[Wizardling]

When useful loot (a tiny percentage of overall drops, anyway) in EQ has always either been extremely minor upgrades for the most part, or very rare decent upgrades I hardly ever see or win if I do see... well, I wouldn't still be playing EQ1 in 2014 if loot was all I cared about.

For me EQ1 is about the grouping, and to a lesser extent the solo adventures and questing. The only thing that can destroy that for me is finding myself having to travel to the same tiny subset of zones on every damn alt, to find other people.

Now I do make an effort at times to create groups where I'd rather play, and sometimes that gets off the ground - which is awesome. If I'm really lucky I create a self-sustaining group that repopulates as members leaving get others to fill their spots, or word gets out and people hang about to get in on the action.

But it's rare that it works out that well. On some alts I just thank my lucky stars I found an UGuk group instead of Oasis again, heh. And you know something is wrong when you consider UGuk a break from the usual (no matter how much I love that zone - and I really do :-) *mucho warm fuzzies for Guk*).

What it comes down to is not only making an effort to create interesting varied group destinations, but the rest of the players making some effort not to just fall into the same old CLs->Ro->Oasis->etc progression.

I mean really - how boring are most people to do the same zones over and over, when just a tiny bit more effort will get them somewhere unusual? Not to say I've not been guilty of being lazy and falling into popular spots, but I like to think I at least make some effort on each alt to break the pattern a few times on the rise to 60.