I have played Eve Online so many hours, and it’s a bad game. Don’t do it. you will spend hundreds of hours dreaming about the cool thing you’ll do later, but for 99% of players the cool thing will never happen. You will be part of the one percent’s cool thing.
Do you have a similar game?
It felt like vanilla wow was inherently more interesting than retail. Classic felt dated, but it also felt more interesting than modern MMOs, because the game wasn’t afraid of player interaction.
I think today companies have found that the most profitable way to run an MMO is to prevent any player from being inconvenienced, especially by another player. So over time they got rid of mage portals, and quests that required you to have a player craft something, and gave everyone the ability to self heal and fight multiple mobs at once. And of course, RDF. Slowly WoW became a single player game, and any dependency on another player was seen as an outlier experience that provoked a toxic player response.
I still wish there was a non-MMO game that replicated the wow raiding experience, but afaik nothing like it exists. Which is part of why I still play wrath classic.
But classic wow as an MMO is functionally dead.