Old EQ Trilogy and beyond player here.
 

So, thought I'd introduce myself after a day or so and well, not gonna lie, I'm loving Project 1999 already. I never got very afar due to college and whatnot, but I do remember playing Everquest back when it had only two expansions. Strangely, one event I still remember and am glad to have seen others replicate (I never repeated it mind you) on making a new character is a fresh player killing their GM.

I've already rolled a few characters, though I'll likely roll and stick with a Velious-prepped Iksar SK eventually, so probably 25 points into Charisma for Divine Intervention using Charisma and that's the hardest stat to raise for an SK and due to the Greenmist sword.

I swear this isn't going to be a trend for me, but here comes the nostalgia I felt as I remembered various feelings and such when I first started playing (aside from learning to make sure 'A' is not the auto-attack keybind) and observations after returning from breaks to newer expansion packs and comparisons I made at the time, and still do, to the newer, modern MMOs, so TL;DR at the bottom.

I've been playing games since the late 80s as a little kid, namely console games that were single-player, this is important because of how EQ was such a huge shock. For years I basically was used to your standard 90s RPG and Metroid-style adventure game. You talk to one NPC, their dialogue is pretty much always gonna be one thing. I started playing a couple MUDs shortly after EQ was released if I remember my dates right, but I had no idea about it until some months later, I got gradually used to using the keyboard for gaming at that point, talking to NPCs in text via a black-and-white client Telnet, nothing special or fancy, I liked it that way. One day, I saw this box at a Best Buy or at the Wal-Mart or whatever, it said Everquest Trilogy on it and I looked at the stuff on the back of the box and bought it because it sounded challenging and awesome. After finally making my Iksar Monk, my second character (I firmly believed my just-killed Iksar Necromancer would be killed by the Necro GM if I got near him again on the same character), I started interacting with the NPCs and was shocked that you could speak to them and carry on a conversation of sorts. Yes I know it's just using a few certain words while targeting them, but I didn't think such a thing was possible back then outside scripted cutscenes and such. Seeing other players moving around the city and selling their loot, crafting items, doing quests for gear, it was something I had never seen before in a game and it was just so freaking amazing, even years later when I think back on that, I have trouble putting into words just how awesome that was to me.

I eventually headed out towards the next area past the SK and Shaman guild area, fully expecting the loading screen to show me some kind of world map feature. Once again, my mind was blown when I was transitioned into an actual area called the Field of Bone. I spent like 15 minutes exploring the ruined-looking fort near the zone entrance before I saw in the text box someone shouting "Train to zone!" About half a minute later I see this Iksar Warrior making a run towards the zone with what looked like 4 skeletons and 3 scaled wolf cubs all right behind him. I thought it was cool that the enemies would actually chase you after you started to run away and that they would join in and help tear you a new one instead of just standing in one spot or patrolling nearby and doing nothing unless you touched them (Chrono Trigger habits I guess), it made sense for them to back each other up and gang up on players if circumstances allowed it. Of course I eventually died at level 6 to a pair of militia skeletons and large scorpions because spotting skeletons in that desert was tricky for me. I learned the pain that was a de-level and a corpse run with a nearly fully encumbered load due to not selling the loot/vendor trash.

Now, I shouldn't have to tell anyone just how stupid it felt when in World of Warcraft/Borecraft/Factioncraft/whatever that the death penalty was literally run back to your corpse (or near it) and click a button and have some equipment damaged, all while the enemies can't see or hurt you. My first though aside from bewilderment at such a dumb idea was, "Where's the risk if you don't have to worry about losing all your hard-earned gear or the enemies can't attack you at all?" Yeah sure the repair bills could get out of hand maybe, but that required dying a lot and EQ conditioned me to avoid dying as much as possible without a rezzer nearby or as a class that could handle easy corpse runs. I also despised the horrible looks of the armor compared to EQ's much more realistic-styled armor and weapons, that stuff looks like it could actually protect you and be wielded by a normal person. EQ taught me to be cautious in a way that I never bothered with before and that habit sticks with me to this day when I play different kind of games, avoid dying as much as possible (Planescape: Torment required... adjustments, to say the least) to avoid harsh penalties on respawns.

The grouping thing was brand new, I got lucky and my first few groups were with similar newbies who were brand new to the game and thought it was the greatest thing ever. Some of us had conflicting schedules and couldn't duo or trio all the time, but we could do so more reliably on weekend evenings and we started to know who played which class the best and we'd help their new characters level up a bit so they wouldn't get left behind as we advanced. I know everyone here knows that, but again, to someone brand new to the game way back then, new concept and all. Most newer MMOs with their LFG tool that automatically puts you into a random group is well, a gamble is the only nice way to put it in terms of reliability/unreliability for team mates. The sense of camaraderie just wasn't there unless I ended up in a tightly knit guild and frankly, the same could be said of the guilds on EQ (Live and Project 1999). I don't remember if Need/Greed was ever a thing in EQ, pretty sure it wasn't, but I do remember it sounding like one of the few half-decent ideas in World of Warcraft... until I saw it in action with a pick-up group that is. I played a Shadowknight mainly, so I was used to getting the pick of items best on an SK, letting the Monk get the lightest items that could be sold for money so they could stay under the weight limit, the Shaman got priority on items they could use, especially alchemy ingredients found via forage, I was and still am a team player like that. So imagine how livid I was in World of Warcraft (I had no idea Everquest 2 was even a thing and options were rare, no idea about City of Heroes either) when a caster hit the need button on a chest piece that was clearly geared towards tanks, I was hitting Pass on any item I couldn't use since inventory space was suddenly at a premium, I almost lost it, I tore into the guy for not being a team player and snatching a piece of gear that he couldn't even use since the dungeon was still going. Punk just laughed and pointed out how we'd never run into each other again so why care... that was almost table-flip worthy disrespect I saw there. Now, don't get me wrong or quote me on this, but I do recall that if someone tried that crap without prior agreement like for twinking a low-level alt, you'd risk your reputation if you did it to someone who was famous on whichever server you were on, people would learn if someone was a ninja-looter and couldn't be trusted. That was something I missed because you could ask around and figure out if someone was trustworthy or not, not all the time anyway, but you weren't blind-sided so much like in modern MMOs anyway.

The music was and still is kinda cheesy, but in a memorable way I might add. I thought it was awesome at first and after a time away from EQ and on other games, I started to view it as heavily dated, yet it's come full circle and now I'm plenty tired of these huge orchestral soundtracks that almost always sound the same, or hideously out-of-place guitar stuff, so the simple and catchy music of EQ has once again grown on me and I appreciate that it's the way it is as it's not drowning out the rest of the experience and distracting me. Kinda hard to take an epic-sounding battle score seriously when I turn around and find my deadly opponent is just a random deer that a game bugged on and considered hostile. Plus, the EQ battle music makes it easy to hear that cackle the skeletons make, love that sound so much. I like how the inventory space is rather limited by slotd and weight, more logical that way. No carrying enough gold coins that if dropped from low-orbit could flatten the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx with more bows than the all the English Longbowmen from the past one thousand or so years, that was always a nitpick of mine.

it's good to have finally found this server, as I was none-too-happy at seeing how empty most of Kurnak was after the later expansion packs. Field of Bone in Live used to be filled and then was well, later you'd be shocked if you weren't the only person in there who didn't stumble in by accident, so I really hope Project 1999 stays at Velious. I also like that the server isn't so huge that I'd feel more like just another random player instead of part of a community.

TL;DR - Nostalgia's kicked into full gear and it's entirely justified in how awesome it feels, got tired of all the streamlining/cookie cutter clones done in modern MMOs, and all around happy to see a Classic server alive and kicking.

PS - Not dealing with the awful casino-styled enchanting nature fueled by cash shops in most modern MMOs is just wonderful too, real money should never be a substitute for learning the mechanics and how a game works.

Sorry if that post dragged on for as long as it did, it's just well, great to have found Project 1999, I was getting ready to give up on MMOs for a while and go back to older single-player games for who knows how long. That's not a bad thing, but those games often lack the kind of community and interaction found in a friendly and devoted fan-base.