Luclin

[Gadwen]

I had a lot of fun in the Luclin-PoP era on Live. Although I do prefer the Classic-Velious game a lot more. I would be hard pressed to say that Luclin and PoP "ruined" Everquest, for me anyway. IMO, the game itself is simply not that impressive from a game play or technical standpoint. It's meeting cool people, and accomplishing goals that I set for myself that keep me playing EQ, neither of which was taken away from me when either of those expansions came out.

[Briscoe]

What people always overlook is the amount of time and effort it is taking nilbog and company to develop Velious. The implementation of Luclin, PoP, or any other expansion will take a commensurate amount of time and effort.

There is much more to it than Rogean simply saying, "Oh yea, we'll open up Luclin now."

[Taboo]

I would be happy bypassing Luclin and just adding in PoP [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] Add ports to planes to certain rings around norrath. Make it a portal spell for druids and wizards but make it so they have to be at a certain ring or spire to use it.

I remember reading somewhere that they butchered the AA system so it will not be even an option.

[Danth]

Don't even get me started on Planes of Power. For folks like me who didn't really like raids, it was the absolute worst expansion not only in Everquest, but in the entire history of this genre. From my vantage point that expansion was unredeemable trash.

About the only thing from Luclin I care about is the Bazaar; I hate East Commons. That being said, I'll take the bad with the good, and stopping at Velious is a lot more good than bad. When I take everything as a whole, I feel every expansion past Velious just made the game worse and worse. Heck, the majority of my favorite content is pre-expansion stuff.

Danth

[falkun]

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

I would be happy bypassing Luclin and just adding in PoP [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] Add ports to planes to certain rings around norrath. Make it a portal spell for druids and wizards but make it so they have to be at a certain ring or spire to use it.

I remember reading somewhere that they butchered the AA system so it will not be even an option.

https://www.project1999.org/forums/s...ad.php?t=11879

[Noselacri]

Luclin on P99 is a moot point as the server will begin hemorrhaging players a few months after Velious comes out. You see, what each expansion after Kunark does is this: if you don't raid, you're nothing. This is doubly important on this extremely top-heavy server where nobody is content to simply see the sights and be level 43 for months. The wonder and magic of Everquest is long gone and people want to do what they didn't get to do as kids a dozen years ago. Unfortunately, Velious introduces the concept of full separation between normal and hardcore players.

In Classic and Kunark, almost no gear is notrade. Epics, the odd quest item, a few raid pieces and then VP gear, everything else is droppable. Almost all of the best gear in the game is tradeable and you don't strictly have to be in the top guild to get it. You can become an "accomplished player" by trading, by knowing the right people, by RMTing or scamming (hey, it counts for the purpose of this discussion) and any other way you can imagine getting a fungi, Cobalt BP, tstaff, CoF and whatever else is considered top items in the game.

Not so in Velious. Suddenly every piece of "BiS" is from NToV or similar. In fact, the top three best items for each slot will usually be notrade raid drops, and anything less will be considered low-level crap. The gear you can get as a non-raider is suddenly laughable and you are nobody if you don't raid. As we all know, raiding on P99 is tantamount to selling your soul to the devil, and there's a gigantic divide between the TMOish crowd and the rest of the server. With everyone realizing that there's no way for their characters to be comparatively decked out without that unrealistic requirment of becoming the 1%, the whole experience will feel tainted and people will stop playing as this feeling sinks in and comes to permeate the server.

This did not happen back in the day because 1) people didn't know better, 2) the vast majority were satisfied with being unambitious nobodies, and 3) there were tons of servers and you could always find a raid guild somewhere if you wanted, the entire endgame concept was not utterly monopolized by one or two highly exclusive guilds. People await Velious like it'll be some great coming of age for this server, but nobody seems to realize what it did to Everquest and how poorly it fits this server and the way it differs from the great old backintheday. There will never be a question of whether or not to implement Luclin on P99 because there will be less than 100 players left by then.

[Danth]

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

The wonder and magic of Everquest is long gone and people want to do what they didn't get to do as kids a dozen years ago.

Not everyone on P1999 was a 13 year old twit when EQ was new. I was an adult a dozen years ago, just a somewhat younger one. So were most the folks on my in-game friends list.

I agree that Velious was where Sony began to really cater to the [always whiny] raider minority, but overall it's better to have it than not have it. Even as someone who's largely uninterested in raids I like Velious better than Kunark, if for the class balancing improvements if nothing else. I'm much more accepting of EQ's faults this time around because we players here have the benefit of hindsight--I know what to expect from the get-go. I'm content to be an anonymous nobody, too; it's a nice change after being all too popular in the last couple MMOG's I played.

Danth

[heartbrand]

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

Luclin on P99 is a moot point as the server will begin hemorrhaging players a few months after Velious comes out. You see, what each expansion after Kunark does is this: if you don't raid, you're nothing. This is doubly important on this extremely top-heavy server where nobody is content to simply see the sights and be level 43 for months. The wonder and magic of Everquest is long gone and people want to do what they didn't get to do as kids a dozen years ago. Unfortunately, Velious introduces the concept of full separation between normal and hardcore players.

In Classic and Kunark, almost no gear is notrade. Epics, the odd quest item, a few raid pieces and then VP gear, everything else is droppable. Almost all of the best gear in the game is tradeable and you don't strictly have to be in the top guild to get it. You can become an "accomplished player" by trading, by knowing the right people, by RMTing or scamming (hey, it counts for the purpose of this discussion) and any other way you can imagine getting a fungi, Cobalt BP, tstaff, CoF and whatever else is considered top items in the game.

Not so in Velious. Suddenly every piece of "BiS" is from NToV or similar. In fact, the top three best items for each slot will usually be notrade raid drops, and anything less will be considered low-level crap. The gear you can get as a non-raider is suddenly laughable and you are nobody if you don't raid. As we all know, raiding on P99 is tantamount to selling your soul to the devil, and there's a gigantic divide between the TMOish crowd and the rest of the server. With everyone realizing that there's no way for their characters to be comparatively decked out without that unrealistic requirment of becoming the 1%, the whole experience will feel tainted and people will stop playing as this feeling sinks in and comes to permeate the server.

This did not happen back in the day because 1) people didn't know better, 2) the vast majority were satisfied with being unambitious nobodies, and 3) there were tons of servers and you could always find a raid guild somewhere if you wanted, the entire endgame concept was not utterly monopolized by one or two highly exclusive guilds. People await Velious like it'll be some great coming of age for this server, but nobody seems to realize what it did to Everquest and how poorly it fits this server and the way it differs from the great old backintheday. There will never be a question of whether or not to implement Luclin on P99 because there will be less than 100 players left by then.

This is a great post and 100% accurate. Many of the zones in velious that were so popular back in the day are now meaningless because of the surplus of superior items in existence here / everyone at max level cap / knowledge of where to get the best stuff. You either raid or do shit in Velious, and one of the most exciting parts for the non-raiders, the Shawl quest, is now pretty shitty here because the 8th shawl will never be implemented. I do disagree about every expansion being like this however, Planes of Power implemented a lot of cool gear for non-raiders like Ornate armor, it brought a lot of good tradeskill made stuff into the game, had groupable tasks etc.

[Elmarnieh]

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

Luclin on P99 is a moot point as the server will begin hemorrhaging players a few months after Velious comes out. You see, what each expansion after Kunark does is this: if you don't raid, you're nothing. This is doubly important on this extremely top-heavy server where nobody is content to simply see the sights and be level 43 for months. The wonder and magic of Everquest is long gone and people want to do what they didn't get to do as kids a dozen years ago. Unfortunately, Velious introduces the concept of full separation between normal and hardcore players.

In Classic and Kunark, almost no gear is notrade. Epics, the odd quest item, a few raid pieces and then VP gear, everything else is droppable. Almost all of the best gear in the game is tradeable and you don't strictly have to be in the top guild to get it. You can become an "accomplished player" by trading, by knowing the right people, by RMTing or scamming (hey, it counts for the purpose of this discussion) and any other way you can imagine getting a fungi, Cobalt BP, tstaff, CoF and whatever else is considered top items in the game.

Not so in Velious. Suddenly every piece of "BiS" is from NToV or similar. In fact, the top three best items for each slot will usually be notrade raid drops, and anything less will be considered low-level crap. The gear you can get as a non-raider is suddenly laughable and you are nobody if you don't raid. As we all know, raiding on P99 is tantamount to selling your soul to the devil, and there's a gigantic divide between the TMOish crowd and the rest of the server. With everyone realizing that there's no way for their characters to be comparatively decked out without that unrealistic requirment of becoming the 1%, the whole experience will feel tainted and people will stop playing as this feeling sinks in and comes to permeate the server.

This did not happen back in the day because 1) people didn't know better, 2) the vast majority were satisfied with being unambitious nobodies, and 3) there were tons of servers and you could always find a raid guild somewhere if you wanted, the entire endgame concept was not utterly monopolized by one or two highly exclusive guilds. People await Velious like it'll be some great coming of age for this server, but nobody seems to realize what it did to Everquest and how poorly it fits this server and the way it differs from the great old backintheday. There will never be a question of whether or not to implement Luclin on P99 because there will be less than 100 players left by then.

This concern is easily rectified by changing the nodrop flag on some pieces to bring them more in line with kunark no drop ratios. NTOV or Sleepers can be the same as VP - almost all no drop and the rest can be droppable. But I'd say nodrop really occurred in Luclin after all Horn of Hssagra and other raid mobs did have very valuable dropable pieces.

[Elmarnieh]

PoP did do more to move high quality gear into the hands of the non-raider. Elemental bows were craftable and crafting got a huge amount of new very good items.

What PoP did to kill the game was to make travel so easy. Luclin made travel for not porting classes bearable, PoP made it trivial and broke some of the class interdependence to a point where the community suffered for it.