[Toomuch]

Personally I feel like it was a gradual progression that way, with Luclin and Planes of Power contributing to it a little bit here and there, with a steep drop-off after Planes of Power. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, what people seemed to fall in love with in Everquest is the realism and difficulty level. You had to talk to people, depend on other people/classes, take the time/effort to travel where you needed to go, plan ahead with a lot of things like food/water/bandages, not venture into dangerous areas if you're not prepared/leveled/geared enough, etc.

I also played on Sullon Zek, and when they introduced Luclin, they introduced hard-coded safe zones (Nexus and Bazaar). I hate to use the cliché term, but it definitely ruined a bit of the immersion. Sullon was so hardcore, so merciless and brutal, always watching your back and hitting a /who hotkey every 10 seconds, and then suddenly you could just be safe/invulnerable instead.

Freebie ports on a timer with the implementation of The Nexus, that took away a bit of the interpersonal communication and interdependency that was so much a core part of the game, and introduced the first real EZ travel mode. If the Nexus only went once every 3 or 4 real hours, or maybe even just once a game day at most, maybe that would have preserved the game a little better?

Being able to vendor your wares automatically in The Bazaar, again it took away a large facet of the interpersonal communication. The zone itself wasn't the worst, it was the vendor-mode that dumbed down the game. If it could have just been the new EC, where it just made more sense to buy and sell wares there, due to the proximity to the Nexus and banks and all that, maybe that would have felt better? Or maybe limiting vendor mode to "open market hours" (like 8 AM to 6 PM game time) or something?

And then PoP came, and doubled-down on ez mode travel with the books. They DEFINITELY needed more limits on that, like maybe waaaay less available books around, and maybe you can only click 1 non-PoP book every 3 hours or something?

I personally liked the raiding in PoP and Luclin. If they could have kept the gear scaling a little more under control, I think it would have made a huge difference too. Like, maybe the 125 HP/mana items in Luclin, scale those back to ~115 and such, and then apply something similar to the PoP gear, so that it's maxing out more around 130. Then also tweak the raid mobs damage/HP/etc as well, to even out the gear tweaks. If they could've done that, then the very best gear from Velious and Kunark would've still been very applicable and worthwhile, instead of almost completely trivialized the moment the next expansion came out.

Basically, it seems like they kind of bumped up the top-end gear stats at about a rate of 25% per expansion, but if they could have kept it closer to 12-15%, then at least most of the old high-end raids are still well worth doing for the gear. And to me, the general lore sticks better too, because the big-bad bosses from previous expansions, that have all this painstakingly well-written story built in, they don't become complete pushovers (while still being gods and such?) quite so quickly.