This is a really interesting question and one I'm sure the devs think about a lot, given how things have evolved over time.

I like digging up history. I did a Classics degree before I got into the software industry. I like finding out how things were. That's more or less my motivation for digging around web archives, and how I indulge my nostalgia for the game, especially the early months before I personally started playing it.

That being said, there are obviously times when what's historically accurate maybe isn't the best thing for gameplay on the server.

It is really important though to point out that the game the developers intended wasn't the Everquest we played. They screwed things up, left things out, put things in they didn't mean to put in, and all of those things defined our experience of the game.

Gameplay in EQ, since it's a social game, is quite the interwoven tapestry. It's a complex system that has a lot of emergent behaviour, where the whole is more than just the sum of its parts.

The Guise, for instance, wasn't just valuable for the DE illusion aspect, it was almost *needed* before July 1999 because Shamans didn't have a Shrink spell, and large races were struggling in dungeons. Alchemy was broken and badly implemented so there were no shrink potions either. Leaving the Shrink spell and Shrink pots in the game diminishes the value of the Guise, takes some notches out of its desirability. If you try to just emulate the game without all its flaws and their unintended consequences, you lose the game environment this created of the Guise being uber-desired and camped and legendary, which was part of the feel of classic.

Banded gloves not being available would have meant a bigger market for ringmail, bronze, blackened iron gloves, anything that fills that price point. It's also one of those 'cachet' things that were sort of annoying but if you were a blacksmith in EQ, you knew about it and it became valuable game knowledge.

I'm not a dev. I don't make the decisions on what goes in and what doesn't, and that's probably a good thing. I wouldn't always get it right. I'm sure they all talk about this stuff and whether or not to implement it, and that's great. This particular quirk about Banded may not make it onto P99 and that's fine. I'm not invested in it. I found it while I was looking through websites for missing quests in Toxx Forest, something completely unrelated. But that's usually how I end up finding this stuff. I'm reading a Wayback machine page over lunch and something like this pops up and I'm like, "hey wait a minute..."

This is an outrage. I demand these phony banded patterns be expunged from our server!

yup

It was a minor annoyance. It had so little effect on anything that it was quickly forgotten when it was fixed. It wasn't even vaguely valuable game knowledge. Oh darn, newbies in their mid-teens and some sub-level 10 twinks had a couple less ac than they might have otherwise.

An example of useful game knowledge: You could go to Lower Guk dead side and loot rotting Shin Gauntlets & Shin Greaves. (both better than banded, btw)