Trannies

just logged on eq live and made a fresh character

my eyes

Luclin began the decline and PoP set the trend. Yes PoP was a wonderful raiding experience but it left the general community bifurcated and it never recovered.

I played up to Prophecy of Ro, and quit shortly after the expansion came out.

What killed EverQuest for me, was the endless conveyor belt of expansions. The vast majority of people had not had time to enjoy a lot of what was offered in one expansion, before the next expansion rolled out.

The majority of people that played on my server (Fennin Ro) were not "hardcore, play all day/every day" people. We had jobs and lives outside the game, and it often felt that we were being punished for not making EQ our number one priority in our lives. I felt that I was constantly playing catch-up at the beginning of each expansion, so that I might have one character at max level before they raised the level cap again. Then it was trying to grind out the un-fun AA's that were required for most guilds, and even many groups.

Adding to the mounting burden of trying to keep up, the PoK books and the Bazaar pretty much killed any sense of community I felt from the game, and it just became another job.

Pretty much this

After Velious they should have dialed back how many zones they added per expansion and just worked on revamping existing zones to keep the game fresh without making 95% of the game lifeless deserts. New dungeons tucked in the existing zones would have been fine, but should have left a single "core" game that still had to be traversed and used to keep things lively.

Like many have said PoP was the peak.

Lore was great and still in step with the original ethos of the game. AAs which were one of the best points of Luclin got further expanded in scope and usefulness. Gear stats and bonuses felt significant and had bonuses that were great enhancements to class abilities. The progression system was extremely engaging. The zones were diverse and pretty well tuned with a few understandable exceptions. New interesting spells, some of them weren't very useful but still exciting.

GoD was a huge disappointment. The zones and enemies seemed so random in design. The zones in a lot of cases looked like lazy heavy use of Ctrl + V. The spells were very uninspired. I played a wizard and the new top nuke was literally just the damage of the previous one +10%. The enemies were ridiculously poorly tuned. I heard later on the level cap had intended to be raised to 70 but they scraped that but didn't properly adjust the mobs.

Part of the reason things declined was because PoP was so good honestly. It's hard to follow up something where you kill the gods in an epic story and make huge gear gains. After that everything will really feel just contrived and like you are just doing the next thing just to get the next percentage of increase. I played a bit of OoW which was much better than GoD but really the game was just no longer the same. I had enjoyed Luclin a lot because of AAs, mounts, and Vex Thal loot (not the zone itself) but I understood how people could dislike it because it was so removed from the original game. Post PoP was really just a very different feel.

The decline started in Velious and continued through Luclin and PoP. All raid content and forgetting about the rest of the world. After Kunark the 'neck beard' aspect of the game really started to spiral out of control.

Smart! I stuck around until GoD, not that I ever played the content. I totally felt the magic drying out of it with those expansions too. Funny how reliable the child's gut is.

I think they just ran out of ideas