No love for EverQuest? Any MMO I've played since hasn't held a candle to the world design and enduring sense of mystery and wonder EverQuest was able to spark in my fragile little boyhood heart.

I went back to play in a "static" group on the old school Project 1994 servers a couple years ago. Buncha strangers agreeing to meet online a couple times a week to play, drink some fancy beers and shoot the shit. No wonder lost. That thing is still a place of glory.

WoW was the beginning of the end for the genre, in my opinion. Everything about it was smoothed over in all the wrong places. The art design and worldbuilding were just not good, especially when you consider the lore was a hobbled together mess of inheritance. The Colosseum legionnaires of the Iksar in their jungle and swamped wilds or the truly monstrous trolls selling dwarf bits that could have been pulled straight from some Nordic fairytales: that's some love of the grim imagination.