Camp check... JK might makes right.

All those things also happen in raid guilds on TLPs. Just some people seem to think you can only gear by farming HG, when even in classic a good junk of BIS gear is no drop or mostly from raids.

Live eq is not a tlp minus botters. There is NO low level community at all, and a pretty big gap from merc falloff until max where you can either do your own box armying, get powerleveled, or suffer. People looking for the tlp experience are not going to find some better less-rmtd or less-hacked version of it on live. They will find a single player game. Except for classic raid mobs of course, those they won't find. High levels kill them (and seemingly for no reason except to feel hard) and no aocs on live. So it's not even a valid alternative for all the tlp content even.

There is most definitely a reason, it's called achievement hunting. Some live guilds have a thing (don't ask me which ones, I don't know) about whose toons have the most achievements. Plus some live players are what other games call "completionists". There are a variety of threads on the live forum about various hunter achievement groups, which ones might be bugged, if new ones are still to come, etc etc.

There has been a player push for some time to port all of the TLP AoCs to the live servers, for just this purpose. If and when the devs ever agree, then it would be possible to "simulate" the TLP experience with a small group of like-minded players on a live server, provided everyone involved has the self-discipline to ignore all the Defiant armor drops. And it would be non-Truebox, and there would be no bot armies, and it would be free...

I guess on TLP no one ever types /ach to see what's up and what they're missing