We tend to remember painful things fondly once the experience has had time to mellow, and that's how I remember exploration in Everquest.

In the early days, the game was unapologetic in letting you get in over your head. In fact, it was designed to kill you. Lower level zones often had high-level wandering menaces like Sand Giants that would squash the unwary. The aggro system and Z-axis bugs made delving deeply into dungeons (e.g. Lower Guk) hazardous with a disciplined group and foolhardy with a band of strangers. Just seeing some corners of the game took an incredible amount of perseverance. Some of my stand-out memories of the game were from when my friends and I got into areas we really weren't ready for, but somehow still made it work. Modern MMO's usually hold your hand and either warn or outright block you from content you're too low level or poorly equipped for. Everquest gleefully murdered you.

It really is amazing how the way people play MMO's crystallized in this era though. Everquest was a group game, so I played with a group of real life friends who were all in voice chat together. That coordination and the fact that they were some pretty smart people let us do some amazing things. Once some of us left, it was inevitable that all of us would. Playing the game without the full group felt like playing with an arm tied behind your back.

Everquest had an interesting design philosophy. A modern MMO, like FFXIV, carefully balances and playtests content so that it's challenging but just possible with known tactics performed completely without error, then easier for mere mortals once people get better gear. SonyEQ designed encounters that were flat-out impossible and waited for uberguilds to find a way that often involved an exploit that would not be fixed but, rather, become a long-standing key mechanic.

e.g. In the Scars of velious expansion, there was a frost giant world boss that was unusually hard-hitting. If you put a main tank on him, sooner or later he'd get blasted with more health than was in his entire bar and die. Then the giant would chew through half your guild in less time than it would take to get heals rolling on a new tank. The solution was a spell that healed your tank to full health when his health was reduced to zero. That spell was probabilistic. Normally, it failed with a high enough probability that tanks died reliably, and hence this frost giant baddy remained unkilled. Then somebody figured out that the spell's success rate increased to 100% if the tank had enough charisma. Uber-guilds that discovered this secret guarded it jealously, since that meant other uberguilds would fail when they tried to take on the giant and then the task (and ph4t l3wts) would fall to a guild that knew the secret.

This sort of thing happened over and over, and good guilds invariably had players who messed around with all the game's systems to find helpful tricks. Some called them "exploits", but SonyEQ never fixed them or punished players for using them. They designed impossible content and players found a way to do it. Heck, high level raids came to be entirely based upon the skilled exploitation of the Monk's feign death ability. Without a monk who knew what he was doing you simply couldn't do raid content.

EQ was a wild and wooly arms race between players and developers. Most MMO's are are lot more civilized these days.