I believe portions of Luclin began the nosedive, hence the exit of Brad and over 50 other personnel a week before it launched. On Xegony, we didn't care for the port stones and bazaar, and most players decided to stick with the old character models over the Luclin "upgrade".
However, the "Real Decline" started when they began releasing expansions closer and closer together with minimal content and not allowing the player base time to fully explore and immerse themselves within the expansions. The writing was on the wall, so to speak. The first being Legacy of Ykesha, then except for the Augments, LDoN was a terrible expansion. The Lore was sacrificed as well after PoP and GoD was so damn bugged for so long no one was able to appreciate it or thought of it in a positive light until OoW era after they fixed GoD, but by then it was too late.
OoW was the last expansion I played through and thought it was a good one. I quit playing shortly before the Prophecies of Ro as it was clear that SoE was following in the path of old school Atari: Quantity over Quality. This was a recipe for disaster in that players found little to no worthy content being released, repetition for the sake of it, instancing and further disengagement throughout the EQ worlds, and a lack of appreciation from the company towards their player base, let alone understanding the magic which made the game great from the get go.
Everything became dumbed down, dull, and repetitive.
EQ2 was something new and fun until it began dumbing down the game to follow the WoW model and they suffered mightily from it.
|