5-box leveling, balancing efficiency and "safety" ?

[Apatheist]

This is a really good point I'd forgotten. Same goes with those ground-object items you have to right-click on, as the multi-access object changes were also in later builds.

Yeah. Combine that with the fact that quest items in classic weren't guaranteed drops. Some had drop rates of +/- 30% so you can spend a long time trying to collect 15 snake legs each on 5 characters. Not worth the time IMO. You'll end up having to kill hundreds of mobs to finish a single quest. Ground-lootable quest items are just as bad. Each item has a respawn rate of 3-10 minutes depending on the particular quest. There's no fancy dynamic respawn rate on resources in highly populated areas. That's another late feature. You'll spend 30+ minutes collecting a mere 4 (* 5) mushrooms for the Fungal Spoors quest in the Barrens. That's assuming there aren't a million other people running around competing for the same items. Definitely not worth the time in my view.

My plan is to grind kill quests and mobs, collecting Deadmines quests along the way, until 20 when my paladins get consecration and my mages get blizzard then head straight for dungeons. Stopping only to get the important quests for each dungeon that reward worthwhile gear.

[MiRai]

so you can spend a long time trying to collect 15 snake legs each on 5 characters. Not worth the time IMO.

That's definitely not worth it since snakes don't have legs, and that's a 0% drop chance across the board. That may be the worst collection quest in the history of collection quests.

You'll end up having to kill hundreds of mobs to finish a single quest.

I think some (yet to be determined) collection quests may be worth it in the sense that you're already grinding in that area, and if you just set loot to free-for-all, you should then be able to only have to loot on your lead character until they have all of the item, and then move to the next. This is, of course, assuming that a follow/assist setup is being used that allows for control from any character.