When did Everquest start to really decline in quality of experience?

[Jibartik]

I was thinking, I figured it out.

When they made an expansion.

Now hear me out!

This game is great, we just played through 10 years of kunark, without a broken economy. It proved to me it's one of the most well designed games in history.

So here's when EQ started to go down hill, when they released an expansion, 1 year after launch, setting up the precident, that they would continue to release expansions, every 1 year thereafter.

That is what killed everquest, the fast grind of expansion after expansion, to keep new players coming in, and ignoring the things that old players loved: The content they were already playing.