I was 22 and my boyfriend, all our friends and I had been playing Gemstone 3, a text mud. When I heard about Everquest it was talk about the release of Kunark and so my BF and I bough a copy to share, and that lasted about a week
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] We bough another copy and flipped a coin to see who had to make a new char and I won the original copy we had.
What I loved best was the feeling of a permanent world. In GS3 you could forget there was a river in the room description. In EQ you could not forget about the terrain, it existed. Exploring felt like exploring, not just looking for keywords to move to the next set of descriptions.
I also loved that EQ made you be good at your class. It didn't hold your hand when things started to go wrong, it kicked you in the head. The bar for average was set very high, and exceptional players could turn a good group into a great one. Casters had to learn to trust the melee, sit down blind, and med if they wanted to be useful. Melee had to learn how to pick targets and control target movement. Everyone had to learn panic kills, always.