What made EQ great was the community and complete ignorance of everyone involved. No one shared raid strats because of the non-instanced content, and if you went online for information (even up to Velious) what you found was either incomplete or straight wrong. Being part of the brain trust of your guild coming up with strats is really, really fun and something that no longer exists in games.
The lack of information and experience allowed the developers get away with so much bullshit. When things were broken they were "working as intended". When stuff didn't exist in game, random people would lie to you about how it was in game and a friend of a friend swears it exists. For someone with a lot of free time that created opportunities for you to waste time "exploring" things that weren't there.
What made EQ great was the people you played with and the fact it was the only game around to play. As soon as better options were available you lost touch with people and the community fractured into dozens of games.