My personal review of P99 Green: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
 

About me

Innoruuk sever (60 epic Monk)
The Sleeper server (60 epic Magician)
Test (Various high level with swarming SK)
P99 Green: 53 Iksar Necro, 37 Iksar Monk, 24 Human Druid, 23 DE Mage

The Good

- It's free (not freemium or free-to-play)

- There is a lot less downtime than Live

- It's popular, for now, so there are people in newbie zones (adventuring and buffing)

- There are no mercs

- There are no Kronos

- There is no Verant store selling XP pots for $

- The vast majority of people seem friendly and chilled out; there is far less drama than on live server.

- It's not easy if you do it legit.

- It passes the time.

- There are no Luclin models.

- It runs on a 12 year old laptopand a throttled 30kbps data connection.

The Bad

-It's cramped and spawns are highly contested, forever.

- There are bazaar characters in EC spamming and ripping people off that's why they take a while to answer when you send them a tell; real players answer right away and have reasonable prices.

- Higher latency and screen lag than Live servers.

- Lacking basic features (pet window, working hot bars, unique icons)

- No sci-fi aspect, ever.

- No Beastlords, ever.

- No Halfling Rangers, ever.

- Mobs on Green and Blue drop the same amount of plat but items on Green cost up to 5 x times more than on blue even though populations are roughly the same; there's lot of sellers hoping it stays that way keeping prices up. You want to sell an item for a reasonable price? A seller is going to buy it and flip it so a newb is gonna pay 5 x more for it.

The Ugly

- P99 is stuck in a moment of time forever when there is a great bias for evil races and classes (self harm, witchcraft, playing dead like a sissy, lifetaps, eating oneself, talking to the dead etc) so heroic righteous classes like Rangers, Paladins and Druids are a permanent joke on P99.

- Humans are blind, dumb, weak and have no racials to speak of and the best plat farming zones are ones in which you kill humans (humans being neutral have potential for good).

- Iksar regen makes all other Necro's technically inferior, forever. All Necro at 60 should be equal and you should play the race because you like the look of it not because it's min-max.

- PnP policy benefits camp stealers, trainers and kill stealers (good people don't need signs telling them how to behave in public).

- P99 is an unnoficial emulated version of EverQuest and there are lots of those but there's only one official EverQuest so P99 is not as unique as you may think it is.

- Pet classes share XP with pet (duh)

- The early birds have already caught the worms so they will always have OP pre-nerf loot and you won't.

- Bow damage is a joke and will always be a joke.

- Although it's popular, people seem to level in a bubble and only group out of necessity.

- P99 is not Classic/Vanilla; it's the original game with two full blown commercial expansions released after 1999.

- P99 is min/max heaven...so there's no fashion or lore to speak of.

- Raid rotations....you can't just turn up and kill a raid mob; you have to check a sanctioned list HOWEVER if you have an XP camp for hours and somebody gets you killed then somebody immediatley has a right to your camp because you're no longer there.

- You have to 'learn to love it' a bit like an ugly version of yourself unlike Live back in the day when the experience was magical from day one.

- You don't know how long the server is going to stick around for or what's going to happen to it.

- With some classes the monumental stuggle has no endgame reward other than kudos from other players (Ranger vs Necro for example).

- Whether it's Live, TLP, test or P99 I play on my own because I have no friends or faily to speak of and the game isn't designed around solo play but evil classes can do it better.

There's no edit button on this forum (more duh).

- There are login issues with P99 which you don't get on Live. I guess having to reboot my phone 10 times to log in is part of the 'no hand holding' classic experience? If you're not pulling your hair out wanting to bomb verant offices then you ain't playing EQ the way it was intended to be played even if you can't login?

(Edit: I can edit this post but not my OP).

- EC tunnel exists on P99 but it's a bit of an illusion. It's more like the Luclin bazaar in EC tunnel.

No one is forcing you to play an iksar necro.

There's other classes to play.

The only classes that need to buy anything from EC are monk, war, rogue. And even then you can easily hit 40 plus with a weapon you can farm yourself.

There's no compelling reason to play an ogre or put all stats into sta.

You can literally get by on any race/class combo putting every point into CHA, AGI, or dex. Once you have thurgadin armor There's absolutely no difference between you and anyone else. And before than the difference is less than 5% vs any dark blue or higher, and 0% vs greens.

People do box. It actually hurts the legit players more. Try takp. It's almost as good as p99 and you can help them polish the broken quests, factions, and NPC chat texts once pop is debugged.

:p

Conclusion:

Live is one extreme and P99 is the other and it's somewhere in between where I want to be but Verant has got (or should have) absolute authority on the subject being the original developer so I'm out of luck until they do it because I prefer official OR something comes along that's better than EQ, P99 and WoW, which I can't imagine, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist or won't exist. Something which doesn't have so many fuckups and nerfs and isn't just about making money and you're not punished for being heroic and rewarded for perpetual self harming.

EveQuest 3?

The #1 thing I agree with you the strongest is the PnP policy. The toxicity and exploiting how it is written has made it too much LawyerQuest vs using common sense and instead of relieving pressure from the GMs it puts them in an awkward place to follow this nonsense

I just started on the blue, got to lvl 5. But there are absolutely no groups, no one in the zone, feels kind of lonely. Sometimes there is a twink who absolutely never talks to anyone or high lvl player on /anon who is also afk... but otherwise dead. Might give up if it stays this way till 8.

Is green better, are there groups on green at low levels? I'm not really a hardcore player, just want to group for fun and you know the old school stuff, hang around, shoot shit, tell jokes, guild stuff eventually. That's the fun part of grouping. EQ was never really a solo game.

Green is busy at the bottom, it's the biggest selling point. Not sure about the top.
EQ needs people and Green has that (at least for now) so enjoy it while it lasts but there's no room to grow at 60 and no way to level the playing field.
Green is full of greed.
I haven't tried blue. I've tried to log into it but it won't let me.

drugs

I'm not trying another emulated server.
I felt the need to try P99 because I heard about it years ago in the news when Verant blessed it with protection.
I've also been looking to relive those days like other people have...the nostalgia....a time machine; official EQ is a barren wasteland in the newbie zones and it's no surprise because every new expansion hurts the original newbie zones and the Mines of Gloomingdeep doesn't help either. EQ is now in the hands of a gold digger and that needs to be fixed and P99 doesn't fix it.