I quit live right before the current expansion TDS came out.

Some of the reasons:

- Overpowered trash, my 100 Ranger with max AA can tank one current content mob with chain heals... named mobs no way

- Cookie cutter itemization, all gear is on a template its all 99% the same, different tiers add about 100 hp/mana...its just boring unimaginative stuff.

- The last xpac I bought COTF was pretty small, the current one I didnt buy is smaller.

- The nerfing of xp in old zones, they made it so you cant go back an expansion and get any meaningful xp.

- The constant nerfing of classes fun abilities, Mage pets, SK swarm, ranger headshot, druid reptile, cleric swarm etc...

- overly annoying mob mechanics, trash that summons, immune to cc, immune to run speed changes... its basically "you must kill these mobs this way".

Just a few of the reasons I quit.

Why would they tune yard trash to hit like nameds? To encourage more grouping/boxing?

Require Tanks instead of Ranger/Monks are reliable group tanks.

They meant well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions: I *will* damn them for those mechanics because they make effective first-person gameplay almost impossible. EQ and its world was designed with the first-person camera in mind; Warcraft isn't and cannot be. In Warcraft the player has to be zoomed out just so he can see all the crap on the floor in the area around him. Then, so as to accommodate the use of third person as the standard view mode, interiors are made open and airy so as to provide space for the camera to pivot without clipping through walls. Because of this, small, cramped EQ-style dungeons like Guk or Solusek's Eye can't exist in that environment. Trying to build a complex dungeon with suitably large interiors results in a place so large and sprawling that most folks can't do it in a single gameplay session--thus explaining a major portion of why we've devolved to "dungeons" being little more than a couple of rooms connected by straight hallways. I don't think they intended that to happen, but it's the law of unintended consequences at work.

Trash mobs hitting like raid named is another ill-conceived idea that promotes single pulls over crowd control and therefore also promotes boring gameplay. Few people want to pull 4 or 5 monsters if any one of them will one-shot the enchanter then the healer without even time to react if someone accidentally breaks a mez. Stuff hitting for less, and looser tuning in general, is the very thing which allows recovery from sloppy pulls and the other sorts of emergent gameplay that make EQ's dungeons as memorable as they are.

With respect to the original thread purpose, I stayed with EQ longer than I should have--I permanently quit in spring 2004 along with a lot of other folks. I considered every expansion to make the game a little worse and if my friends didn't all play I probably would've quit a good 18 months earlier.

Danth

Gates of Discord was a pile of crap - not just because it was broken as fuck and horribly tested, but the content itself was shitty - the weird BDSM monsters just didn't fit.

Guess they felt like after planes of power they didn't have anything cool left to do.

Meh. BDSM is very medieval.

And Neriak was a rave from day one.

But I hated the names of the GoD zones.

WoW vanilla was extremely difficult. Sorry to tell you. It had many elements of EQ especially requiring large raids. Molten Core in its first iteration was ridiculous. Same thing from going from basic Sebilis yard trash to Plane of Sky "trash." I remember my guilds first foray into MC, we had to give up after the first 4 mobs due to getting our asses pushed in. ADD: And to clarify, my guild was a "server first" competitor guild. We got things like Magmadar first, and one of only 2 guilds to take down pre-made easy Onyxia. We were on Kel'thuzad if anyone out there remembers. Horde Gone Wild!

Onyxia was also ridiculous pre-nerf.

Anyway, I won't defend WoW vigorously or anything. The game descended into exactly what you're saying. However, I'll always appreciate WoW vanilla. It was definitely a different beast. TBC wasn't bad but it definitely had all the elements of making the game awful, ie. itemization becoming ridiculous, battlegrounds killing world pvp, etc.

TBC was awesome too. They added lots of value while still keeping the hardcore gamers happy which culminated in Sunwell.

I quite EQ because I started college. Dabbled a little bit on breaks and got to raid some but never really got into it again. Last raid I did was during LDoN but PoP was when I quit.

the faceroll on the keyboard to name the mobs didnt help either

never pvp'd on EQ live, but world pvp in WoW sucked for me as a holy paladin. on the other hand, alterac valley must have been the most pvp fun i've ever had. this is why i started playin on r99, hoping for something similar...