Old player back for more...
 

I can't believe how excited I got when I realized that EQ was not still an option, but that I could play it as if it had been frozen in time back in the old days. I'll admit, I didn't pick up the game until right after the Kunark expansion launched, but I still consider myself an old player. =)

What I find most exciting is the return to the original experience that got me hooked in the first place. I continued to play EQ up until a few years ago (13 expansions in or so) and things changed so much that it was almost impossible to recognize the game. I missed having to ride boats, find wizards and druids for GG/TP. I missed sitting in NFP and watching the auction text scroll by. (On Mith Marr, the trading area was NFP...although it seems every other server had it in the Ro tunnel away from banks for some reason.) I missed the economy being balanced in such a way that I could make platinum as a new character by selling bat wings and CB belts in GFay. Heck...there was a lot that I missed. (I hated that tutorial level in the Kobold mines, for the record.)

I'm currently downloading the game, even though I have five different versions of EQ on my shelf, since my one Titanium edition copy has a huge scratch all the way around the first disc. After it's all done, I'm hoping to be in GFay for the rest of the afternoon getting kicked by grass snakes and laughing at skeleton noises.

My sordid past, the best that I can remember it:
67ish HE Cleric
65 Iksar Warrior
60 Dwarf Rogue
55 Human Monk
55 Dwarf Warrior
and about 1000 alts that never made it past 25.

Welcome back to Norrath

I've been back a couple of days and loving it. I always hated that they made porting without Wizards and Druids. I thought that aspect of the game was a stroke of brilliance. Making class abilities integral to the game (like casters binding etc.) creates so much value and gameplay - and community. Removing it in Luclin/PoP was the beginning of the end IMO. Necros summoning corpses, requiring Wiz's to port to the Planes etc. etc. It was fantastic design, and changing it once Sony took over showed that they didn't understand the original EQ.

I still can't believe this server exists. It's amazing.

/agree. I'll admit that I loved Velious. Despite the fact that I was such an alt-oholic when it launched that none of my characters were high level enough to take full advantage of it. I saw the game change with Luclin, though. As a matter of fact, that was about the time that the guys who introduced me to the game (high level guildies all, who had been playing since the beginning of the game) started to walk away.

Despite the changes, many of which I didn't like, I kept coming back. My best story to date was when I started playing again after buying the Anniversary Edition in...I guess about 2007? I took my -new- rogue to level 50 in a couple of weeks, solo'd the hell out of the game, and got my Ragebringer. Which was my first epic weapon after playing since 1999 lol. I somehow managed to never get lucky in the loot rolls for epic components, and the cleric was my only real raiding character and she was low on the totem pole for epic assistance.

Now that I think about it, EQ started the slow spin down the toilet when I noticed people stopped calling their characters characters and started calling them "toons" lol.