[Bisonzabi]

Originally Posted by Landroval [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

SoL was an attempt to develop an expansion that had exp-able content from lvl 1 to lvl 60.

Kunark also catered to that level range but the zones were much more thought out.

The reason you categorize the majority of the zones as "useless" is simply because you were leveled past them by the time it came out,

No, I'm calling them useless on a game design perspective. Everything from overland zone designs, layout, mob placement and reasoning for why mobs being in specific zones and lack of factions tied to many. Lot of these zones could've easily been merged together like Marus Seru and Mons Letalis (someone got way too experimental with zone naming) much in the same way Dreadlands in Kunark had three different landscape biomes. And who said I was leveled past them?

and because the lower 2/3rds of exp zones contained within the expansion are tuned to a higher difficulty than their respective counterparts in classic, kunark, and velious; they were attempting to avoid the mistake of creating an expansion that only suited the 30+ crowd like they did with velious.

Velious itself was also catering to a higher difficulty even at the midlevels This is another problem with SoL: There was no levelcap when it was pretty obvious that there needed to be since the endgame was not made for Level 60 and the raid scene was fucked. Love him or hate him; Tigoles blogposts of SoL's raid scene in early 2002 are to EQ to what Cicero's writings are to the late Roman Republic when looking at it in hindsight.

And more zones doesn't mean the player base is spread out more.

Yes it does and this is a problem every MMO has to address as time goes on when introducing new content and how to streamline player movement, especially if there are multiple starting zones. PoK unironically saved many older zones in terms of their relevancy.

Once the server opens POP, POP will essentially house 90% of the player base 90% of the time, with classic kunark and velious zones being something you speed run through to get to 46 to zone into POTranq.

Meanwhile the remaining trying to level will try and be LFG at only optimal camping places and with SoL's only noteworthy xp camps being Paladul and Echo Caverns and maybe Griegs End. Btw this thinned out playerbase outside of endgame is one of the major problems EQ1 had in 03-04 and onward, especially when WoW (and to a minor extent EQ2) came out. Before and after November 2004 was like night and day. And are you sure it's not 90.5%?

And I need to stress I don't hate the concept of the expansion pack and I did like a lot of the zones that I felt were more well thought out (the subterranean zones for example), but it was clearly rushed out with a lot of issues tacked on which did indeed sully the reputation of the developers and the game itself. Amazing how they introduced new armor texture packs in Velious and then trashed the variety with the new models at the time.