Will 1999 ever progress to Luclin exp?

[Erasong]

I enjoyed Luclin. I dont know why people get so angry over the moon and cat people, but talking frogs and interdimensional shadowed men are ok. No one was shooting high powered lasers or using machine guns so its pretty much fair game.
The raid scene was amazing and I will give the compressing of population into select zones a point but that started lloongggggg before Luclin. Look at classic. The karanas ( minus south ) VS every other zone.

I liked the bazarr. I usually got my selling done offline that way and sometimes i enjoyed human interaction for the trade, and sometimes due to RL i didnt have the time for it.

The Nexus portals pretty much didnt effect travel much at all. In fact, more often then not, i paid for a trip to luclin rather than wait on the nexus.

PoP I LOVED. To me, what screams fantasy more then a full on armed conflict with the gods themselves? I see the argument about the world getting "smaller" but I didnt mind it. Nothing much more to say on that.

For me EQ died when GoD was delivered unfinished and tuned for the wrong levels. That combined with WoW beta being released told me 5-6 yrs was enough of a stay on norrath.

Im here becuase I loved EQ. All of it. I didnt really pick and choose which expansions I enjoyed and didnt. I loved the game as a whole pro's and cons. My definition of classic EQ.. is all of the game I played years ago so that is Vanilla thru PoP and I wouldnt mind it going there myself but I know what i signed on for. Velious has its own fun memories for me and I cant wait to rexperience them.

[Insedeel]

I think it's pretty widely accepted that EQ/Kunark/Velious was considered to be "classic" and that's where I personally also feel it should be as well. There needs to be a limit put somewhere, and velious makes the most sense. Luclin was an ok expansion, don't get me wrong, but luclin was the first expansion to start to "reimagine" everquest with the introduction of AAs, new models, UI revamp, bazaar, etc. It was the first expansion to try to change very core elements to EQ. That's a lot of the reason why it's considered to be the first expansion to shy away from "classic" and the original vision of everquest. Luclin in my opinion was the first of the downward spiral of making the intricate faction systems of the race's main cities become unimportant, and planted the seed for what you see today of the different races meaning next to nothing, and roleplaying and story telling between the races become a thing of the past.

[Quitis]

Has everyone had enough of a discussion on this topic? I would add my personal, logical based response. Listen to this kids.

If you take out the entire AA code, and not allow anyone to require 2,000,000 level ups to "finish" maxing out a character. Then you as the new designer of the game are a genius. Now you know exactly what each character is maxed at. Levels + spells + maxed abilities + best equipment possibly acquired = Single Power of that particular Class + Race character. At that combined power to other combined powers to figure out a group. Balance it verses other group combinations. Different healers, different CC, different buffers, different tanks, different DPS. Then balance it verses the new content in the expansion.

Now instead of needing 200 AA to kill that really bad ass snake, or the really bad ass end all raid in Lucline. Reduce the mobs damage to the maxed out tanking ability of a max geared tank prior to being able to get geared by said raid target. Reduce its abilities to being cast less often if it is necessary for reduced healing because of no AA's. Reduce other things to compensate as well because of no AA's. Finally, you have the ability to go behind any expansion you want because of no AA's.

No AA's means you only need to do 5 levels per expansion at most before you can enjoy an entirely new set of content. And for that, I am for the new content of adding another expansion at some point. Bottom line, AA's hurt the player, expansions help the player.

Go to Velious, stop, find a way to take AA's out of the entire expansion equation past Velious, then continue on. I'd pay money for that!

[point blank]

I began the thread to answer a simple question. I returned out of curiosity of what people thought. I was content to be silent and just observe since at this point I intend NOT to join as the server is clearly not headed to luclin.

But this must be said.
Quitis you are quite wrong and you have pointed out what is wrong with most mmos now.
They chose easier to balance over depth and fun. They chose cost effective over quality. This greed and way of thinking killed EQ, was what was wrong with EQII from the beginning, and is what made Vanguard a train wreck.

With out AA too many people run a toon to max level get bored and roll a new one rinse repeat. Why bother to play your maxed out toon?

What AA does is increase the time in a toons life span that they are at comparable levels to adventure together. It increases the time they are around to be seen and interacted with.
It gives your friends or even strangers one more reason to help you camp %#$@$ to get your epic. At least they get some exp along the way.

That increases a sense of community.
Community is the biggest single factor that made EQ great.