Recovering old EQ characters

[Forsh]

Maybe, whatever I play next I want something I can live in for a long time. I invested 7-years in EverCrack from 2000-2007 but the game started changing and the guild I was in eventually dissolved. From there, I jumped over to WoW starting in 2008 and actually still have my Hunter of 12-years but stopped playing many years back because the same thing happened...the game evolved into something very different. All I do is occasionally log in and do some battlegrounds, nothing more. WoW never had PVE as good as EQ, not even close, the risk vs reward and teamwork aspect was perfect in EQ and that's probably because it was essentially a MUD at the core. There's no danger in WoW, never once did I have that "scared" feeling or sense of loss like I did with EQ.

Ranger: https://eq.magelo.com/profile/1361726
Hunter: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ch...saurfang/forsh

Over the years I tried a few more MMORPGs like DAOC the first 6-months it was released (2002 I think), tried Neverwinter, FFO, none were even close to EQ or even WoW for the type of play I enjoy.

Recently I tried the EQ Classic flavor of Green right when it launched as I mentioned and things looked promising. The day the server was split everywhere turned from exciting to ghost-town. The bottle-necking of players was a good thing in my opinion it forced people to be competitive, meet and work together with people they didn't know, and rewarded people willing to put in the work. The very day Blue launched that instantly went away.

Below are the screenshots I took of the server at launch as well as the minute I logged in and that's a healthy amount of people for Green's launch. Below those images are two more images that have a similar story....the launch of Classic WoW.

The screenshot showing the players is the very minute the servers opened when I finally got through the queue. The screenshot is eerily similar and especially because the same scenario played out. Players in Classic WoW were bottle-necked and forced to work together with strangers. I would sometimes find myself at camps or running quests in my lvl 20s and groups of us in the zones would track down Alliance that were jumping people who were leveling, it was great fun. We didn't know each other but we were united in purpose and that was continual up into my lvl 30s however, this fun ended nearly the exact same way Green did for me. As additional servers were added to Classic WoW over a few days/weeks the zones were eventually completely dead because the bottle-necking was eliminated and the population quickly thinned. I went from excitement to being the only player in nearly every zone I was in.

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Whatever I play next I want to be somewhere I can live in for many years. Pantheon looks DOA and no idea how Ashes of Creation is moving along since I just discovered it. Everquest really could have lasted forever at the top if the game hadn't changed so drastically. Reading the comments of any videos about EQ on YouTube you can see how much people loved it, how emotionally attached they were (myself included) it almost feels like a crime when it all went away...or changed to be something different.