You'll never recreate that old feeling because the people have changed. When all this stuff was new, people were normal, functional human beings. If they wanted to hang out, they needed to call, talk, schedule something. People got most of their social contact from in-person conversation, and the biggest pool of social pressure that most kids faced directly was their high school class. When these digital spaces opened up to those players, they entered them and proceeded to act like normal people. If they saw someone, they said 'Hi!'. They chatted about the game or about real life. They treated the other player characters like they would people in real life, and the idea of doing that was new and fresh and interesting.
Now the idea of people existed in a digital space is tedious and boring. Online social constructs have become a sort of panopticon as they've scaled up, and people are shaped by these insane, demented social pressures, like ants frying under a magnifying glass. Now the opposite is true - many of those who have been sucked furthest in can no longer function in real life. They see themselves through a distorted lens - the self-curated image that they present to the scrutiny of invisible online mobs. You couldn't hold on a normal conversation with them in real life, let alone in a video game.
