Essentially Everquest was founded upon the idea of honest discovery. They did not equip players with a ton of information so indeed, if you did not look up things like spell information or maps outside the game, you had to learn through trial and error how things worked and where things were. Frustrating as it might have been at times, it forced a great deal of player interaction and cooperation which in turn became the foundation of the community as a whole.
The general lack of game knowledge was rather quickly thwarted by websites like Allakhazam, EQAtlas, EQTraders and so forth, but the basic principal of having to discover things for yourself still remained. The game simply was not going to hand you any of this information so even the act of going to these other sites was in a sense forcing players to figure things out for themselves and/or rely upon the community at large.
Obviously games are no longer made this way to which I of course would argue this is one of the primary reasons most games have an extremely limited sense of community within them now, including Everquest itself.
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