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

[magnetaress]

GoD actually had some cool zones, and the OoW proving grounsd or w/e that maze like zone at the end were u did all those trials for the +saves was a cool well designed zone but it was all to insanely grindy at that point

[magnetaress]

GoD/OoW should have been their own game and start from lvl 1 on another mmo world.

[foxchris509]

PoP was a masterpiece, the progression and flagging in the expansion was very well thought out. You can really tell the devs went all in for it. All the npc models are great and the zones are just as badass as you would expect from a high end expansion. If you are a raider and haven't experienced it yet you are seriously missing out. Finish it all to make it into time and the amazing loot it just is perfect. The fast travel books obviously suck and ruined some parts of the game but overall if you are into raiding its the best. Things did start to get weird after pop with GoD but OoW was another masterpiece and probably my favorite eq expansion. New epics 1.5/2.0 that really are cool and tie in to the previous epic quests. Awesome raids and loot it really has it all.

[Kohedron]

I stopped playing like the day before Legacy of Ykesha came out

It was clear they were just churning shit out just to churn shit out, luckily 11 year old me figured out it was time to jump ship

[Izmael]

Luclin is where it went downhill for me.

Places like Shadowhaven, Nexus, Bazaar.. soulless, lifeless places that all look the same.

Mobs that nobody likes. What the fuck is a zelniak? Who the fuck cares? But everyone loves a gnoll or a froglok.

Zones that are all huge and square, a-la Halls of Testing. Fuck that shit. Give me the good old Qeynos and Befallen so I can get lost in there.

Items that made everything from previous expansions a bunch of junk.

AA's that made players without AA's a bunch of junk (or was that later on?).

Mindless keying for boring raid zones and soulcrushing timesinks aka "ring events".

Praise Rog/Bog for stopping at Velious and never going past it. We're all lucky here.

[Toomuch]

Personally I feel like it was a gradual progression that way, with Luclin and Planes of Power contributing to it a little bit here and there, with a steep drop-off after Planes of Power. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, what people seemed to fall in love with in Everquest is the realism and difficulty level. You had to talk to people, depend on other people/classes, take the time/effort to travel where you needed to go, plan ahead with a lot of things like food/water/bandages, not venture into dangerous areas if you're not prepared/leveled/geared enough, etc.

I also played on Sullon Zek, and when they introduced Luclin, they introduced hard-coded safe zones (Nexus and Bazaar). I hate to use the cliché term, but it definitely ruined a bit of the immersion. Sullon was so hardcore, so merciless and brutal, always watching your back and hitting a /who hotkey every 10 seconds, and then suddenly you could just be safe/invulnerable instead.

Freebie ports on a timer with the implementation of The Nexus, that took away a bit of the interpersonal communication and interdependency that was so much a core part of the game, and introduced the first real EZ travel mode. If the Nexus only went once every 3 or 4 real hours, or maybe even just once a game day at most, maybe that would have preserved the game a little better?

Being able to vendor your wares automatically in The Bazaar, again it took away a large facet of the interpersonal communication. The zone itself wasn't the worst, it was the vendor-mode that dumbed down the game. If it could have just been the new EC, where it just made more sense to buy and sell wares there, due to the proximity to the Nexus and banks and all that, maybe that would have felt better? Or maybe limiting vendor mode to "open market hours" (like 8 AM to 6 PM game time) or something?

And then PoP came, and doubled-down on ez mode travel with the books. They DEFINITELY needed more limits on that, like maybe waaaay less available books around, and maybe you can only click 1 non-PoP book every 3 hours or something?

I personally liked the raiding in PoP and Luclin. If they could have kept the gear scaling a little more under control, I think it would have made a huge difference too. Like, maybe the 125 HP/mana items in Luclin, scale those back to ~115 and such, and then apply something similar to the PoP gear, so that it's maxing out more around 130. Then also tweak the raid mobs damage/HP/etc as well, to even out the gear tweaks. If they could've done that, then the very best gear from Velious and Kunark would've still been very applicable and worthwhile, instead of almost completely trivialized the moment the next expansion came out.

Basically, it seems like they kind of bumped up the top-end gear stats at about a rate of 25% per expansion, but if they could have kept it closer to 12-15%, then at least most of the old high-end raids are still well worth doing for the gear. And to me, the general lore sticks better too, because the big-bad bosses from previous expansions, that have all this painstakingly well-written story built in, they don't become complete pushovers (while still being gods and such?) quite so quickly.

[Danth]

Declined a little bit with Kunark and Velious, but not badly. Luclin was the first serious decline in quality. Luclin's development was notoriously plagued by internal turmoil within Verant/Sony, and it showed. I still think a decent expansion might've been hidden in there under the garbage, but I have to assess it on what it is, not what it could've been.

Planes or Power is rightly popular among the folks who enjoy zerg raiding, but from my standpoint (I mostly like group content) it mortally wounded EQ. Game never truly recovered from PoP. That singular expansion, moreso than any other, effectively ruined the game for me. Then come Ykesha and Lost Dungeons, both of which were cheaply made insults, then the ultimate insult of Gates and "let's cut this expansion in half and sell it as two!" I quit for the last time in spring 2004 and haven't been back since.

Looking at the above, EQ looks like a tale of poor management. For all its success, given better management and planning it could have been even more than what it was.

Danth
Danth

[Danth]

(can't edit in RNF) Hah at myself, managed to double-sign. Think that's a first.

[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.

[Gustoo]

I just like when Monks had to be the worst race (humans) and got not weapons, and were still quite strong and awesome. They were truly minimalist, really special class.

In Kunark and beyond they get so many crazy ass items and weapons that they're just like any other class that its a real downgrade for the direction of the class.