I never loved corpse rot. I think it was horrible mechanic that punished people with responsibilities. I would not go back to vanilla EQ for anything.
I do think the penalty for death should be challenging enough so people don’t just suicide off cliffs rather than walk the path and god don’t get me started with the rangers and hybrids sucking up all the XP… and you put one point in this other attribute so now you’re ruined at level 50 or whatever it is vanilla EQ wasn’t just brutal, it was unfair… but during the days before wikia and phones and heavy social media… a lot of people still on modem, it wasn’t just the game itself, which as magically and not streamed or record so a lot of what you saw early on was new for everyone, it was also like opening the door to the gaming world. You could play with people you didn’t know, from different countries, different sexes and different ideas all through typing and realizing you’re constantly playing at the same time as they are… then there were guilds and planning and despite the bickering, one guild has a total wipeout, theyr’e the biggest on the server, everyone knows who they are, and suddenly a couple of tiny guild and just random people in the area are getting together to try and save them. We had a Norwegian guild and a Japanese guild on our server, if I recall correctly, despite the language barrier, they were also part of rotations and helped with wipe-outs and big raids.
but corpse rot… no. punishing other players for having specific classes in their group, also no. You might as well just put a target on their back.