P99 has never tried to emulate the fact that EQ had like twenty servers for the hardcores to spread out on. Raid content being completely and utterly inaccessible was not a universal feature of EQ at any point in time, you always had the option of moving to a server where the endgame hadn't been totally monopolized or where the top guild had room for you. EQ essentially had twenty times the content P99 has. The developers have never cared to acknowledge this problem and don't seem interested in fixing it. It has created a community of people who hate each other and distrust the GMs, a server where doing anything meaningful means you have to step on others and ruin it for them in order to get it to yourself. It has created a community of constant bickering, abuse, conention and rampant cheating -- everything you want to do has to be done at the expense of others.
So many players quit because they come to realize that the only way to get anything other than the leveling experience out of this server is to join a guild that expects completely unreasonable and unhealthy things of their members, and makes you shunned by the community because you're content-blocking a thousand other players. It's not the fault of the resident überguild, it's the fault of the server for failing to account for the fact that Everquest is not a game that functions properly with just one server that has no instancing or manual spawning of raid content.
Failure to account for this is the reason P99 has numbers in the hundreds instead of the thousands, and the conflict created by this endgame environment has been such a blemish on the server throughout its history and the cause for several good GMs quitting, not to mention probably 75% of the people who have played here. It's the #1 issue with this server and one that has been dominating the community since the very beginning, but almost nothing has been done about it. Emulator communities always consist of disproportionately high amounts of hardcore players, former raiders, and people who come with ambitions of doing all the stuff they didn't get to do back in the day. This has to be accounted for or the server suffers severely, as P99 always has. It's only because there has been no classic EQ alternative of reasonable quality that P99 even has numbers in the higher hundreds.
There's not enough content on an EQ server for more than one, maybe one and a half serious raid guilds. Instead, EQ had its twenty servers so that there generally was enough total raid content for everybody who wanted to raid. Maybe you had to reroll elsewhere if your current server had a hardcore poopsocking guild, but you had that option. There's no alternative on P99, even if you were to "beat" the top guild then there's still only enough content for a certain amount of players. You've just shifted the hierarchy around at best and saddled others with the issue of no available endgame content. This has actually happened a few times here.
It's holding P99 back from being awesome, and it has cost the server many individuals who would have improved it.
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