How much more classique can we get? Is there a limit we haven't hit yet? Will they reduce spawn times for newbs to 10 seconds? Will The Hole now drop at launch? Will CT ZEM be set to 10 million right from the start? Are we going to get 3 Teal Instances? Will the /list afk check now involve a chess problem to solve? Will recharge costs now involve an xp sacrifice?

Every day we move farther from classic. Nothing is going to change that, not six new servers.

How can you possibly tell if we move further from or closer to classic? The players are nigh-infinitely removed from the classic playerbase in knowledge and behavior, and that effect dwarfs the devs tuning attempts to insignificance. P99 ain't classic, and cannot ever be classic.

Although they could recreate part of the environment if they adopted Verant's old stance towards players and also irregularly introduced various surprise broken mechanics with fixes often taking many months just like in the good old days. Some examples:

• Your corpse rotted? tough luck it's gone

• You died [at Vox's feet][in VP and your keys are on the corpse][because Gornit agro'd everybody on the boat][some other sob story]? tough luck

• We deem your clever raid strat an exploit and it offends us greatly and you're not led by one of our special friends, here eat this ban (see <Conquest> vs. Sleepers Tomb for extreme example)

• We deem your clever raid strat an exploit and it offends us greatly and you are one of our special friends, you're not banned but we're gonna break your strat with our atomic flyswatter here and later change an important mechanic gamewide because our one precious mob was killed months before we wanted it to die (every mob in Kael made immune to charm for an extended period of time because a charm-zerg was used to achieve the first server-wide AoW kill, eventually they were allowed to be charmed again when charm had been tuned to be much less reliable in all zones)

• Stop your whining Shamans, Alchemy is working as intended

• What day is this, Tuesday? Oh Friday? Well it's patchday anyway, good enough, let's break Bards again

• lots more where those came from

We need a Doomsday clock of classicfulness.yeah, corpse rots are a big item sink. It pains me, but restores go against game design (even if some server GMs did restores on live)

I agree with most of that, except that last part (which I strongly disagree with). "Nothing is going to change that, not six new servers" ... what about R&N?

Look, all it would take is for Rogean and Nilbog to find their passion for classic EQ again (and for those who don't believe they lost it ... THEY LITERALLY DISABLED THE QUEST IN EVERQUEST ... ON THE "CLASSIC SERVER"!!!)

Now, given that they've been doing this thing for over a decade, I can't in any way fault them for losing their passion. And to be crystal clear: I'm still totally grateful for our decreasingly-classic-but-still-free-and-awesome servers!

But let's not pretend "this is out of mere mortal control": it's 100% in R&N's control. If we want servers that get more classic over time instead of less, we have to find a way to make them want classic again.

One could argue that this decision was made completely due to a passion for preserving the spirit of a classic experience.

Why would they merge green into blue and then make 2 fresh greens? That makes zero sense. Would be dump into blue then just restart clean current green

They have limited resources and anyone who has dealt with customer service knows that the service needers (us players) too often treat the service givers like garbage, so like cops they end up hating all of us. What can we do? Who knows.

Disabling quests on green was pretty sad.

Still no simulated repops which are a classic mechanic of random server down time.

Some easy stuff to classic it up.

I don't know what their resource availability is like or just their burnout level. I volunteered to guide the minimum amount of hours which I would attend to like my regular paying job and I would never get to play the game, because I just like it, but I have never had any interest in the guide apps I have posted over 10 years. I don't know what they need but who can give them what they need if they don't communicate with us.

Wishing it was better 2021.

That would be a flimsy argument when you look at the bigger picture including rooted dragons, /list, and all the other non-classic changes that have been implemented on a whim even after Nil said 'I'll keep making classic changes when I can, regardless if people threaten to quit. I'm here to recreate classic eq; not to make people happy.' This statement has long been thrown out the window, and with that, we have strayed further and further from the true classic mechanics they originally championed. This has turned into a Velious area custom box at best. While it's the closest thing to true classic around, it's too far gone from true classic to even be considered a museum box at this point. Good or bad, it is what it is. It's the N&B show at the end of the day under the banner of classic EQ. Once they started making smaller QoL changes and caving to the complainers, down the slippery slope it went.

Yeah, they totally made the classic choice: keep classic EverQuest quests on the classic EverQuest server ... or let one idiot who saved a bunch of quest items get a server first (and ruin the "mini-game" R&N invented ... which was never in classic).

I'm sorry, but you will never convince me that someone who truly loves classic EQ would actually think it's acceptable to remove quests from the game (for a month ... after beta testing for 10+ years ... and then all they did after that month was nerf one quest!)

But there are plenty of other examples also ... like the staff just flat out gave up on /list :( To be clear, I'm a /list defender; I argued with people that /list was classic, it was just making up for classic paid GMs.

But it quickly became obvious that /list failed in one simple way: paid GMs slept. There were many different ways the staff could have addressed that, but instead ... guaranteed pixels for the sleepless/account sharers (because that's classic :rolleyes:).

Its true. I agree.

There is some stuff that is problematic. That isn't one of them.

Server progression breaking knowledge of things like manastone should be dealt with in a custom manner, I believe. The list was a failure. However, doing nothing and having it in game in normal fashion is also insane. On all live servers, the manastone never came back. Instant click pumices never came back. Legacy items were gone forever.

Here we are bringing legacy items back, legacy binds back.

They need customized if they're going to be in.

The classic move would be to have no locket of escape, no manastone, no clicky pumice (oh look we didn't include that, how interesting) and no firepots bind.

But if you want these fun items in the game, then you gotta customize it. The list was a good attempt but it didn't work with screen sharing technology it meant the thing was on lock permanently.