i just love MMOs and nothing has kept its integrity as far as serving an MMO community and not adjusting continuously in pursuit of capturing the next new player.
EQ just respects the long term more than most. ive found myself coming back to it over and over again when i want a real project. all my other MMO pursuits have practically spat in my face by undermining everything they sold to me at the start (BDO being the latest in a long tine). they always pulll the rug on me eventually by changing the game to suit a new audience.
i started EQ back in 99 and i was 7 years old. it just blew me away being able to play with people. people took me under their wing and to me i saw them as heroes. i also played with my dad and it was my primary connection to him since i saw him only once every couple of weeks and he slept half the time cause he worked nights. i grew up with my "imagination play" with my brother about being in norrath, fighting skeletons and raiding crushbone castle. its tied in my mind for "core of what fantasy is" with lord of the rings.
theres also different flavors for me too which is a huge factor. i can go on live and raid, i can go on live and box a whole team and play the game in a totally different way either manually or with mq2 automation so that the game plays at a totally different level, or i can hop back onto p99 where my characters have been patiently sitting for nearly a decade now and the world is just waiting for me to hop back in, exactly the same as it was. if i hop on any of my other MMO's, its like i go back and my characters are just some low level jabronis even though they used to be all-powerful. EQ has just been a fixture of stability in my life where i can still point to the things i love about it and they still exist, they arent just a remnant of "the good old days". they may be split up into p99, progression, and live server... but they are still there. its my "theres always money in the banana stand" fall back for gaming