[Ezrick]

I very much enjoyed EQ2 to a point. Looking back, it was a bit on rails up until level 30 or so. You could easily get more xp from completing quests than just grinding xp.

The locked encounters were good if, like me, you hate morons (/yell unlocked the encounter if you wanted to ask for help). So kill stealing and most other things some think of as "competition" in a PVE game were mostly eliminated. There were still some contested mobs at the raid level if that's your thing, but they were few and my guild mostly ignored them.

Raids were awesome though and, by extension, so were guilds. 24 players max. Period. That was all that could enter the largest raid encounters. No zergs allowed. Be good, or die. It separated the good players from the average. It also managed your guild for you. A good guild was no more than 30 of the best around. Even then we sometimes had to turn guild members back at the entrance to an encounter.

This would, of course, drive the average P99 raider bonkers. "What???? We cant have 17 clerics in a 1.5 second rotation?" ! It would totally screw them. No you couldn't pull a dragon to a zone line.

Almost no contested raiding spawns, but almost no guilds could truly raid the toughest encounters (there were only three on Kithicor and the third was iffy at best).

I can see where some wouldn't like it, but if you were at the top of it, it was a lot of fun.