Noobs report in!

[Estu]

I was reading the Plane of Mischief thread and the following two comments struck me:

"I LOVED PoM. Was my home for a long time, unfortunately I think it'll be kinda sucky on P99 now that everyone knows the deal."

"almost all the player base here knows the secrets of most of the game...or at least, is highly familiar with them."

Really? Everyone knows the deal? Almost everyone knows the secrets of most of the game? Let me paint you a little picture. I played EQ for a couple of years starting when I was in 8th grade and ending in 10th or so. When I joined, either Kunark was out or Velious was. I enjoyed the game a lot, but I had severe altitis; I kept wanting to try every race and every class to the point that I never got a character past the teens or so. I think my highest level character on EQ was a 20 monk. When Planes of Power came out I became disillusioned by the easy teleporting between zones and all the tradeskill stuff being available in one place, and although I did a little instancing with LDoN on my monk, ultimately I decided EQ had jumped the shark and I quit. I play WoW for a while and although I have some altitis I actually end up getting some characters to high levels, and one or two to 70, or whatever the max level was during Wrath of the Lich King. Then I become bored with the game and quit it for good.

Cut to about a month ago when I'm browsing 4chan, as I do, and I see a thread about a private classic EQ server. I've seen these threads before from time to time, and though I've salivated extensively, I've just been led to some website saying that the thing is still in development or they are waiting for approval from Sony or some such garbage. So imagine my surprise when I'm reading the 'getting started' guide for P99 and it looks like it's legit and it works! I load everything up, I start playing, and this nostalgic old game that I was worried I might not like because of the flaws I remember about it, thinking maybe I just had nostalgia goggles about it, that my older and more refined gaming sensibilities would now have distaste for it - this game is still an excellent play! Life is good.

But from the beginning until now? Still a newbie! No experience with post-level-20 EverQuest. I can tell you all about starting up your tradeskills, about how you should keep your bat wings and snake eggs and snake scales but sell/trash your bat fur and snake fangs - but Plane of Mischief? My sum total of knowledge about Plane of Mischief is that it's some high level zone that maybe you need a wizard to teleport you to that has Bristlebane, the god of thieves, in it, and I've seen screenshots and I think his character model looks pretty cool. Now I'm wondering if I'm the only person like this out there, or if there's a sizable number of us and nobody seems to be aware of it! Hence this poll.

By the way: I realized just after making this poll that people who have played official EQ but only reached 50 on an emulator might not know where to put their vote. I'd put your vote in the second option.