My thoughts on EQ2Follow

The whole thing about "not being afraid" is simple. You actually don't go out adventuring at level 1, naked. By the time you're done with the boat ride in eq2, you've already have a basic weapon and maybe one piece of armor. By the time you leave IoR, you're level 6, and it's pretty easy from then on to level up with quests and such. There's a map, and you'll never get lost. There's a compass, and you always know where you're headed.

Back in EQ1, remember getting rolling your toon, and having to find your "master"... and it could take a long long time, depending on which city you started out from. There was no map. You had to visit eqatlas.com to look at the maps or print one. You needed sense heading, and had to mash that button everytime it popped up. You had to learn /loc to use sense heading and the printed maps to know where you are, or know where you were going.

I remember going out into the cold, from Halas, at level 1, looking for a white or a blue con to start levelling up. In eq2, there are no social mobs. You can pull a group of mobs close together and only get the ones grouped together. The roamer standing close by to that group won't add via social-aggro.

Scary? I remember rolling my necro in Paineel in eq1... way past midnight, and had my headphones on... that really freaked me out.

I think the real reason why we're not so scared in EQ2 is the simplicity of death. Corpse retrieval is simple. It's easy to group with a high level to grey-out the zone and retrieve your shard. In EQ1, CR could be a mini-adventure in itself. Remember those failed Plane of Fear break-ins? What about wiping at Lord Djarn in SolB? Losing your corpse meant that you lost your gear, and fighting your way in naked... lol... was way fun.

XP debt... that's like 10mins to recover from it. It's nothing.