I have hopes for this one myself. Modern MMOs are mostly lameass action RPGs that get boring to grown adults. While Pantheon will likely to be different than EQ in many ways -- at least their talking about reeling back the whole "rush through the dungeon AoE with 4 stangers" style of play.

only took you 17 years

This. I've seen ingress players that Def rival eq in terms of how hardcore they play.

Augmented reality games are onto something huge.

QFT! I completely agree with this, in WoW you didn't just have encounters where a CHeal rotation was required in every raid. You had specific roles that individual classes needed to play. The raid encounters were very unique and fun to learn, it did take a certain discipline to achieve success.

I also agree with the delayed gratification, I could get up to level 60 in a month on WoW and just solo to boot. It was very easy to reach the top level. Also not losing exp later in wow was a big mistake that catered to all the babies. Every patch stuff became easier and easier. Reagents weren't needed anymore, cool downs decreased, combat damage wouldn't break crowd control, etc. When new expansions came out in just a day you would get the server wide message 'Server First! <guild xyz> Killed the top boss in the game!'. It was very disheartening.

EQ was tough, people needed to know how to play their character effectively to advance, whereas WoW you could have a snot nosed kid that doesn't know how to use his spells yet is epic geared. I took a lot of pride in the achievement of making it to the top in EQ vs. WoW. Is why I came back to p99.

http://vgoplayers.com/index.php

Still working on it, but the world is there.

Its not going to be like the WoW emu from my understanding. They can't finish the work. They don't have more than 10% of the data needed.

As they don't have any data to recreate most of the things exactly as they existed. Missing about 85% of the entire data on spells, mobs, and quests.

Unless SOE/Daybreak leaks the source code, VG emu will remain exactly as it is right now. A shell world, with developers making a lot of guesses. Its just a fun little project. It won't be playable VG anytime in the next few years, that's for sure.

They have begged SOE devs by email, no response. An insider sys admin programmer would have to leak it very quietly. Otherwise theres no point pretending VGemu is a real thing.

WoW is a harder game than EQ in just about every single way other than "leveling" which isn't meant to be anything other than a way to watch the story and learn your class. All of those server firsts you talk about in WoW are the result of people who beta tested for months and played 16 hours a day doing the same fights sometimes in excess of 300 attempts. There's a lot of things you can say about WoW, but to claim it's raiding, particularly mythic raiding, is "ez" is lol worthy.

The only mmo currently being developed that could recapture the 1999 feel for me aside from a fresh P99 would be Crowfall.

A man after my own heart. Spoken like a gentleman-- get him a drink.

I wish games would be more like old EQ and make the entire game based on Grouping and Raiding. But there is a huge push to make most the game (content-wise) solo. This is partly because WoW has created these monsters.

WoW planned for a pattern like this:

Phase 1) You level solo to 60, grouping here and there optionally (it was actually never worth the time during Vanilla until you got to Sunken Temple or so). This allows you to learn your class, the story, and get hooked.

Phase 2) You group and start being more social and making friends around your playtime. This is the first step of keeping you around long enough to get raids looking appealing

Phase 3) You join a guild and raid. It becomes a kind of social organization that keeps you playing for years.

Over the years though, Blizzard kept giving into people that liked phase 1, and thought the other 2 were stupid because they were gods gift to gaming and didn't need to put up with any sucky person dragging them down.

Maybe their original model worked for building community. No regional instances allowed a community to grow even in the presence of so much instanced content. Grouping was more difficult and -- in fact -- it is routine for wow to nerf group content after the expansion has been out a few months to let the bads do it. Almost no one used "leveling specs" that were separate from their "group spec," so your solo experience mattered a little more. Raids used to take 40 people -- later deemed much too high.

Now any potential for community building is dashed. WoW is a single player game with a public chat (Orgrimmar or its equivalent) where people join little micro-gatherings of people like you would in FPS. You aren't even sharing a world with others, let alone interacting with them.

Edit: My point: Every. Game. Since. WoW. Seems to try to replicate their model. They also replicate the biggest weakness of WoW. They are selling people on a game (solo leveling) that is very different at the endgame (raiding with 25+ people). They basically attract a fanbase that is going to hate their end game and demand it be more like the leveling phase.