When did Everquest start to really decline in quality of experience?

[Gustoo]

For a while it was great trying to murder people at the spires before the Luclin teleport timer ran out. There was still a lot of activity in Gfay during early Luclin as people didn't all get the expansion at the same time and there was some transition. I even made money buying things from Gfay and selling them in the Bazaar and similar such dumb stuff.

Like any PVP player the non PVP zones in Luclin totally destroyed the game and I quit for a long time. I came back and didn't buy any other expansions and kept playing for a while. I eventually got POP on my last bout of playing and enjoyed getting KEI and SLN on a low level character and going around with infinite mana and health casting low level spells on people. It was pretty fun and there were players here and there but thinking about the difference between what Gfay was and what it was during POP era brings actual tears to my eyes.

I played much longer than I should have, but LDON really put the nail in the coffin because it made it so all rallos zek PK twinks had augmented no drop gear so there was no point to PVP them anymore.

I did enjoy the noobie quests added in the LDON era or so and I enjoyed getting to play on the Discord permadeath server that was similar era.

At some point what they needed to do was a total game rebalancing that made the old world relevant again, and made old world items more than just vendor trash. I mean you could get a centi longsword for like 100pp and it was better than almost all droppable weapons through velious.

What was interesting is that the majority of the stuff added in Luclin and afterwards was no drop or non tradeable. What this meant is that while I was trading and low level PVPing well past Velious era I can hardly remember a single item beyond velious except the centi long sword, the tool that increases fletching success, and the super low delay thrown item from luclin also that I was like the only person to pharm and stockpile and use.

Of course you get a new expansion like Luclin and you try to enjoy it because, what choice do you have. I loved all the expansions and the excitement they brought, but they all just made more and more of the game irrelevant which meant I was no longer really playing everquest but instead a new game based around the content of the new expansion. That sucked.

Ultimately the game got worse with every expansion and should have had a more organic perpetual improvement program that kept the whole world progress aligned rather than obsoleting entire continents.

For me, Vanilla is the best but without modifying the game and adding custom content, velious is the right place to stop.

They should for sure disable waking the sleeper on servers that aren't going to reset though.