So what happened in luclin-pop?

[Hyperbase-1999]

I sort of agree and disagree.

AA I thought was bad. I was on a 1 char per acount server and this made changing guilds very difficult. Sorry cant join unless you have 200 aa min.

Luclin ports I liked, soul binder was nice... It could take a week for me to get a port or bind sonetimes. (Timezone issues.)

Pok books I disliked.

Key quests I liked, zone flags as well... good gating mechanisms until you want alts in.

Armour dye... hated it. You knew someone's progression from just by looking at them. (And super man ogre dye.)

I hated the bazar.

I enjoyed the zone flow of luclin, and to a minor extent PoP... I could live with pop as a raid only expac with no exp being earnt!

[Katarumi]

I think the biggest loss caused by Luclin was the Bazaar killing EC Tunnel / proper selling. Instead of people yelling and hawking and running around like chickens with their heads cut off, it was people just standing around afk to sell their wares. It felt like it really took the magic out of the world and the community.

I miss beastlord though...

[Dacien]

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

how much interaction do you have with your taxi drivers(porters)? i'm just using their service to get some place and pay them. The most interaction i have is telling them where I am going and giving them my money. if i could instantly teleport to work i think i'd be a lot more happy than a one hour commute.

It's also a logistical thing. Will I find someone to port me? Will I be able to make it to the port area without dying (A real concern for a 46 Paladin in Velious)? Then comes the interaction. They agree to meet me at Kael Entrance! Cool. They heal me up, buff me, and take me where I want to go. Super grateful, we both say thanks.

That whole deal is much more interesting and immersive than clicking a book.

[mr_jon3s]

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

It's also a logistical thing. Will I find someone to port me? Will I be able to make it to the port area without dying (A real concern for a 46 Paladin in Velious)? Then comes the interaction. They agree to meet me at Kael Entrance! Cool. They heal me up, buff me, and take me where I want to go. Super grateful, we both say thanks.

That whole deal is much more interesting and immersive than clicking a book.

This argument is moot as the book wouldn't take you to Kael. So if you are talking about the Wakening lands entrance to Kael you would still have to call a druid. If you are talking about eastern wastes you would still have to run to great divide for the book or for a caster to pick you up and port you out.

Luclin & PoP were the best expansions dispite what some of the players on here say. Numbers don't lie PoP had the most subs and was the peak.

[Daywolf]

In a nutshell, it went from an open-world mmo to a themepark level progression grinder. Instead of expanding horizontally, the direction went vertically. Being more of the sandbox gamer, I pref the classic EQ. Played both EQ and UO early on, UO being a more traditional sandbox. But EQ classic has it's charm. Early SWG still being my fav [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[LethClaypool]

Most of my experience with EQ back in the day was with Velious and PoP. I was active during Luclin but I didn't do anything too heavy (where I raided in Velious and even more in PoP).

Most of this is just saying what's already been said but with my own opinion:

- With Luclin you got AAs which I personally loved. I wish more games used Alternate Advancement systems. I feel some of the classes got some game changing abilities that I felt required more investment than originally required but that's besides the point. It panned out to a lot of balancing factors by the time PoP came out. It was a more subtle way for developers to redefine the classes and push them towards specific roles without a sudden dynamic change.

- At the same time, portals/books. Luclin added a few timed spires that would teleport to four different areas in the game. They weren't so convenient that they made porters absolute. The PoP books didn't make them absolute either, as porters still had uses, but it did bite on one of their major defining abilities.

- Luclin DID make certain old world leveling zones much less populated. Paludal Caverns in particular was a mad house - becoming the new Crushbone up through High Hold Keep. You could go in one end of the zone (over by Shadoweaver's I believe) and level off monsters in the 7-10 range, and go in the opposite end of the dungeon by the bandit camps and do the teens off fungal fiends and 20s off bandits. It was a sort of one stop shop for a leveling range. I didn't really care for this personally, but that's just me.

- The bazaar was a good idea. Everquest is a time sync, Tunnelquest is a time sync. People have day jobs. This aloud them to at least get rid of shit while at work.

- Luclin added horses. I still feel the mechanic of sitting and meditating at the time was horse shit (hah, see what I did) but I think it was nice to provide travel and movement speed for players, plus the Paladin and Shadowknight AA mounts were cool during PoP.

- I didn't raid much during Luclin, nor play a Vah Shir so I can't speak for that. I do remember the shissar temple zone being fun, and I remember leveling some in Acrylic Caverns plus the Grimling Event.

- PoP had some fun raiding, the level cap increase was nice, the added AAs were nice. Could've done without PoK centralizing everything and the books, otherwise loved it. Loved the lore. Loved the zones. Reaching Plane of Time and the lore behind it in itself made the expac worth it to me.

TL;DR - AAs, some older content getting middle child treatment, Vah Shir, horses, oh and those ugly character models. Some fun content though.

[myriverse]

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

Luclin Issues

The bazaar made the world seem less alive. AA's meant less people starting up alts which detracts new players since it was such a group dependent game, you needed a steady flow of alts. Took many years before Sony corrected the problem of having to solo your way to max level by adding Mercenaries and ridiculous gear that dropped off any mob in the game. And Luclin character graphics changes looked horrible. I realize that is subjective but just my opinion. Every character ran like they had a stick up their butt and just did not look as good.

PoP Isses

Ports everywhere, world suddenly felt very tiny. Low level characters would just port into PoK, get whatever high level buff and go to whatever continent wihin minutes. It just felt more like an arcade game, no immersion, no pride in your home town, no travel. It's a right of passage as a Erudite to have to take the boat to qeynos at level 1 for a lot of people and then wait even longer for a high level to show up to bind you. Or evil characters getting off the boat in Butcherblock trying to get to Crushbone without being killed by guards. None of that meant anything anymore. Oh and even more stupid raid content and bottlenecks slowing alts from being created on top of AAs, this killed new players from sticking to EQ, this was the death knell of EQ.

A good 90% of the people I played with during those times did not have alts that mattered. There were so many people playing that groups were never hard to come by.

As for ports, the world needed to feel tiny because it had actually become unwieldy gargantuan. Without those ports available, it would have been hell.

[surron]

People think pok books ruined the roll of the porter and are largely mistaking...

-Want to go to seb or CoM? The FoB book allowed you to run there but a druid/wiz port saves you 5 minutes.

-Want to go to chardok? OT book, but again a druid/wiz port saves you 5 minutes.

-Want to go to solb? Nek book, but druid port saves you 5 minutes.

-Want to go anywhere in the karanas? druid/wiz port or 15 minutes for nexus spires.

-Want to go to Kael? GD book but druid/wiz port saves you 10 minutes.

-Want to go to IC/EW/ToFS/WL/SS/CS/SG/WW/ToV? GD book but druid/wiz port saves you 15+ minutes.

-Want to go anywhere in Luclin? druid/wiz port to dawnshroud or you're running there from Nexus... the book to SW is way out of the way for anything...

Velious / Luclin raid targets are still huge for PoP so its not like these locations are unrealistic to be traveling to in PoP. Even the kunark zones I mentioned still served a purpose in PoP.


Places that PoK books did trivialize...

-Noob towns (god forbid a noob doesn't have to wait 15mins for a port)

-Guk - Yea swamp book really made this an easy run

-Hole - Tox book makes this an easy run

-HS - OT book makes this an easy run

-OT Hammer - OT book

-Karnors - FV book bout the same run as druid/wiz port



Clearly when people say pok books trivialized porters they have no idea what they are talking about.

[jolanar]

I think the PoK books have as many pros as they do cons. I can definitely see why people wouldn't like them, but they were pretty much a necessary evil at that point in the timeline of EQ where the game was so top heavy, many newb zones were completely empty and finding ports was difficult.

Now the Luclin ports on the otherhand, people are delusional if they think anyone on this server would wait 15 minutes for a port, or 30 minutes for 2 if they needed to go from say Gfay to Nexus to NK.

There is nothing particularly wrong with Luclin content. AAs I have a feeling would bring back a ton of elitism and class favoritism as people at level 60 would again care about how quick the exp was coming in. Not to mention making it that much harder to break into the high end scene on P99 which is already a pretty daunting task for someone starting today at level 1.

[sedrie.bellamie]

when Luclin came out I had like a 55ish Shaman and my buddy a 55ish Cleric, I know we were not 60 and neither of us had epics. We were chilling and he said, you know there is a new xpac. I had not even bought Velious yet. But he told me of a new race and new class so we both we to an electronics boutique and picked up a copy. He made a cat rogue I believe and I started a cat beastlord. I would end up making a Troll Beastlord on RP server and wrecking people in the Oasis with the crocodile pet.

We never cared to get 60, we never cared to go through the work to get epics, we never cared to be in the popular zones grouping with randoms. We sat in Lower Guk and farmed AAs. I think I was like 55 shaman with 80+ AAs by the time of the froglok expansion. My buddy's brother took his SK to like 85 and raided all over the place but we just sat in Lower Guk. We had friends burn out and give us a 65 monk and a 75 necro; we just stayed in Lower Guk. They gave us PoK for free, so it made it easier to bank and get back to Lower Guk easier for my Troll after they took Grobb away from them. We stayed in Lower Guk till like the Fabled stuffed started dropping. That actually encouraged us to get out for a bit but around that time I think Counter Strike 1.6 was released; everyone moves on from EQ eventually.

Googling it seems Legacy of Ykesha and Counterstrike 1.6 both came out in 2003, so I played from 1999 to 2003 and never got 60 never did velious content and never raided competitively but enjoyed all the time I did grind away to make me hunt down p99. I like the p99 classic feel, things are not balanced, spells don't have descriptions or timers, there is a penalty to death, finesse is more important than just trying to brute your way through content.

tl;dr Luclin made Everquest easy, EQ is not suppose to be easy