On the outside, I"m against this. When Everquest slowly inched towards more rooted mobs and monsters that summoned, and shorter duration roots, it was moving away from the original vison of the game that was much less linear. In the origional game there was more kiting and creativity. Yes it could backfire, and pathing was buggy, but there was a lot of beauty in that. As Everquest matured, it seemed obsessed with "balance", and I don't think balance is everyting. This goes for a lot of things in the game, including items. Originally, items had some character. Stats were different between them. Apparently the devs saw this as a bad thing because players may have ot hunt around for the right items. So they went over it with a spreadsheet, and thereafter all items looked almost identical. I could go on.
Sorry that's just how I see it. Overzealous developers always ruin games when given enough time. That's why players make emulators, or go to other games. They're chased away.
I think the main problem has to do with congestion in the content. The original game never anticipate the huge population that came afterward. They also never expected Everquest to last for more htna few years. So builtin from the start was a strong congestion problem. I think they tried to make lots of content to counter it, but it wasn't enough when servers were peaking at 2000+ population. With Project 1999 the problem is a bit different. Playrs have more knowledge now and that essentially increases the congestion, meaning even with a smaller population the Project 1999 server is similar to a high poulation server circa 1999-01. The other problem is Project 1999 is very old now. What's it, 10 years old? This means extremely high mudflation in the economuy. This means there're a lot of players entering into the raid scene, as well many high level players. It's much worse than it was in 2000-01. This further drives the congestion problems to extremes, meaning the players and devs are going to be in a constant state of tension and panic. Since devs are naturally anxious and overzealous in their work, it all leads predictably to what we see in most mature games and MMO's, since they all share a lot of these problems. The original magic is lost. It eventually leads to a stale game.
I'm glad I played this in 2010. I no longer consider it the same game. I think the devs and the players here have the best interests in mind and they're all good at heart. But nothing lasts forever, and try as we might to make some things last forever, they'll slowly die in our hands even as we fight back the darkness.
Regardless, without Project 1999, the world would be for the worse. I'm grateful this all happened. It's still worth keeping alive, IMHO. Why? Because so many MMO's go down the soloing, personal quest path. Even in tis current state, Project 1999 recalls a time when grouping wasn't assigned to a secondary role, or the end game.
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