Just remember, all those discussing EQ are doing so through rose colored glasses. EQ had one of the worst track records ever created when it came to bugs and game content. Large quests to get keys just to enter a zone that wasn't finished, quests that took months and ended with a NPC eating the turn-in item, quests that went absolutely nowhere because they were never finished or were partially removed from the game, mobs would teleport, mobs could kill you from underneath the world, mobs would often attack through walls, dungeons that were so utterly completely full that level 5 rogues could walk to the end of the dungeon and beg for items (this is where the original NEED for instancing came from, thank you lguk), people would zone into a new area and end up naked with absolutely nothing in their bank and have to get restores, mob pathing that would cause a mob in front of you to turn around and run all the way through the entire dungeon to get to you, invis bugs where someone would be invis but still get seen by monsters that shouldn't see invis (often requiring every person to actively test their invis to see if they had the bugged invis).
Were the players any better? Let's see, training giants and spectres down the beach of oasis. Training spectres to the ogre starting city from POF portal. Shadowknights would HT mobs to kill steal (hence the need for encounter locks in EQ2 / WoW first hit claim). General loot whoring and bitchyness that went on in any raid guild. Ninja looting (hence the need for 90% of games after EQ having loot master modes / etc). Tons of duping, z-axis exploiting, path exploiting and other bug abusers. EQ had at least 2 massive 3rd party exploit programs.
By now you'd probably think I hated EQ, but I didn't. I enjoyed it for what it was, just like I enjoy WoW for what it is. The difference is I can sit down and acknowledge that both games have pros and cons unlike RBachman who will spend 7 pages trying to sell you on the fact that EQ was perfect, the community was mature and WoW is a living hell.
Oh and Rbachman, the term you are looking for is "Mudflation", it is the term by which gear continues to improve at such large leaps and bounds until it is obsurd, trivializing previous encounters and ruining the game to a certain degree. It got its name because it was used extremely often in MUDs. And it started happening in EQ the second they added Kunark, you noting it in POP just shows your tolerance to it. Most people remember Kunark as the start of it, because Kunark added gear with other classes spells, something most people thought of as mudflation and the destruction of class dependancy.
Enjoy.