My friend and I had pretty similar taste in video games, but I had only dipped my toes in live EQ whereas he went full in and was in a hardcore raid guild by the time WoW was coming around.
When WoW came out I thought it was the answer to all our mmorpg prayers, but he wasn't impressed and barely touched it. I did get the feeling though that it was mostly because he had already put 10,000 hours into progress questing, and doing it again from scratch wasn't appealing, rather than any particular shortcomings of the game or superiority of everquest.
It's hard to say Vanilla WoW as it existed 2004-2007 wasn't an outright superior experience to 99% of everquest though. To me its only on replayability where it falls short. Once you've mastered the mechanics of WoW and the content, there's less depth and less variety compared to EQ. Its shorter, more condensed, and more on rails. But I don't think any of that was really a factor when you and everybody else was starting fresh and blind. It's hard to overstate its impact and how it was experienced compared to the competition.
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