[Noselacri]

Well, the thing is that if you're no longer hugely amused by the various dungeons, soloing can be a much more pleasant experience. I get the impression that the soloers are mainly people who enjoy classic but haven't been waiting 8 years for it; i.e they're the ones who have been drifting from classic server to classic server on emu, or they're the ones who haven't been missing it so much they could cry but still find it mildly entertaining. They're also often people who still play Live, or have up until recently. In groups, I see mostly people who a) haven't played for 8 years or b) just want to experience the old days for sheer nostalgia. They aren't the ones who long for high-end raiding, or the ones who have been playing the game on and off all along. For that reason, joining a group often means playing with people who aren't hardcore gamers or haven't been for a decade. Seems that the min-maxing experts who know everything and can play their classes to perfection are either out there soloing, or are playing with their RL friends and pay little attention to those around them. Basically, joining a group almost always means playing with at least a couple of bad players.

That's no problem in and of itself. All games have bad players, and it was no different back in the day. However, what's different is the fact that most soloable classes can get similar or sometimes much better exp from soloing, without having to deal with people who consistently cause wipes or play their classes poorly. They rely only on themselves, and if they know what they're doing, it's simply much less of a hassle than grouping in a dungeon. If you don't specifically miss the grouping aspect, and if you aren't overly interested in meeting more internet strangers - after all, we gamers have met thousands upon thousands, and it sort of loses its appeal - well, then grouping isn't all that attractive. Add to that the fact that soloing tends to be a good deal more safe, offers many more options, can be much more profitable than regular exp grouping, and allows you to do whatever you please and go AFK for 15 minutes when you feel like it.

And that's the thing, really. The benefits of soloing are supposed to come at the price of less but safer exp and a lack of interaction. However, the guy who played back in anno 1999 when he was 18 and had a blast joking around with strangers and staying up until 2AM and so on, he's now a grown man with a wife and a crying kid in the next room. He doesn't care as much about bullshitting with other youngsters, and he doesn't need to play in an environment where having to leave the computer for 20 minutes is a problem. And unlike the EQ he remembered, this version actually rewards him much more for refraining to group. Suddenly soloing isn't something to do when there are no groups available, or the only way for classes that aren't highly desirable in groups. It's the best way to level up and by far the most convenient way to play for him. And since many, if not most players, are now more like him than the energetic teenagers they were when they started playing ten or eleven years ago, it's no wonder more and more players prefer the spectre island over Lower Guk.

Other than that, there has been a simple change of mentality in gaming over the years. Back then, Everquest was a modern game and we didn't really question it. Now, after most of us have played WoW or EQ2 or whatever, and after MMORPG gaming as a whole has shifted to an entirely different atmosphere, EQ turns out to be a brutally punishing and unforgiving game. Dying while camping bouncers in Oggok means a loss of exp and a 10 second corpse run. Dying at the bottom of SolB means a loss of exp, a corpse run of potentially hours, and quite likely a further loss of exp as you die once or twice trying to recover. These are things we put up with back in the day, both because grouping was the more effectively way to level and because that's how games were. Now, neither of those two are the case. What seemed like a fact of life back in the day, the hour-long CR or the hours of going from dungeon to dungeon trying to find a group, those aren't really acceptable in today's gaming industry. It's no longer an accepted element of the game, it's a thing that constantly pisses you off. And when the exp then isn't even better, it's sort of hard to justify grouping. You'd have to just love grouping for the sake of grouping, despite the disadvantages that it tends to come with. Virtually all of EQ1's gear is tradeable, anyway.

Until grouping becomes substantially better exp than soloing, we'll see hordes of people playing necros, mages and druids, and we'll see ridiculous amounts of soloing. We can't change the fact that most of the players have grown older and live lives that make soloing more convenient than grouping, but if they want to solo, it should be for that reason; not because it's twice as fast as Guk.