Will there ever be a server between P99 and Quarm?
 

I like classic best. I don't want the moon and pok books.

I don't like ui and mechanic changes making things easier.

However I don't like rare drops on top of rare spawns on top of socking and batphones and fruitless races at anti social hours.

Quarm fixed the latter but fucked up the former and it's going post velious eventually.

Do you think p99 peeps or other people will ever make a server that's equally hard but less time sinky and anti social?

I'm not waking my wife with batphones or risking getting fired from my job for being sleepy and dumb.

That'd be the dream. The time sinks only ever existed to keep people subbed and would be bypassed by server progression. For a free to play time locked they don't make sense.

no

It's not the game that causes the batphones, its the players. Once they collectively started to realize just how far into the depths of depravity they'd go for pixels, it opened pandora's box and became the new normal. There ain't no going back, any game that can be socked, will be socked.

We've got a spectrum of Everquest going for us now, gotta choose your own adventure. I know there are countless other servers but these are the main sections of this autism wheel:

• Classic no-life mode (p99) - "casual guild recruiting: raid 5 hours a day, every day, quake response required"
• TLP cashgrab mode (daddy Daybreak) - "I love EQ but I'm not a pirate, no warez for me"
• Participation Trophy mode (Quarm) - "have a pulse? did you log in? here's your epic"
• ARPG cocaine mode (THJ) - "Cease and Desist pending"

Most likely best case for your vision coming to life is that Daybreak goes after Quarm for being too closely in competition (server going into additional expensions, and with QoL changes beyond velious getting closer to competing with their proprietary paid TLP servers). If daybreak pursues project Quarm then it could force them to pull back to something closer to P99 that is looked at as more of an aged version of EQ without threat of competition against the current paid direct landscape. In that case they would likely focus on stripping out the additional expansions and QoL changes but leaving in the instanced EZ mode to avoid daybreak crosshairs but still differenciate the project from P99.

The only alternative to socking is instancing. P99 already has a welfare system via the draft, which I think is already a happy medium.

Can you tell me more about this draft system?

Yeah that'd be cool I like non instanced dungeons but instanced raids perhaps a weekly or monthly lock out with one extra non instanced one still for the try hards would be cool. Maybe make the instanced drops rates worse or something.

You don't allow other groups in planes at same time so it's pointless to not just instance them anyway.

Every other month all the raid mobs are locked, eligible guilds draft which mobs they get to kill (traditional snake draft). They get the entire week to kill the mobs uncontested. If the mobs aren't all dead by week's end the guild that drafted the mob has to run an open raid and random off the loot.

That's cool that wasn't around in my day.

What happens if people vote for the same mob? Is there like ranked choice or lottery?

P99 exactly as it is, but with AAs added to make certain classes more useful, and PoP raids added (but scaled down as needed to account for people being in Velious gear, and no PoK) would be quite possibly the best EQ server ever IMO