[Jimjam]

Originally Posted by heartbrand [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't know why people say PoP killed community. You had tons of people gathered in PoK and PoT, tons of groups in all the new zones, pickup raids, huge guilds for 72 man raiding, trade skills that mattered, tons of tradable gear and a great economy (ornate armor anyone?), difficult grouper content (BoT bosses), and the best raids. Also had the coolest zones and coolest music (sol ro tower / poearth / potime some of my favs). I don't remember once thinking to myself "man that nektulos pok book is ruining my immersion." Prolly cuz I was balls deep in the new content.

People think PoP and the PoP books is what killed the newbie game, I think it actually helped save it.

During kunark the newbie zones were generally packed; lots of opportunity for player interaction as soon as you rolled your guy. By the time SoL was ending, often if you rolled a character you would be the only one in the zone if you rolled the wrong area. PoP let you roll the character/class combo you wanted, without penalising you by giving you an empty starting area. Furthermore, PoP meant you could ensure that there would be a group where you wanted to hunt (as a newb) as you could more easily form up and travel there. Notably, the pop books particularly aided travel between the lowest level zones; for higher levels there was still a sense of scale in the game as PoK books didn't do much to open up Velious or SoL.

The problem is EQ was getting too big; there was too many similar zones, and the level cap was getting too high. I imagine these are problems more MMOs are facing; I think I read something like WoW reset level 0 to level 80for paying customers as the catch up was getting silly? EQ I think created a fast track levelling/gearing up path with the drakkin expansion so all the newbies would be concentrated in one area and be given quests where their gear would be more 'meaningful'.

Originally Posted by MarcusD [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If kunark+ didn't exist then would they still be pointless? I am asking because I don't know but I assume they were good relatively in pure classic.

Expansions are solely to make money and they always make old stuff obsolete (mudflation). By making an expansion what you really did is start sacrificing the game for money and eventually you kill it completely. Don't get me wrong there should be fixes and tweaks to get it to where it was originally intended but "expansions" as we know them are commercilization of a brand and nothing more.

It's not like Kunark just knocked a couple of points of delay off weapons, or maybe added a DMG, some stats or a new proc... The problem is kunark gave weapons that were obtainable in the late teens (Iksar berserker club, even the crappy forest giant hammer) that invalidated so many of weapons you could quest/loot in classic. The improvements in the weapons were not small increments but orders of magnitude better.

Originally Posted by heartbrand [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Couldn't disagree more. Pre Kunark itemization is terrible. Trade skills are worthless, most named mobs drop crap that no one uses, sol ro temple quests offer awful items with dumb stats for the most part, poorly itemized planar items, etc. Only a couple of item camps end up being worthwhile, for the most part all located in lower guk, leaving most zones completely pointless.

The best items were in a high end dungeon. That makes sense to me.

Most stats don't really achieve that much, I like how Sol Ro armour had stats your character didn't need as it made the itemisation seem real; not that it was a game where everything was optimised towards the class system. Besides, the Sol Ro armour had decent AC on it for the most part.

You complain that everything pre-guk sucked, but surely that puts it on a rough parity?

I think part of the reason most equipment was such a small upgrade / sidegrade to ringmail and bronze was to prevent people becoming to item-orientated in their gameplay.