The Pinnacle of Everquest (In your opinion)

[jstnhickey]

I started live right before kunark and didn't do much kunark til I soloed (druid) outside karnors. I lost interest not long after velious due to new gear making mine trash so in short I go with original.
Right now me and 2 friends who played originally are playing on red (left blue) as characters we never played are lvling without any twinking. It's great. We are gonna take our 3 man group to guk this weekend while we all have a lan party. Just like in 99 minus the towers and huge monitors.

[porigromus]

Originally Posted by heartbrand [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

What "killed" EverQuest, at least in my opinion, wasn't PoK books or the expansion of the world [especially considering the game was at it's subscription peak during PoP], but rather an unfinished expansion in GoD that was not properly tuned to the level of the playerbase, offered almost no content for casual players to consume, had mobs that absolutely raped even elemental geared players in the first zone, an incredibly difficult locked progression that wasn't nerfed until a lot of people quit already, a weird environment that turned many people off [though I didn't mind it], suddenly nerfing raid size from 72 to 54 forcing many guilds to break up, an increased focus on instances for loot and less static mob spawns with loot that you could just "camp" which is what EQ had been based upon up to that point. On top of all of this you then had the simultaneous release of WoW which was incredibly polished.

At least that's my theory!

In my opinion it was the incohesiveness of the poor cobbled together game that was just waiting for something better to come along at that point to topple it. World of Warcraft just happened to be that game. Everquest in my opinion had sloppy expansions with ridiculous mismatched graphics, themes, pok, poor implementation of a auction system, magical teleporting books. It didn't feel like one game.

Here comes Wow that felt like a complete product, everyone jumped ship.

[porigromus]

Originally Posted by Daldaen [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

PoP + PoK = Muy Bien

But really, I Agree with heartbrand here. Don't get hate on PoK. People don't use half of the classic zones as is. No one is grouping in splitpaw or runnyeye or gorge of King Xorbb or lake Rathetear or west Karana or Blackburrow or permafrost or Kithicor or north Karana or Cazic thule or south ro or north ro or befallen or najena...

There may be a solo guy or two EXPing in those zones. Very rarely are they getting grouped in currently.

I just realized what pok felt like. It felt like the amateur attempt at making a emulator by making a zone lined with teleporters. I always hates those attempts of making some custom game. At that point the game has been removed and replaced with some mob killing factory.

[Taminy]

Originally Posted by Daldaen [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

PoP + PoK = Muy Bien

But really, I Agree with heartbrand here. Don't get hate on PoK. People don't use half of the classic zones as is. No one is grouping in splitpaw or runnyeye or gorge of King Xorbb or lake Rathetear or west Karana or Blackburrow or permafrost or Kithicor or north Karana or Cazic thule or south ro or north ro or befallen or najena...

There may be a solo guy or two EXPing in those zones. Very rarely are they getting grouped in currently.

Because many of those zones are shit / massive train town asking for CR. I remember I went to gorge once on live back when the game was still quite new (I don't think anyone was level 50 yet) and vowed never to go back after everyone got charmed and CR was a pain in the ass. A similar thing happened in runnyeye. IDK though, maybe it was because none of us knew the zone at all.

Also the xp bonus sucks in a lot of those zones and the server is 5 years old so there is a lot of stratification at the upper levels and a lot of the low levels running around are twinks and can solo.

A lot of the zones are not used because they are just plain... bad zones for one reason or another.

It's not even all that different with vanilla WoW, most of the low-mid level dungeons were extremely underutilized because they were a general PITA. How many people did you see in Desolace for that matter?

Anyway I don't think underutilized means we should have books to skip across continents. It just means some zones go underutilized. Big deal. You don't even have to cross most of those zones for anything. And they do give a "safety outlet" for xp if the server is particularly crowded with a certain level group because of double xp or holiday weekend or some other reason.

[Danth]

I like the original pre-expansion Everquest best. I feel that both of the early expansions were little bit worse overall (for different reasons) with the expansions from Luclin onward starting a much more rapid and--more importantly--irreversible decline. I particularly loathe Planes of Power--quite understandable since I don't enjoy raiding as a mode of gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Taminy [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How many people did you see in Desolace for that matter?

Off-topic of course: Not a disagreement, but merely a comment on this quote: That zone received considerable traffic when I played Warcraft (from launch). It had both the quest track plus a few weeks later folks going to and from Mauradon. Granted, while it was used, Desolace was disliked by most folks because it was ugly and boring. As soon as Blizzard increased the leveling rate that zone fell largely out of use.

Danth

[Taminy]

Originally Posted by Danth [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Off-topic of course: Not a disagreement, but merely a comment on this quote: That zone received considerable traffic when I played Warcraft (from launch). It had both the quest track plus a few weeks later folks going to and from Mauradon. Granted, while it was used, Desolace was disliked by most folks because it was ugly and boring. As soon as Blizzard increased the leveling rate that zone fell largely out of use.

Danth

Interesting. On my sever even early on no one used it - though I did play alliance so I'm not sure if it was more popular with horde? It was also a pvp server so I think had a bit lower pop than pve servers.

[Stonecrush]

I feel like PoP was an interesting expansion but Gates of Discord gave more guilds a lot more raid targets, when they wanted them. Effectively ending the race towards targets. Instanced Raiding was nice for people that didn't want to deal with contested mobs.

I chose Luclin not for BSTs, Space Kittens, or the AA's.
I chose Luclin for the raid content. That was a real raiding expansion with the loot saturation off the charts, it made Velious look like a kids sand box.

I really enjoyed SSRA and Vex Thal.

[Velerin]

Classic EQ was so unforgiving and not conducive to easy grinding. What game now puts wandering high level npcs in newbie zones? Classic EQ had:
Griffins roaming around EC
High level evil eyes roaming around low level goblin areas In Runnyeye
Level 8-10 orc camps where a lvl 20 named can spawn that any exp group couldn't even kill
etc. etc.

Problem is people learned those inefficient areas rather quickly and rather than deal with those challenges those areas go unused and people go elsewhere. EC a little different since high levels are there to assist.

[wwoneo]

I had to choose Kunark as the best expansion. I agree that PoP was amazing and would have been the best, but Luclin was SO terrible that it negates the greatness of PoP.

I would choose PoP, if you could have PoP without Luclin.

I wouldn't vote for Velious because I don't like that gear is so absurdly good in the expansion that it makes everything else a lot less difficult. Also, I feel Velious makes raiding less of an option and more of a mandatory event.

Classic would be my second choice, but only because there wasn't enough to do in Classic by itself.

[Zuranthium]

Classic was the best, because people actually played it as a roleplaying game and hadn't broken things down into a technicality. It was about living the moment, adventuring, trying new things, and facing new obstacles because of the excitement of it all. The game at that point was set up so well for the community to interact, with such a strong vision in the design. If you didn't play the game in 1999 then you sadly missed something unique and special.

Kunark was great for the look/feel of the zones themselves but the new levels and items were poorly conceived and it hurt the game.

Velious had a few good ideas but it mostly just hurt the game. Ridiculous amount of HP + Resists on the monsters = extremely long and boring fights (and Clerics more of a necessity than ever). Huge powercreep on equipment, particularly melee = way too much mudflation and melee classes made damage casters look like a joke. This era was when Everquest really started to stop feeling like a roleplaying game and instead more of a grind and a checklist. It already was heading in that direction with Kunark era, but the game world became too fractured in Velious, with the old world zones in particular becoming too sparsely populated.

Originally Posted by Sampten [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

PoP raiding separated the men from the boys. It was unforgiving and challenging.

Raiding was more challenging in classic and FAR more unforgiving. Some people couldn't even get their corpses back at all back then.

Originally Posted by mokfarg [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm surprised so many people have voted PoP. I imagine the demise of the MAC EQ server has had an influence since it stopped at PoP. Those folks have probably reluctantly made a home here but wish for their old server back.

No doubt!