alts play was in og classic as well. when i got my miragent i leveled like 5 chars for that stupid quest and i wasn't the only one doing that.
to get masters in every craft i had to do it on alts.
or when the 30e-50e pieces of gear were tradable i farmed ap on alts on afk dredges... and everyone was doing that and we formed afk groups. they were unable to win so this is the time from all afk instances started.
when we had shugo tomb and other events everyone was using all their alts.
or when everyone was farming balaur mats solo in dark poeta on alts because of limited entries and kept the main char for real runs.
others leveled alts to keep up with space inventory... because we had so many different materials back then.
there are many reason for why ppl farmed the game on alts.
the downside now is that we have nothing much to farm. events are not rewarding... default game has little to no resources to give. but the game got better in some other ways... mostly with qol features.
ppl enjoy classic so much that they spammed the na forum with complains... which get deleted after a while. such a simple solution to all the problems they have.
how ppl can enjoy classic when it's such an obvious p2w crap?
and they don't need to focus on developing classic. the game is already written. all they did was to bring some further patches much sooner... a pass design and a cash shop design. so much development.