I think there is a twin problem of too many convenience features added, and the advent of Youtube and community wikis. The former has turned the process of get

I think there is a twin problem of too many convenience features added, and the advent of Youtube and community wikis. The former has turned the process of getting from one end of the map other, and that of forming groups for dungeons and such, virtually effortless. As best i recall, if you wanted to travel to another city without doing it overland in EQ, you had to locate a player character wizard with the right spell unlocked and the right reagents on hand. Similarly if you died far out in the wilderness you had to rely on a PC necromancer services to recover the corpse and gear. These days you can just click a npc, pay some in game currency and presto, either problem solved. Similarly you can these days just put a checkmark next to the dungeons wanted, hit "find group" and be teleported to the entrance. The other issue is access to outside information. Just about every puzzle and dungeon will have multiple video guides up on Youtube etc within days of game launch or update. And most games these days have wikis that are either officially or community maintained. These things kill all sense of wonder and exploration, as one can always alt-tab to the browser to tell what one need to do next. edit: Never mind that most overland areas are specifically designed to be soloed no matter what class or gear one have chosen. Just follow the virtual breadcrumbs of quest markers and you will be max level and can start on "endgame" before you know it. At that point the MMO turns into an overly elaborate lobby game, as nobody ventures out into the overland areas ever again. And we can see this in how more recent MMOs are set up with quite elaborate shard/instance load balancing. Meaning that they can scale the server farm up or down without ever taking a whole "realm" or named server offline.