As a continuation from my
last post:
-The multiclass system is still very addictive. I have tried different combos, and levelling each up alongside upgrading their spells is fun. "Bard / SK / Wizard works well, I wonder how Bard / Monk / Wizard works. Oh, pretty good! Now I'll try Bard / Monk/ Necro!" <--- Lots of that, which is fun.
-Instancing is still great, and I know P99 playerbase is against instancing (for good reason, as it's not classic) - but it's a good way to jump into a dungeon and AFK for an indeterminate amount of time as real-life things come up, knowing that you don't have to poopsock an exp camp or item camp.
-Overall, it's a decent fascimille of EverQuest to enjoy if you're like me and can
maybe carve out 6 hours total per week to play.
-Although multiclassing is fun because it allows you many options, re-visiting the same zones over and over again to level each class gets tedious and boring. There have been days where I've had an hour to myself to grind some exp, and after 20 minutes I get bored and wind up exiting the game and doing something else completely.
-Still having the same problem when trying to group: Healers don't heal. Enchanters dont mez, etc. It's just faceroll through dungeons with alot of players, and it gets frustrating when you die and you are forced to stare at your corpse until you can release and get back to zoneline.
-Gear makes you overpowered, in a way that's not entirely fun. The power fantasy aspect strikes again. I was level 36, in the Ghoul Lord's room in LGuk and fighting the Lord and his two bodyguards at the same time, levels 47, 42 and 41. It wasn't a difficult encounter. I have 3k HP and enough mana to heal myself 4x over. Granted: more challenging zones like raid zones might bring more fun - but I haven't got there yet. Still only have 1 combo over level 40.
-/sigh. This is what makes me think I am aging out of being a gamer. The community, on the whole, kind of sucks. If you think P99 UN is bad(fun): check out the EQL Discord general-discussion. If there are any troll-minded folks here, you will have plenty of fun goading the folks in that Discord.
Every day, there are more complaints about niche feedback (example: Rename gypsys in Mistmoore to something "not racist", or "I have 1k AA and all classes to level 50 after 3 weeks and let me tell you this game is unfinished"). For every second spent in the Discord, 20 seconds is removed from the end of your life. It is really soul-crushing to see that modern gamers believe that games should be tailor-made to their specific wants and needs.
The Community Managers and mods of the Discord are also in over their heads. They have a team of a handful of mods (like 3-4) moderating a Discord with 60,000 people. They have banned clown / poop / eggplant emojis. They ban people from the Discord for starting arguments, or providing not-so-swell feedback. I feel for them, because they are clearly on and island as far as Daybreak is concerned, and again - in waaaay over their heads.
Daybreak is clearly trying to cash in on the nostalgia coins, and they figured out a great way to do it: Hire a dev team that's too small to take on the scope of work proposed, add a cash shop for people who admittedly spend hundreds of dollars per month on microtransactions, and use a free service like Discord to host the community, using volunteer moderators to keep the overhead at $0.
I have hope for the game simply because of the dev team. They have all been working on EQ Projects for years and years now - and I want to see what they have cooking. But good grief, the (active in discord) community of EQL is head and shoulders above being the worst gaming community I've ever been witness too. I've actually defended the toxicity of p99 compared to them, because at least people here are masochistic enough to play p99 instead of "EZMode EQ."
The good news is, it doesn't seem like the devs are listening to the raging nerds feedback on what they want specifically - and that's causing the nerds to rage even more. I hope it stays that way, so that the devs can really show us what their vision for this game is, rather than what the vision of each individual butthurt nerd is...
But, on the whole, I feel like this experience in EQL is my wake up call to just put down the video games, finally, at age 40, and never come back.