Usually, when major things happened, they were related to the story quests.
Story quests were the quests of the original game world and were of fair importance. They held the various important events of the world and the rewards were good and unique. Through it, one might be able to acquire unique powers and rise to become a high leveled player.
Their difficulty varies from one another but most of them were hard and required both luck and skills in both obtaining and completing it.
For example, if you have met a city mayor, you would of course try to obtain a quest from the NPC right? In order to do so, you would have to meet certain requirements. Higher the grade of the quest, less likely for someone to get it.
The requirements wouldn't be known by the player. The NPC might even decide to pick a loser over a lvl. 100 player because of some certain circumstances.
So it was purely luck and skills in order for one to obtain a quest.
