Same thing. The flood of emotional highs and lows came back and for thirty seconds it was May 2001 and I was strorming headlong into city of mist with 62 other players of various levels for an epic finale encounter against Lhranc.
me too. the heading is, "How I Fell Out of Love with EverQuest" but the music just brought it back. anyone remember the original "score"? pump up the volume! dance! dance!
@@willieo6027 same, although there is such a huge population difference i started on 99. i told myself i will just get a char or two to 60 and that will be the end of it, since there is next to nothing to do once the level cap is reached. though sometimes i feel there are too many people on p99, and on weekends there are often no good spots to set up camp, especially if you are solo since they are always taken. but i guess that is sort of a good thing in a way. also empty zones everywhere turned me off too. the supposed ~150 i constantly see on that server (at least thats what the website says, and from me checking about two dozen zones, i believe it) compared to the 1000+ on the 99 server.. well that made my choice for me.
@@nainmayoudavich7541 while i can agree it was the start that killed a lot of important things to everquest, the planes raids were fun as hell and much more engaging. and the start of the AA's were a great addition. after that shit just got bloated so much it was insane. i say this as someone who started the game less than two weeks after its launch and quit the day the level cap went from 65-70.
I left EQ for wow in 2004, by 2009 I did not have time for gaming anymore. Just started on p99 a few weeks ago, forgot how hardcore EQ was back then. But the nostalgia!!
EQ vanilla was hard core! There was nothing friendly happening on my server...it was "dog eat dog." Soloed a Paladin to level 60 in 11 months time, then I burned out and left the game! lol.
I started a rogue about 2 weeks ago when I found out about p99. I quit EQ in 2004. P99 is legit amazing and I'm still having fun. It is literally just as I remember it AND this dude noticed I was new and gave me like a whole starter kit of gear. I was blown away. He literally handed me a full set of ravenscale. After playing games like LoL with a horrible community I was and still am so blown away with this community and how nice people are. I've not had a single bad encounter with a player yet. If anyone wants to play my IGN name is Razil Dazil and I'm a 24 Wood Elf Rogue at the time of writing.
I remember the old Everquest well. I remember the hours fishing and cooking and brewing. I remember my bard character, where playing your instrument could make you run fast. I got involved in the Grey Hawke guild and eventually resigned.(and I have totally forgotten why but it was so emotional I made a graphic over it). Even though I was middle aged at the time, watching blue skinned ladies in red underwear trying to retrieve their corpses always amused me.
Anyone who wants the original Everquest experience back should come check out project 99. They just launched the green and teal servers two weeks ago which only goes to velious and follows the timeline exactly for patches and releasing Kunark and velious expansions. Server populations are good and it's a blast from the past!
Love the ending, and yes please more EQ vids!!! P99 is much higher quality than the live server and many more people always on. Running 1700 unique IPs during peak hours and 400 at non-peak, it truly is the original EQ without the trolly kids. Very rarely will you find a bad apple.
Well done sir, very informed and thorough, now the reason you can't find a group anymore is simply all the great players have left live for Project 1999, the last incredible and old school style MMO in existence.
I returned to the game in December. I mostly play solo as it’s tough for me to dedicate large chunks of time to the game. That said I’m having a great time. The game has changed a lot since I started playing (2001), but it’s still A LOT of fun for me.
I still remember playing this game. I started when planes came out and left when WoW came out. I still use the name I used back then in all my games today.
Tried Project 1999 a couple months ago as wood elf ranger like i used to, man that was tough LOL i couldn't get pass level 1. Which got me thinking - how the heck did i level all the way to 60 during Scar of Velious, and then eventually all the way to 85 before i quit? How did i endure all that harshness and brutality? Still a good memory though.
Casters are much easier as a first character on EQ1999. Use the caster to make some money then start a melee if you want. I like mages myself. Casters sit to med, but sitting to heal is much much worse. They do sell normal weapons in towns now, not rusty or fine steel, just normal which will help at lower levels. The Kaladim skeleton bone quest will help with money and armor and exp.
EverQuest Project 1999 Green Server for the win!!! Over 800-1k peak concurrent players constantly... literally feels like stepping back daily into the familiar Norrath we all know and love. Draekos Draconis 47 Wood Elf Druid P99 Green Server
I fell out of love pretty quickly, but all my buddies were playing still, so I stayed on. The truth is, EverQuest is so immersive and compelling with sound and location, design and concept that I still have a real nostalgia for it (and would love to see someone rebuild it). And Lost Dungeons of Norrath was their best expansion by gigantic leaps and bounds.
My latest pet peeve with Everquest was when Daybreak fixed a bug many people including myself had come to rely on: The ability to glitch past locked doors so that finding a rogue to pick the lock for you was no longer needed. Granted, there aren't many locked doors without keys anymore but when I went to Sebilis to hunt names for an achievement, the whole undead wing was locked. Everquest is still my first love since 2001 and I still play it from time to time but now I'm spending much more time leveling toons in Everquest 2.
It was the four strike combination of the DX 9 upgrade+Gates of Discord+EQ 2 Release + WOWs release that did it for me. My guild collapsed, my friends just disappeared and never came back. It was a complete disaster of a year for EQ. I went instantly from being the leader of a solid guild, (my guild had just cracked open time), to barely being able to put a decent high level group together without going outside the guild. And, for us at least, it never got better. We eventually merged with some other guilds that were going through the same death throes but endless keying, flagging and reflagging brought all our progress to a halt and people just kept on leaving the game. It was pretty much the end for me as a "hard core player. I hung on for several years as a casual player and the introduction of the prog servers brought me back full time for awhile but the magic was gone. Now and then I pop in as a FTP just to see how things are going and nostalgia purposes. EQ was my first MMORPG and as such will always have a special place in my gaming heart. To this day though I have yet to find a game that has captured my imagination the way EQ did all the way back in the days of dial up.
All of those were huge factors for me too. One other one was how quickly Expansions moved. I didnt come close to exploring all of EQ Classic and Kunark came out, so then im starting these new adventures, figuring out whats going on (Usually completely on our own as their were little to no guides), and I got about halfway through Kunark then Velious drops! Im like FUCK STOP! Thats partially why I think old school servers just work. I think half the problem with these games is how much they pack in, but then most people didn't get to see it all before the devs themselves usually completely ruin the game. WoW was also like this.
In terms of player population, it was Gates of Discord that killed the game. That was when Sony organised their notorious emergency meeting with the player base: a meeting to which only high end guild raiders were invited. That invitation list only served to highlight what was killing the game. At the time WoW was still in Beta, so it wasn't a factor.
Thankfully we have old school private servers like p99 and reborn, but we can't really act all too surprised that a 20 yr old game's live servers are incredibly top heavy, making finding groups at lower levels near impossible.
The game lost its remaining charm after Velious. Once they added the Nexus and then PoK, everyone disappeared from the world and spent all day afk in one spot.
People who say this are completely wrong. Time killed this game. Nothing but time. No feature, expansion or aspect of the game killed it, only time. People grew older. People were already playing for years by the time PoP was even released. Families started, careers started, life changes. Even people in hardcore guilds after they beat current group content only get on to raid. Nothing else. I'm one of those people. I've played since late 2000 until now, with multiple breaks. Time and peoples interest are what killed this game. People who played this game hardcore are now older with a life and most likely a family. You can't just assume that leaving things the way they were would of saved this game. Let's stop at Velious. What happens? You have another P99 with 2,000 on at peak hours? That's still so small of a population compared to the tens of thousands that used to be on during the peak of EQ. Leaving things the same will kill off the population base just as fast as the newer features you disliked did. If nothing was added, more people would quit compared to those who stayed. Time is the only thing that really puts an end to the good things in your life. Changes. The people you made memories with are gone from the game. Now it's a different time in your life. That's what people want to capture again. But you never will. The first time you explored or did a raid with a certain group of people is what you actually miss. Not the way the game was. Corpse runs were fun and a big deal... But on the other hand, thousands hated it. Adding the guild hall made it easier for people. You didn't have to use it, you could of still ran to get your corpses if you wanted to. It catered to both sides. No changes means those people would eventually be gone, along with people leaving due to real life issues. Bigger loss than not trying to expand the game.
The problems started in 04 when wow started, not me but many left and an even greater exodus after Sonys/Verants (cant remember if it was still verant at the time) poor handling of the Kerafyrm and FoH's leaving the game for WoW. Luclin was the beginning of the end.
@@dustinhiggins710 Disagree. Sure with time some people moved on, however the changes they made only incentivized many more to quit. Changes made with Planes of Power expansion and the power creep completely changed the game. They were definitely trying to appeal to the WoW crowd. Myself and many others lost that connection to the community, the feeling of adventure, that kept us coming back.
When they started trying to and compete with WoW and making the game more accessible for casual players. I lost faith. This is where I believe MMORPGS started on the decline.
It was a much more difficult game to play than WOW...but to say that WOW is for casual players is not accurate. There is nothing casual about Vanilla WoW. However, Blizzard eventually ruined the game by screwing with it constantly to appeal to all the little children that were complaining the game was too difficult! EQ vanilla could be brutal and frustrating at times with all the "campers" in game. But the game was not protected from platinum sellers that ruined the economy. Terrible spawn times and epic competitions between guilds for rare spawns were both challenging and at the same time maddening when one was "trained" to get you off a mob. EQ was hard...but what really ruined the game in my opinion was the "platinum" sellers that destroyed any reason for peeps to make anything for sale.
People who say this are completely wrong. Time killed this game. Nothing but time. No feature, expansion or aspect of the game killed it, only time. People grew older. People were already playing for years by the time PoP was even released. Families started, careers started, life changes. Even people in hardcore guilds after they beat current group content only get on to raid. Nothing else. I'm one of those people. I've played since late 2000 until now, with multiple breaks. Time and peoples interest are what killed this game. People who played this game hardcore are now older with a life and most likely a family. You can't just assume that leaving things the way they were would of saved this game. Let's stop at Velious. What happens? You have another P99 with 2,000 on at peak hours? That's still so small of a population compared to the tens of thousands that used to be on during the peak of EQ. Leaving things the same will kill off the population base just as fast as the newer features you disliked did. If nothing was added, more people would quit compared to those who stayed. Time is the only thing that really puts an end to the good things in your life. Changes. The people you made memories with are gone from the game. Now it's a different time in your life. That's what people want to capture again. But you never will. The first time you explored or did a raid with a certain group of people is what you actually miss. Not the way the game was. Corpse runs were fun and a big deal... But on the other hand, thousands hated it. Adding the guild hall made it easier for people. You didn't have to use it, you could of still ran to get your corpses if you wanted to. It catered to both sides. No changes means those people would eventually be gone, along with people leaving due to real life issues. Bigger loss than not trying to expand the game.
@@dustinhiggins710 Disagree. Sure with time some people moved on, however the changes they made only incentivized many more to quit. Changes made with Luclin and Planes of Power expansion, and the power creep completely changed the game. They were definitely trying to appeal to the WoW audience with convenience mechanics. Myself and many others lost that connection to the community, the feeling of adventure, the immersiveness, that kept us coming back.
So what i took away from this, is when the player base keeps complaining about things that make a game difficult, the developers cave in and meet the demands of the users, making the game more like another game we started out playing, put the square block in the square hole.
I think the Bazaar did a number on EQ the EC tunnel let you meet new people watch duels even find new items you didn’t know about when the Bazaar came to be people got disconnected from even socializing with other players that were not in your guild and still that way to this day
Making the game more soloable is much needed as time goes on and most of the earlier levels are barren. I remember in even late 2004 it was difficult to grab a pick up group in popular dungeons for anything pre-50 since so many left to EQ2, WoW or elsewhere. At that point it just kills the motive for many newcomers wanting to give the game a try.
thats the thing i like about EQ 2, i quit it for the longest time and came back as a new character, guild let me in under level 50, they always offered to help if i was attempting to battle an epic +4 boss solo(lowering your level would just lower the amount of exp you get, rather than phase out all exp if you fight a mob too low).. Going to old zones while gear wise is useless, but achievement and trophy wise it makes it fun
I do like the Vah'Shir and new classes, and don't begrudge anyone their frogloks. I wish P99 would package in the Vah'Shir, unlock the new classes and race/class combos to keep things fresh/interesting. Velious is 2 years old now on P99 and I don't think it has that much longer before it starts to get stale for a lot of people.
That theme song... it's like a loving embrace followed by a cold, sinking feeling in the chest. In the mood for a story? Strap in! I was obviously an EQOA guy, most EverQuest fans have no idea it even existed, but my fuck was it glorious while it lasted! Imo the perfect balance between oldschool hardcore and a more vanilla WoW feel. Imagine Vanilla WoW, only more hardcore than that. I miss it! OMG do i miss it! I met my wife in EQOA, total happen chance. She ended up in Surefall as a wizard from Qeynos, i had rerolled that day because a quest WOULD NOT FLAG for me outside of the gates... long story short, we kind of hit it off at the gnoll fort to the west, random PUG invite. Here we are, 15 years later. Crazy! So you can only imagine, with how special EQ is to many of you, EQOA is really special to us! So to watch the mismanagement of this series, has been an absolute heartache for both of us. I even went as far as to make a channel around EQOA... as time went on, and it grew, i increased my production value from literally pointing a cell phone camera at a TV screen with VHS recordings (no idea how i got any traction) to an actual gaming PC, yeti mic, and good video creation software. Every bit of the painful transition can be seen today... i do NOT recommend it lol. I did this chasing EverQuest Next... and the would be spiritual successor to a little known game called Socom, dubbed H-Hour on kickstarter we all know what happened to EQNext, H-hour... well it released but it was an absolute TRAIN WRECK. That was painful, Socom was again, a game near and dear to my heart, i used to play it with my cousin who passed away in 06 way too f'ing young! At this point you can see a pattern. Games i loved, fading away as most things do... sucks but i had to move on, Eventually i just demonetized the channel, last month actually. My heart just wasn't in it anymore, i limped along for a few years sure... and my numbers were okay, but no heart, no content. During the time i was losing heart, Daybreak sent me a package. I unboxed it for the fans of the channel but... again, heart wasn't in it. I didn't want Kunark Ascending, nor Empires of Kunark, i appreciated the gesture, but those games simply didn't appeal to me. Not anymore. Some people can play on TLP servers, that's great, honestly. For us though, once they pulled the plug on EQOA back in 2012, that was all she wrote. Outside of a save state on an emulator, with no NPC's and no online connectivity, EQOA is dead and gone. 9 years of memories, wiped away in an instant. Feels bad man.
my very first night in the game was met with a female wood elf , probably a guy irl, trying to seduce me in kelethin. she emoted stuff like ".. twirls her fingers around your chest hair". i just sat there going along with it but i was thinking like wtf . it made me feel so weird i /quit and deleted the character and created a new one. i saw her ass running around doing the same thing to other players who were sitting at the lift
I agree with pretty much all of this, so sad to see once flourishing areas now ghost towns. Not to mention the lack of risk and the increase of hand holding through the game. I personally loved the fact that I had to do naked runs back to my corpse.
I started in 2001. Velious had just come out and my level 50+ friends convinced me to buy the $9.99 CD which included a one month subscription. I thought, what the heck, it's only 10 bucks. I was hooked from the start. Leveled slowly but steady. After a year we were raiding in Temple of Veeshan and working to get VP keys. Then Luclin came out and we all began the long journey for Vex Thal access. Just as we started getting enough people to send a few groups into VT, Planes of Power came out. Time to work on flag progression. We got to Plane of Fire when Gates of Discord came out. That was the killer for me. We were a small guild with about 45 players, serious about the game but not hardcore. Always a step behind the top guilds. But Gates was just a back breaker. Half the player base became unneeded. Your 15K HP warrior tank was useless when mobs quad for 12K and hit fast. So you tanked with a pally on chain-stun duty, then filled out the group with a druid, two chanters, a cleric, and a necro. Charm pets did most of the work, while everyone else healed and rezzed. Every other class in the game just sat back on the beach waiting for a pity group spot. What a shit expansion that was. Was the only time I ever stopped having fun playing EQ. I quit right there and never looked back.
It brought back a lot of fond memories, but what it brought back most was memories of the people in my guild! I don't know where they are now or what they are doing, but I have played WOW for years and guilds just don't come together like that anymore. I don't really KNOW the people in my guild...they come, they go....it's very different than the original days of Everquest.
Those first months were magic. Like most games things change and the need for social interaction disappeared. But, I do have fond memories of those early months and those spell sounds still haunt me. Most games these days don't make memories but instead set up hoops you need to jump through so you can say, "Yes I'm at max level"
Yeah i got as far as Gated of Discord. The reason this sucked for me. Is they introduced the high level spells required a parchment. But all other classes also needed that parchment. Here is the problem. The problem is. The parchments are a NEED roll. You need a parchment because people where over pricing the object. So they made it bind on pick up for the high level ones. OK... Problem. The writing on the parchments where RANDOM. So you couldn't write a high level spell you needed. You had to run the same dungeons over an over again. Weeks on end. Months on end. An you may NEVER get the parchment you need. it got to a point i stopped getting invited to groups because i needed more damaging spells. But because i cant get groups i cant roll on the parchment.So i had no guild. I had no groups. An i could not get any way to level up my skills. So i quit the game. Then went to World of Warcraft. Playing a Enhancement Shaman. An it was glorious. until the same person who created the Parchment addition to Everquest moved to World of Warcraft an became the HEAD GAMES DIRECTOR! How the living FUC)(*Y)(*) Does that happen?!! He thing nerfed all the classes an said. if you have a heal you are a healer. An ruined WoW.
Even the Legacy progression servers are absolutely fucked. They aren't remotely like actual old EQ. If you want good, actual original EverQuest, definitely play Project 1999, it is thriving and amazing! Just like the good old days.
Up to you to find quests? You should have phrased that the right way, "Up to you to find quests that actually work". Christ, what was it, like the bone chip quest and the Blood forged hammer quesat?"
I quit when GoD released. I became irritated with how the trash mobs hit harder than PoP ones and it made me realize it is a never ending treadmill of mobs and gear grinding. Cool ending, I never tried drunk kelethin(?) racing!
I miss the class diversity and the amount of utility there was in EQ. Handling a large pull with an enc and bard was satisfying as fuck. Today MMOs are like pull everything and AOE it down. SLowing the enemy 70% while hasting your party 70%, holy shit. Today's MMOs: Everythings gotta be "balanced", your "buff" is now +1% crit for 5 seconds every 5 minutes, have fun guys. Can't even buff people who are not in your party, and even if you could it would fade before they encounter the next mob anyway. Following rotations and burst windows, it's all complete bs lol. Making MMOs into fkn aracde games. I still come back to progression servers occasionally and progress through Kunark raiding, then call it quits till the next server lauches. Still an amazing and satisfying experience, even if you already know every nook and cranny inside out.
I was a “whale” spender in SOE games until I invested several hundred extra dollars in the store to support the new owner and then lost most of that investment in a day because they drastically reduced the price of the item I had purchased dozens of and apologized to the community for their initial price. The problem was they refused to adjust my purchase, even just in game credits. I didn’t quit over the money per se but being cheated for supporting them. Though I learned a lesson and stopped investing real money in games and stopped feeling any faithfulness to game companies.
Funny, all those game changes sound great: maps, corpse summon, soloing made easier. I played eq vanilla and kunark and loved them but I'd never turn down those changes mentioned above.
wish i could go back to 1999 and do it all over again. Their biggest mistake in the game was making it to easy to solo or box characters, that did away with the need to make friends and group with others and the game fell apart after that.
If you subscribe you can level very quickly with a merc. My main is now 111 and I have moloed all the way up. At later levels, 103 plus, I two box with a shaman and no mercs which works well. It is hard work though but that is what Everquest was always about,it a tough game but is more forgiving than ever.
I remember watching my friends parents playing it in early 2000's and it blew my mind. It looked like a real fantasy adventure. They got me into it and I was hooked at the age of 7. Recently played project99 and had a lot of fun.
I remember when they added the particle effects to the weapons in POK. I got one of the first, which was an offhand yellow orb for wizards/mages/necros
i have reason to believe there is eq3 on the way. but many wallets will not forgot the loss of eq next and landmark. daybreak needs to renew our faith.
Goodness...watched this and it immediately lead me to Project 1999 and trying to remember my password LOL I rly enjoyed P1999 the short time that I played it. My wife and I raided live in the DoDH era before the child came along. She wanted to play too but according to their FAQs, they consider multiple accts using the same IP address as bots. You can /petition to allow you to have two players using the same connection. I submitted a petition and bumped it for a few weeks....crickets. I stopped playing shortly afterwards. Great community and really was a great nostalgia fix but if I can duo w/ my fav enchantress (wife)...it doesn't feel like EQ to me. That was in 2016...maybe things are different now.
Safe Space Bear the reason you never got an answer is because when you bumped you request you were effectively putting yourself at the back of the line over and over.
It was a fun game but had many problems. The big one being a problem of quantity over quality, more expansions with little to no story and quests. More levels which means more grind. Alternate levels which also means more grind. More items which means more gear needed which means more grind. I used to call it Neverquest. Also, EQ will live in history for inventing most of the negative terms in MMOs, such as, camping, kill stealing, and training.
Absolutely correct Randy! I got so sick of grinding for years and I regret it , I should have quit when my main druid was 65 lvl and got his epic, but noooo I kept on trudgin along till I got 85 (soloing) and had 2500aa or so (took me a Long ass time) no merc or nothing , I refuse to get a merc. so I played probably 3-4 years longer than I should.
I loved playing EQ in 2000, I love it today. Yes, its easier, I can summon corpse in GL, etc.... but I don't have to have stupid fights with other guilds over 1 dragon every 7 days.
Excellent post and analysis! I was in EQ starting with beta 1 and loved the game. Spent days standing at the bank in Fremont while we waited for enough players to join a raid to break Fear. Lost two corpses in Fear and had to follow another raid in and they dragged them back to camp for me. Those early days, what made EQ great was the community, the in-game interpersonal aspect. Everyone knew everyone else, how they played, how they acted, often what their favorite food or drink was. We talked back and forth a LOT. When the Priest NPCs appeared that summoned corpses, that signaled the end for me. I kept playing for a couple years. Did all the Planes. The only thing we never did was Sleeper. Which was ok, because there was more than enough to keep us busy. And then it just got less dangerous and safer to play, and it just wasn't Everquest anymore. We jumped as a guild to WoW beta, and though it seemed great, after the first 3 years Blizzard was in high gear dumbing the game down, and we wished we'd never left Everquest sometimes.
I will always love EQ. I believe they jumped gear too much each expansion and too many levels. Should have been 2 or 3 levels not 5. Classic Luclin was pretty balanced. When you start getting gear twice as good in PoP (which was fun) gear started taking off too far too fast. Should have been incremental.
While in Luclin by Katta Castellum I was learning from an older player teaching me about our class. I remember hearing stories all about the old days of banded armor, steel swords and the mighty bronze armor as they slayed dragons back in their day. Before that when I just started leveling hard and was still new, traveling merchants selling off Velium Weapons would regale stories of frozen lands and dragons and giants to hype up the power of what they were selling. Much better than a rusty bastard sword and magic enough to take on a wisp. All that gave way to what is now a standard MMO auction house. From the server being the wild west to watching tech revolution change the world at gamer speed with every update.
I started playing beta back in 97 and i still play but stopped raiding and joined a casual family guild, i still enjoy the game as much as my first years and groups are not hard to find at all. game is still lonely for new toons tho unless ur in a fairly large guild with players making new toons on a reg basis so today its a good game for old players with lvl capped charaters but they dont appreciate new players as your vid is pointing out. I do box sometimes but only 2 characters and thats enough to kill most bosses in even the top RoS maps in group gear if the player is good. When i start new toons i always make 2 and box them up since that obv is a LOT faster than soloing. PC requirements are quite low but you do need a deacent connection. i have a crappy lap top with only a quad I5 and a gtx1050 and i run 2 characters lag free even in raids but i do have a 200 MB fibre optic cable connection straight in to the lappy so no router and wireless anywhere and it probably helps a lot. would i recommend new players to start playing, yes and no. If you are a patient player that can handle the grind up to say lvl 100 sure.if you dont like to play alone for quite a while then no. Go play WoWs. However f you are new then do the tutorial and then go to general chat and ask for a guild because there is a pretty damn good chance a family guild will pick you up and make your life a lot easier:)
i stopped after LDoN here. Came back to the TLPs. Mangler is pretty fun. P99 was nice for a while but lately, they're removing all the ease of use functions (pet window, UIs,). ah well.
TLP servers are kind of fun and classic. Although they have toxic bot armies, and griefers who train at will and krono farmers. Still good shot of nostalgia
I was too young to play EQ when it was new but when back and got a bard to 30ish swarm kiting on P99, definitely understand why the game feels so special. Still, i do think WoW is the better game, old WoW i mean, and i'm so glad Classic is coming soon
Good vid. Progression servers were great, but with their own dramas. My friend just installed his own private EMU server and we will simply do bot maddness on that.
Gates was the biggest blow ever dealt IMO. It was objectively the worst expansion released at the MOST crucial time of the games existence. This coupled with EQ2 in the works siphoned so many players from OG EQ into WoW and EQ2.
Played EQ beta. Release on Tunare. Went to Nameless went it opened and was original LoSer member. Played Sullon Zek until the hacks were out of control. Came back to P99 twice. And the biggest deal breaker for me is... *EXPERIENCE LOSS*. Everything is such a time sink, that the loss of exps sans having a cleric, was just not a fun detail. All games should do vitae like AC.
The grind was real. For those who started in 99 had the knowledge and the expansions were to make up for new players making it easier for them to level. By the time I left a new player could get on and make it to at least lvl 20-40 in 1 day. Would have taken weeks or months to do in 99.
P99 has provided years of nostalgia - trying new classes, exploring things I never did. Need to take a break due to IRL or what not? No Problem. The server is frozen in time. Is the server Top heavy? Yeah. But the journey to 60 is what matters, and it will take you 4-12 months. Find a small guild of good hearted people doing more with less. You'll love it. And will also realize how shit EQLive has become :(
Hard to understand your complaint here as you are demanding a lose/lose situation. First your complaint is that expansions continue to cater to the majority of the player base; which are higher-leveled players that have run out of content / gear acquisition / raids to complete and are not adding enough “lower-level content”. They did try to do that a couple times. Notably they did that with the Ykhesha expansion and Luclin with zones designed for both the Froglok and Cat Beastlords to level fully within the new expansion. And do you know what players did? They left those areas as complete ghost towns and left to go to popular areas to level grind that they used on their original characters anyway. So what do they do? They make it so that all lower-level players have accessibility to areas so it can be easier to get to the same areas as others their own level... and you complain about it still. Yes. There was something special about “vanilla” EQ and traveling around exploring the world. Making the run from Qeynos to Freeport. EC Tunnel trading. Riding the boats around. But you were always going to have the problem of people were going to level up and leave Blackburrow behind someday and congregate in higher-level zones together. So what is a new player going to do? There aren’t ample numbers of people roaming around in Blackburrow like before and groups easier to find... so if you saw some people in Crushbone what do you do? Answer: You make it a lot easier to get over to Crushbone so they can group up quickly. Not spend hours traveling for a group that probably will no longer be online by the time you get there 🤦♀️ I loved the PoP expansion. After you have traveled around and ground out all your levels and done all the old world dungeons... traveling is boring AF. It doesn’t have the same “danger” associated with it when you are level 20 looking out for a level 30 griffon when you are level 60 running by and could one-shot her. It’s a chore to travel around after you have done it for so long. Druids and wizards won’t make as much money with teleports? Oh no! What a silly reason to get upset about. You know how I used to make a lot of money? In South Karana I would hunt the aviaks for a while and when I was going to log out I would do banking services for everybody. Exchanging silver and gold for platinum and buying their FS weapons. I would be so heavy I would barely move but I was bound right at a vendor so it was okay. And then.... I got high enough level to move on. So I did. And that was okay. And then you saw your favorite expansion was LDoN... like what? If your concern is about a lack of emphasis on exploration and ease of travel? LDoN was the most egregious offender of that of them all! You stand around right at the expedition starting point, get a group, and then run over to your instanced private zone, do one of a couple pre-designed dungeon crawls, then return to the expedition camp. As somebody with a fully-powered LDoN Stone... trust me when I tell you that it got really grind-heavy repetitive pretty quickly. I understand your complaint about corpse summons and experience penalties from death... but ultimately it is just a time penalty. You have to waste your time to either retrieve your corpse and regain the experience lost. Yes, that element does add an element of “danger” to death and affects your decision-making, as nobody wants to die and have their time wasted, but it still is an arbitrary mechanic. IMO you should have never lost your gear and bodies should have never been draggable. You die you return to your spawn point with gear and experience loss. If you didn’t have a cleric there to Rez you back; then you have to waste time returning to where you were to resume. That’s also what I dislike about the WoW mechanic of traveling around as a “spirit” to go back to your body. There is no “danger” to return to your body, it’s just an arbitrary time-wasting mechanic. Which feeds right back into your ease of travel argument. You are advocating that it’s somehow “better” to have arbitrarily increased travel times just because when you are higher-level when that posed zero actual threat or difficulty. And even with the ability to travel freely between cities... you still have to travel through dangerous areas if you are lower level to actually get to group or raid areas. There isn’t a PoT stone that goes Lower Guk or something; you have to leg it. But it was necessary to make it easier for lower-level players to quickly reach each other as the number of lower-level players dwindled as people continued to progress and level-up. And then you complain about cartography... the only issue is you shouldn’t have been able to import the map and had to make your own. But that was a welcomed feature that people used to overcome with hand-drawn maps either made themselves or found online or (in my case) you could just lookup in the Kunark Strategy Guide. It would have been better if the map started with a “Fog of War” and made you have to search out and find everything for yourself before it became populated on your in-game map. But again; how many times do you have to explore the same area before it becomes redundant to keep exploring it or to keep using /loc or to keep looking at your paper guide? I just don’t get the complaints about the QoL upgrades over time. It never took away from the meat and potatoes of what made the game fun: Questing and grouping and camping and grinding and raiding.
In my opinion shadows of luclin killed the game. With the creation of the bazaar it removed direct interaction and socialization. The commons tunnel was great actually. Yes it was the sale hub but at least the person selling was a live person instead of a character set up as a store
All my rl friends went to WOW and almost all my EQ friends left and the guild I was in was dead so I went to WOW to be with my friends . RIP Guild House of Norrath
