Necromancers could summon a player's corpse if they were within some distance, like 500 meters. So Necros would camp out near famously tricky areas, and offer to pull corpses for 10 platinum pieces ("10pp") a pop.
Enchanters and Druids were the only classes with a teleport spell, so likewise they'd charge a small fee to teleport players across the continents, like from Qeynos to Freeport. Sometimes a chanter would spend an hour or three grinding out teleport runs like an Uber driver (we didn't know that analogy - uber wouldn't exist for another 10 years!) to make some extra cash.
And there was no auction house at all. The de facto auction location was a big cave in the desert outside Freeport. Players would all meet there and post in the general chat, hawking their goods:
someguy: WTS Swarmcaller LEGENDARY bow for ranger 1k
coolwizard: WTB pally helmet
lesscoolpriest: WTS leather pelts 5g each
Fun times. I miss that sort of emergent magic.
But then games like EQ came out and made things easier for players, and that put pressure on UO devs to make their game easier, and eventually with time UO became a boring safe game rather than a true virtual world.
Great game though, AC.
Looking at the popularity of the Soulslike games, I don't think that's true. I think what people want is a system which feels fair.
A big part of fairness is not letting randoms online destroy your stuff & progress. Stories about UO often fall into that vein. Ways in which some player made life hell for another player. Honestly doesn't sound like much fun to me. I can see why many players wouldn't want to be part of such a system.
In actual reality we are wired to seek unfair situations - we intrinsically prefer scenarios in which we have an unfair advantage. Scenarios in which the advantage is unknown or in which we even are disadvantaged are fundamentally unsettling to us because we have been programmed by billions of years of evolutionary programming to avoid those kind of scenarios! Games that present us with these kind of unfair advantages disguised as 'fair' are in fact wildly popular for exactly that reason.
Much of that is dead now, unless you are in or can join a community that preexists.
I remember using my bear in WoW to tank as a hunter because we got bored waiting for a tank to become available and one of the dps suggested we try because getting another dps was easy and it was better than sitting around stormwind.
If you didn't care how fast the instance or non-instanced outdoor "dungeon" was progressing (and you had to manage a certain speed, or you'd eventually get swamped by respawns, when that was still a thing), you could do it as long as the group could balance aggro (and/or kite, when that was also still a thing), with damage and healing. We did some really wacky group compositions back then, because that was what we had. And the old talent-trees encouraged it, as a shaman or paladin or druid (or even warrior) could take some talents to let them tank better, while still keeping their character viable for solo-questing or as a dps. And the game and other players didn't actively punish you for being sub-optimal. (I.e. you could, to an extent, successfully aim for breadth instead of depth, because other players were more accepting of the trade-offs involved, for a variety of social and practical reasons.)
I leveled my pally back in the day as a holy/prot hybrid pretty much exclusively via group questing and dungeon runs. Having decent gear for both roles and understanding the abilities was even more important than talent choice, although good talent choice helped. I remember a great deal of my healing set was leather or cloth, because that's what had the best stats for it, which in turn made it problematic to switch roles mid-fight. I suspect that today, even if I could re-build the character as a working hybrid, it would be an unpopular choice because I wouldn't be as fast as a specialist. But "In the Good Old Days" success and good play still mattered.
The fun part is the priest core was the only group that for our nature resist gear. So we tanked that week.
I remember when I played both that and FFIX. I'd spend 7 hours looking for a group in FF on a Saturday, get to the dungeon, wipe right away, level down and the group would disband. Logging on became more and more rare but wow wasn't punishing.
This was and still is completely standard on MUDs, which Everquest and pretty much all other MMO's were strongly influenced by.
Indeed, Dark Age of Camelot was a direct successor to the Darkness Falls MUDs. Its gameplay was essentially the same, it just rendered the world in 3D rather than text.
I always wondered why I could never ride the dragon again with anything that came since. Was it because I was much younger when I played EQ for the first time, so nothing to do with the game, but all to do with me? Was it the kind alternatives on the market for gaming experiences? But I think you're right, it likely was about the comparative undersaturation with social experiences on the Internet of 1999. The best I had going on for me sociall online were a couple of friends I had added on IRC from my months of playing Myth The Fallen Lords online. What an era.
One thing that made EverQuest good were the sounds. They were mesmerizing at times.
That's weird. The vast majority of my time in MMOs is raiding, not leveling. Leveling is boring, filler content. I don't know why it should have such a strong emphasis in any game.
Automation replacing human contact (ticket counter closures). Convenience replacing experience (empty high streets)
Change works both ways.
I am re-writing a long rant that I just deleted in response to this; but let me distill it as concisely as I can :
Star Vault repeatedly mismanaged Mortal Online, burned lots of members of a small niche community with repeated character wipes and hacking incidents, and did not take the appropriate steps to address issues that finally resulted in the total loss of confidence in the persistent world by many early fans.
After all that -- and with Mortal Online I about 30% done with respect to the early crowdfund goals, they announce Mortal II and divert an already small staff elsewhere , throwing the early game into maintenance.
tl;dr : people play these games, but they can only take so much abuse.
For example, if you died, your corpse was where you died. You reappeared with literally no gear. If that was deep in a dungeon (Sebilis anyone?) then recovering it might be nontrivial. This led to corpse-run ("CR") groups. If you failed to get your corpse within a week it would disappear taking all your stuff.
You also lost XP when you died.
Another example: wood elves started in Kelethin, which was platforms in the trees with no rails. It was a rite of passage to fall off those passages and die. If you were fighting under the city at times you'd often see newbies falling to their deaths.
Travel originally was originally nontrivial too. One continent had a big city on each side (Qeynos and Freeport) and it was almost another rite of passage to do the Qeynos to Freeport run as a low-level (which could take 30-60 minutes IIRC) because you wanted to level somewhere else.
This is a genre I wish there was life in but sadly I think it's time has come and gone. A big part of what drove it was that it was the era before social networks. You met people in MMOs. Now? Everything is so results-oriented. Play a modern MMO and to do a dungeon you just queue, join, kill things off the checklist and then leave. You may never talk to anyone. People may leave mid-dungeon and get replaced without you ever noticing.
It's interesting to see how many small changes players demand ultimately kill the genre. Levelling too slow? Eliminate it. Um, what? That's half the game. Dungeon queueing. Raid queueing. Solo content, which has definite merits also means you rarely have to talk to or cooperate with anyone to get a lot of things done.