My personal review of P99 Green: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

[Gugg]

About me

Innoruuk sever (60 epic Monk)
The Sleeper server (60 epic Magician)
Test (Various high level with swarming SK)
P99 Green: 53 Iksar Necro, 37 Iksar Monk, 24 Human Druid, 23 DE Mage

The Good

- It's free (not freemium or free-to-play)

- There is a lot less downtime than Live

- It's popular, for now, so there are people in newbie zones (adventuring and buffing)

- There are no mercs

- There are no Kronos

- There is no Verant store selling XP pots for $

- The vast majority of people seem friendly and chilled out; there is far less drama than on live server.

- It's not easy if you do it legit.

- It passes the time.

- There are no Luclin models.

- It runs on a 12 year old laptopand a throttled 30kbps data connection.

The Bad

-It's cramped and spawns are highly contested, forever.

- There are bazaar characters in EC spamming and ripping people off that's why they take a while to answer when you send them a tell; real players answer right away and have reasonable prices.

- Higher latency and screen lag than Live servers.

- Lacking basic features (pet window, working hot bars, unique icons)

- No sci-fi aspect, ever.

- No Beastlords, ever.

- No Halfling Rangers, ever.

- Mobs on Green and Blue drop the same amount of plat but items on Green cost up to 5 x times more than on blue even though populations are roughly the same; there's lot of sellers hoping it stays that way keeping prices up. You want to sell an item for a reasonable price? A seller is going to buy it and flip it so a newb is gonna pay 5 x more for it.

The Ugly

- P99 is stuck in a moment of time forever when there is a great bias for evil races and classes (self harm, witchcraft, playing dead like a sissy, lifetaps, eating oneself, talking to the dead etc) so heroic righteous classes like Rangers, Paladins and Druids are a permanent joke on P99.

- Humans are blind, dumb, weak and have no racials to speak of and the best plat farming zones are ones in which you kill humans (humans being neutral have potential for good).

- Iksar regen makes all other Necro's technically inferior, forever. All Necro at 60 should be equal and you should play the race because you like the look of it not because it's min-max.

- PnP policy benefits camp stealers, trainers and kill stealers (good people don't need signs telling them how to behave in public).

- P99 is an unnoficial emulated version of EverQuest and there are lots of those but there's only one official EverQuest so P99 is not as unique as you may think it is.

- Pet classes share XP with pet (duh)

- The early birds have already caught the worms so they will always have OP pre-nerf loot and you won't.

- Bow damage is a joke and will always be a joke.

- Although it's popular, people seem to level in a bubble and only group out of necessity.

- P99 is not Classic/Vanilla; it's the original game with two full blown commercial expansions released after 1999.

- P99 is min/max heaven...so there's no fashion or lore to speak of.

- Raid rotations....you can't just turn up and kill a raid mob; you have to check a sanctioned list HOWEVER if you have an XP camp for hours and somebody gets you killed then somebody immediatley has a right to your camp because you're no longer there.

- You have to 'learn to love it' a bit like an ugly version of yourself unlike Live back in the day when the experience was magical from day one.

- You don't know how long the server is going to stick around for or what's going to happen to it.

- With some classes the monumental stuggle has no endgame reward other than kudos from other players (Ranger vs Necro for example).

- Whether it's Live, TLP, test or P99 I play on my own because I have no friends or faily to speak of and the game isn't designed around solo play but evil classes can do it better.

[Gugg]

There's no edit button on this forum (more duh).

- There are login issues with P99 which you don't get on Live. I guess having to reboot my phone 10 times to log in is part of the 'no hand holding' classic experience? If you're not pulling your hair out wanting to bomb verant offices then you ain't playing EQ the way it was intended to be played even if you can't login?

(Edit: I can edit this post but not my OP).

- EC tunnel exists on P99 but it's a bit of an illusion. It's more like the Luclin bazaar in EC tunnel.

[bigfun]

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

- There are login issues with P99 which you don't get on Live. I guess having to reboot my phone 10 times to log in is part of the 'no hand holding' classic experience?

you play on your phone??????????[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[starkind]

Tethered wireless mobile
Internet...

[starkind]

No one is forcing you to play an iksar necro.

There's other classes to play.

The only classes that need to buy anything from EC are monk, war, rogue. And even then you can easily hit 40 plus with a weapon you can farm yourself.

There's no compelling reason to play an ogre or put all stats into sta.

You can literally get by on any race/class combo putting every point into CHA, AGI, or dex. Once you have thurgadin armor There's absolutely no difference between you and anyone else. And before than the difference is less than 5% vs any dark blue or higher, and 0% vs greens.

People do box. It actually hurts the legit players more. Try takp. It's almost as good as p99 and you can help them polish the broken quests, factions, and NPC chat texts once pop is debugged.

[Gugg]

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

No one is forcing you to play an iksar necro.

There's other classes to play.

The only classes that need to buy anything from EC are monk, war, rogue. And even then you can easily hit 40 plus with a weapon you can farm yourself.

There's no compelling reason to play an ogre or put all stats into sta.

You can literally get by on any race/class combo putting every point into CHA, AGI, or dex. Once you have thurgadin armor There's absolutely no difference between you and anyone else. And before than the difference is less than 5% vs any dark blue or higher, and 0% vs greens.

People do box. It actually hurts the legit players more. Try takp. It's almost as good as p99 and you can help them polish the broken quests, factions, and NPC chat texts once pop is debugged.

I'm not trying another emulated server.
I felt the need to try P99 because I heard about it years ago in the news when Verant blessed it with protection.
I've also been looking to relive those days like other people have...the nostalgia....a time machine; official EQ is a barren wasteland in the newbie zones and it's no surprise because every new expansion hurts the original newbie zones and the Mines of Gloomingdeep doesn't help either. EQ is now in the hands of a gold digger and that needs to be fixed and P99 doesn't fix it.

[Gugg]

I've yet to meet a Druid on P99 who didn't create a Druid just to port for plat.

On P99 the righteous Druid is nothing more than a money grabbing taxi (and money grabbing AC camper) being used to twink the character they really want to play which is either SK or Iksar Monk.

[Swish]

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

I've yet to meet a Druid on P99 who didn't create a Druid just to port for plat.

On P99 the righteous Druid is nothing more than a money grabbing taxi (and money grabbing AC camper) being used to twink the character they really want to play which is either SK or Iksar Monk.

Fair comment honestly, lol. I think that's somewhat due to a druid's limitations in a group as well... they fall behind with healing, their nukes aren't great, their dots arent useful in a fast paced group, and while their DS is good... a mage adds more DPS in total.

[Gugg]

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

Fair comment honestly, lol. I think that's somewhat due to a druid's limitations in a group as well... they fall behind with healing, their nukes aren't great, their dots arent useful in a fast paced group, and while their DS is good... a mage adds more DPS in total.

I very recently logged into AB server and a L119 female Wood Elf Druid gave me SOW in PoK. I said, 'Some things never change'.

This Druid wasn't a taxi though and to get L119 takes a ton of work; L44 not so much.

The most difficult thing about making a Druid on P99 is coming up with an eye catching porting slogan to stand out from the rest of the taxi's at the taxi rank.

There was no porting guild in classic.

[starkind]

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

I'm not trying another emulated server.
I felt the need to try P99 because I heard about it years ago in the news when Verant blessed it with protection.
I've also been looking to relive those days like other people have...the nostalgia....a time machine; official EQ is a barren wasteland in the newbie zones and it's no surprise because every new expansion hurts the original newbie zones and the Mines of Gloomingdeep doesn't help either. EQ is now in the hands of a gold digger and that needs to be fixed and P99 doesn't fix it.

Takp is that mid point. Definately at least humor that. Although all our communcommunities are static. You won't get much interaction if you don't work for it..

Our real world is collapsing in greed, catering to children and the brainwashed as if they're commodities. No commercial venture will produce anything like EQ 1 again. Not until people get past "stats", "raids", and "progression. And world, lore building becomes the focus, not locked behind AAs, and time gated content, and factions that are never KoS permanently. Without choice. On rails.

Give TakP a shot.

And continue to make posts and exploring what you want. Design it in your head and lay it out. Over and over until you can create and express even the meanest part.