It's pleasure and pain with classic EQ. There are EQ days where you've really looked forward to sitting down and playing for a few hours and getting some exp on your level 53 char only to:
a) have to wait for a spot in a group
b) have the group wipe 5 mins after you join
c) have the tank leave after the CR and your group spending the next 20 mins twiddling your thumbs while looking for a replacement
d) have your healer be afk with no tag when you finally get a tank replacement
e) wipe on the second pull after healer finally got back
f) have the group disbanding
g) realize it's an hour later than you had planned to play for and logging with less exp than when you logged on and having to get your corpse tomorrow.
You then ask yourself why oh why do I do this to myself. And why indeed? Obviously if experiences like that were the norm it would be too dire, but I mean it's part of what makes the reward feel so immense (just reaching maximum level).
I never played during vanilla EQ and I'm yet to really play on green. But imagine it's all pretty hard core.
If you can't keep your sanity while focusing on the long term goals and thrive with that then maybe it just isn't your cup of tea.
I mean Blizzard cherry picked the best elements from EQ and then completely (nearly anyway) did away with down time and bottle necks etc. It worked a charm. They pretty much blew EQ out of the water and EQ spent the next several years trying to copy WoW with all sorts of "QoL" improvements to the game. But hand-holding leads to generic gaming experiences imo. There's a reason I don't play WoW (even classic WoW) but am a sucker for Blue 99
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