The penalty is spread among party members so it's really not bad at all if you stay grouped. And if you play an SK or Paladin, you should have a relatively easy time finding them. They're so much better at tanking while leveling than warriors that it is absolutely worth taking one over a warrior every time, even with the troll/iksar SK penalty.
I've gotten the urge to get back into EQ twice, and both times I started with the live test server. But over there you just hit relatively high levels in a few hours after only seeing a very small handful of areas and without interacting with anyone. I don't have any interest in post-luclin content so what do you do at that point? Hang around deserted old zones full of green mobs that offer no challenge? That's not really fun in the way that actually getting groups and partaking in those dungeons on p1999 is.
As for red, I dunno. I've recently been trying it out, and I adore the group exp bonus. It makes things less of a slog, but it's not too fast, and it really encourages everyone to group in pretty much any circumstances. You're not gonna get turned away just because you aren't an ideal class, and if there is a group around they usually have room. But that's the big "if". There aren't many people on red so you aren't gonna find anyone to group with a lot of the time. I was the only one in crushbone earlier this afternoon, and when I checked unrest I think there was one other dude. These are by far the most populated low level areas - everywhere else is a 24/7 ghost town. The community also has some real issues. Global /ooc on red is far worse than WoW barrens chat ever was. It's a nonstop barrage of garbage that you have to keep enabled if you want to see LFG/LFM calls and auctions. And the only pvp I've found so far is twinks slaughtering people who don't stand even the tiniest chance. EQ1's classes and mechanics weren't really built for pvp at all either.
One other thing that's kind of interesting about red is that you often have to improvise in weird ways due to poor group composition. Since you're just grabbing whoever shows up regardless of class, you run into a lot of situations where you don't have a tank, healer, real dps, CC, or any combination thereof. That's both a good and a bad thing since it can change things up a bit, but some class setups can be a nightmare to deal with.
I think my ideal server would be blue with a somewhat lessened version of red's group exp bonus. Too many people soloing on blue, and too many people are picky about class selection. That aint classic. Back in the day we invited wizards all the time because we didn't know how useless they were.
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