On of my first experiences in EQ was visiting a low level dungeon, called Befallen, and falling down a well I couldn't see in the dark, down the very bottom of the dungeon. There was no hope of me getting back to it alone. Yet some necromancer, who may or not have been female, happened to be down there messing around. She found my corpse, came to the surface and guided me back down to it.
I relived this same experience two or three dozen times in the three years I played EQ. Falling down The Hole during raid...needing help in the Estate of Unrest when I'd snuck far too deep in to get myself out safely. Skulking through raid level zones doing recon for my guild and meeting other rogues doing the same thing, getting drafted into impromtu raids.
Games today don't like include stuff like that, for good and bad reasons. They need a formula to address the millions of players they want, and that kind of randonmess and social dependency doesn't jive with what sells boxes and keeps subscriptions paid.
I'm still undecided if I want to go back to the days of real corpse retrieval...but the spirit of those mechanics, and what players did with them, gave me far more lasting memories than even the most intense WoW raid I ever ran or participated in. The epic failures and eventually success of my EQ years make the months spent raiding the same dungeon and raid instances in WoW week after week seem pretty shallow.
The only things I did in WoW that ever really felt epic to me, I did alone, by pushing the boundaries of what a solo rogue could get to and kill. I liked sneaking into lower level dungeons and farming the bosses. That's about the only sense of mastery (that and the DPS charts) I ever got out of WoW.