well to be fair sig is new. like REALLY new. not just a returning player from years ago. it's a very different thing and I thnk every1 gets used to returning players but completely misses the boat on someone freshly minted. understanding this, you might have some compassion for sig. sig has no idea where to go or what do. probably isn't prepared for the long haul, or getting lost in a zone somewhere, dying and not knowing how to find the corpse. this is not a small ordeal for someone playing in 2020 with so many other MMORPGs out there.
i've played on p1999 before, quite a bit. i've played eq for a long time. everyone i've met has been friendly. i even rolled a dark elf sk alt--because i never played a dark elf before. the main difference i think is i had preknowledge about everything and the journey is a lot smoother that way. and being i actually like how eq plays, like corpse runs for example, almost nothing is a rude reminder of its "outdated gameplay," as htey might say.
sorry sig for your experience. people around here tend to have a blind spot for people like yourself. a lot of that's due to it being so uncommmon for people like yours trully to visit. EQ at this day and age is almost entirely composed of returning players. the live servers aren't any different.
this reminds me. on live the UI is so incredibly bloated i myself became like a new player when i tried it again. I cannot fathom what it must be like for someone new to everquest. i dreaded creating an alt--since hten i have leanred there's a way to copy the UI in options. the UI fills up half the screen even on 1900x1200 (whatever it's). i realize when eq released in 1999 it also had a large UI, however this is different. back then a large portion of the screen was just images. they had no function. these days, the scren is filled with functiaonal things liike buttons and chat and similar. it's crazy!!!!!!! starting out in teh tutorial almost broke my brain when i fist came back. what's unthinkable is a player new to everquest starts out with a heroic character. OMG. baby jesus died. information overload.
a good way for new player is just watch someone else play it. it's painful, but you'll see exactly how things are done:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQmcHgxO2I
but really the only way to lenar is to play. you have to enjoy the core game mechanics, IMHO, at least somewhat. things like no maps, no glowing paths, no icons above NPCs, coin/item weight and encumberance, corpse runs, lots of traveling, diseases, trains, grouping-oriented, high death penalty, kill monsters much more than doing quests, not led around by a quest chain, chat with NPCs to get quests instead of a UI, and just unforgiving. otherwise it'll just be a burden. nostalgia alone has never been enough for me.
i enjoy the mechanics. it's the same reason i enjoyed wurm online, except wuyrm online is (or was anyway) a hybrid of old UO and eq.
