Last night I was camping Pawbuster in KC for my Epic on the TLP and I was chatting in vent about why we all still play this ridiculous game and why people are so vile towards content after Velious/Lucilin/PoP. Best argument I heard was that it’s a symptom of World of Warcraft's success. The top MMO guilds all got lifetime subscriptions to WoW on release, Blizzard was passing out free beta keys to EQ guilds, and honestly their basic marketing campaign was “steal players from EQ and profit”. You had the top guilds and most visible players all run to WoW around Planes of Power era and it left a void in EQ. Coupled with the fact that PoP and beyond started getting really “hard” and much less “casual”, you had a mass exodus to WoW and EQ started to shrivel and die.
So long story short, people are obsessed with Velious and Lucilin and PoP because that is when the population was thriving. Its not the content people hate, it’s the community exodus and escalation of difficulty of expansions. It got to a point where Sony/Verant/Daybreak (whoever owned them) realized their hardcore neckbeard core of players all left and they were just punishing the “lowbies” by making ridiculous content that no one could be a part of.
Players who stayed through the WoW exodus will tell you that the expansions up till Gates of Discord are really fun and challenging. Velious era raiding is tank and spank zerg, not sure why we are all obsessed with 0 mechanic boss fights still.
a true "classic" server would capture the essence and experience of EQ - the build of suspense for the release of content. Freezing in Velious with nothing to look forward to is not classic.
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