I started playing Everquest the day it came out of Beta. I had a friend in beta and I spent hours at his house playing it with him. I fell in love with it.
A few months later they opened a new server called "The Nameless" server. I started a toon on it and spent over 5 years playing there. I was in a guild called Sanctuary that accepted a little gnome rogue as a new member. His name was Tigole. I had played with him quite a bit and recommended him to the guild. The guild split up months later but had become a large name on the server and was only second to a guild called Legacy of Steel. when the guild split, some of us went to LoS. Tigole was one of us. He eventually became guild leader. LoS became one - if not the top - guild in Everquest. Completed many things before other top guilds were even thinking about going to the area. Now he is Lead Game Play designer or something like that for World of Warcraft! Talk about doing something you love!
You can see him in several places in WoW. Tigule and Foror's ice cream, etc. (Furor was leader of Fires of Heaven guild on the Veeshan server).
While I do like Everquest more than WoW, I had to let go of EQ because of the intensive schedule doing raids in a top guild. I could not just play it casually. I tried by starting over on another server and telling myself "casual only". Well, I joined a guild, ended up becoming leader and starting the raid process again. I just quit completely.
WoW is a lot easier to be a casual player and still do end game stuff. You could not do that in EQ.
That was the reason I never really played it very long...