"it's wild to think of how hard core EQ was at the time. ... For example, if you died, your corpse was where you died. You reappeared with literally no gear. If that was deep in a dungeon (Sebilis anyone?) then recovering it might be nontrivial. This led to corpse-run ("CR") groups. If you failed to get your corpse within a week it would disappear taking all your stuff."
This was and still is completely standard on MUDs, which Everquest and pretty much all other MMO's were strongly influenced by.