I'm biased, but I think EQ declined once I decided to tackle more adult responsibilities. While I love the p99 server, I find that the 'enjoyability' of it died off the second I entered DKP-only loot, as the RL-Norrath balance became unhealthy.

That being said, Live is super fun right now and gives me the best of both worlds!

I think Shadows of Luclin - Planes of power - Legacy of Ykesha would be my 3 step tier to downhill.

SoL killed a lot of the traditional fantasy element, take that as you will, space cats and nexus/bazaar all kill community aspects of EQ, one of its primary strengths. Additionaly, raid keying got a lot more brutal, stepping up the difficulty to participate in endgame contnet.

Planes of Power took ease of access from shadows of luclin and cranked the knob up, instead of just having timed nexus teleports at spires, now you had a stone you could click in every city, and click it to get to any city.....

I did play and enjoyed planes of power, but never touched the endgame, i think your cheeto powder layers had to be pretty thick on the beard for plane of time/rathe council.

Legacy of Ykesha... Ehhh..I know Planes of Power had introduced recommended levels, or maybe that was shadows of luclin, I always hated the killing of the twink player, half the fun of everquest was decking out a newbie character, and it kept old players in low level content.

Anyway I did a few zones in LoY and never re-subbed after that, it felt like a game that no longer gave a shit, lol.

Because there was no player trading area. Players got together at different spots on different servers. My point is, the point was players getting together.

Not bots.

I quit in Planes of Power due to school obligations, not because of my lack of interest. I think a lot of people realized that after a few years of EQ, they needed to focus on real life.

Gates of Discord was when I stopped, right at the start. I think I remember going with guild one time into some zone, where even the trash mobs were basically wrecking our Planes geared folks and was like f this. I'm done.

Then popped back to the EQ I love after a 15 year hiatus.

A lot of people act like EverQuest just died because it got bad while completely ignoring the fact that me, and just about every single person I know quit the game when EQ 2 came out, and eventually moved to WoW because it was better. I don't know too many people who were like man, I really hate Legacy of Ykesha and Lost Dungeons of Norrath, I'm going to quit playing this game.

But I know a lot of people who I still talk to this day who quit for EQ 2. It's so surreal that no one mentions this, even in documentaries. Sony killed their own game, and it's generally prophesized that the only way WoW will die is when Blizzard kills it (which they are actually starting to do).

I find that very interesting, I didn't even touch EQ 2 because at that point EQ 1 had evolved into such a joke, EQ 2 appeared to be a progression of that at a glance, as someone who quit during free trial a few years after it was out. Never met/knew someone who I played with on EQ that played EQ2. Definitely played WoW starting in TBC era after college.

PoP would have been perfect if it didn’t have PoK or the Bazaar. Those were the first steps to depersonalizing the game. I thought that Ssra and VT were really fun zones. I’ll echo what others have said and say that PoP brought some of the magic back. One thing I would kill to have on P99 is AA points. It really opened up a lot of doors for classes that weren’t so well balanced pre luclin. On the flip side of that it also closed a lot of doors for people that casuals who couldn’t grind enough AA to get their foot in the door of certain guilds. All things being equal i stopped playing mid PoP, tried to come back in GoD but it didn’t seem fun anymore.

A lot of people on my server, and real-life friends quit to play EQ 2 together. But also a lot of people kind of became adults while playing and seemed to have moved away from online gaming altogether. I don't know too many of my high school friends who still play games 20 years later, and even though there are a lot of 30-40 year olds I meet on WoW, meeting anyone who actually played EverQuest seems to be extraordinarily rare.

It feels surreal when you have self-proclaimed experts at MMO like Asmongold talk about how inferior EverQuest was despite having never played it. The first thing I realized when I played WoW classic last summer was how many WoW players would have loved EverQuest, but are completely oblivious. Like all of these kids want a more traditional, old school MMO, but few of them have actually experienced it or know how amazing it can be. When I play EQ and I hop into a dungeon or any zone, I'm completely drawn in and feel like I'm in that environment, and could die or be greatly rewarded at any time. I never get that same feeling from WoW or any other MMO I've played. Just a bunch of instanced grind for loot rewards that don't feel rewarding because they're flat-lined and handed out to everyone, and none of them are unique or interesting.