly just see the ghosts of people doing their own things with no real need to interact with them anymore. Too bad =/

Showing off /pizza or other fun commands (emotes, music, crafting, etc.) was a big part of the old-school experience. These days there are still some semi-social MMOs (New World has an awesome group music jamming system, where multiple people can get together and jam like Rock Band/Guitar Hero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggWZJNnaLNU)... but sadly no more in-game pizza that I know of.

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If anyone's looking for an old-school MMO in the style of EQ, Project Gorgon is an indie MMO made by (I believe) a mom-and-pop dev team: https://store.steampowered.com/app/342940/Project_Gorgon/

Game programmers: it’s a video game, we don’t need the same kind of application security that other programs do

Hacker: Hold my beer while I exploit this dude’s game client and makes it order 10,000 pizzas to his door