Nostalgia and Choice

Discussion in 'The Newbie Zone' started by Merrigrin, Feb 24, 2019.

  1. Merrigrin New Member

    Can we please start in our race's respective areas? Or at least have THE CHOICE to do so?

    When Sony gave us Glooming Deep and Crescent Reach, all choice went out the window in character creation. It's not a hard thing to do. It was done for years before these additions.

    I played (and paid) for EverQuest from 2001-2004. I have fond memories of the game from that time. I never enjoyed Glooming Deep or Crescent Reach. I just installed EQ again and wanted a taste pf nostalgia, visiting the old haunts. Unfortunately, the Barbarian Shaman I created had to start in Crescent Reach, run through to Hallow Moors, run through the Plane of Knowledge, and attempt to make it to Halas before Gnoll Pups ganged up on me. I'm setting my respawn point BEFORE ever getting into a fight, because the repeated run from Crescent Reach to where I actually want to be is ridiculous.

    Also, guess what happens when you "gift" us that nice "origin button?" Crescent reach is where we go. No way to change that.

    I know this has been asked for many, many times before (by me and others) and nothing ever changes, even when Sony was running the show. It's NOT difficult to do. Sony changed it from a choice to it's present state, just change it back.

    For the record, I am NOT a paying customer. With beginnings like this, why would I? If I actually got to experience the EQ I had such fun with ages ago, that included many choices, I might even pay to play, getting those extra character slots for my alt-oholic tendencies. But NOT if every character is MADE to accept Crescent Reach as their home. Just a point. Money talks and hopefully knowing that you're losing money with this may (I say MAY) spur you to make a change.
  2. Metrav Journeyman

    The ability to chose your starting city is sadly a perk of All Access Membership (Which is a blatant fallacy because if you wanted to play a Drakkin your basically getting a free All Access Perk regardless of your membership, how's that for a kick in the pants). Free 2 Play members may only start a new character with crescent reach as their home city. Once your character is made, there is no way to change this. You used to be able to petition and get it changed before they added the ability to change it at character creation, but that was long before Free 2 Play. There where rumors of a marketplace item to change this - but it never happened. Guess it just wasn't that important. Or they liked forcing you to Subscribe before making your character.
  3. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    This should never have been changed to force people into Crescent Reach. It should have been (and remain) a player choice. That said, it's NOT difficult to leave CR, go to PoK, go to your favorite home city, and bind there.
  4. KermittheFroglok Augur

    Welcome back, sorry to hear that your frustrated that you cannot start in you old starting ground as a free-to-play player. As Metrav already explained, the starting cities are limited to All Access members.

    Crescent Reach was designed to be the starting city for new players/free to play players because it has a more streamlined progression & also keeps new players concentrated in on area. Could you imagine what would happen if we dropped new players throughout the old world of Norrath with no direction, like the old days? (It would be chaos, I can just see the Ak'Anon sewers clogging up with the corpses of drowned newbies that never found their way out.)

    I suggest you just subscribe, create the characters you want where you want, cancel and then resubscribe when you're ready to. It's only ~$15 for one month (but you'll get $5 worth of DBG cash) and leveling doesn't take too long anymore in the early game. If you were wiling to pay $20, one month subscription, +$5 extra DBG cash, you could also buy one of 5 mounts in the Marketplace. I think you're barbarian would look cool on a Snow Puma!

    http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=96863

    Just be mindful that if you let your subscription expires, you'll only be able to have 2 characters if you have a newer free-to-play account, or 4 if you have an older "silver" account. (The box in the upper left-hand corner of the character select screen will tell you which type of account you have.)

    Shoot me a PM if you're on Vox and need help.

    Good luck!
  5. Merrigrin New Member

    Thanks for the info. Pushing the All Access Pass, eh? I kind of wrankle quite a bit at ham-fisted "Give us your money, or else!" tactics. But I'm old school :)

    As for traveling to the starter cities, with my Barbarian, it took three tries, thanks to a group (3) of Gnoll Pups ganging up on me for my first attempt, then hitting me again on my second, just as I spawned into Everfrost. Then my third try had me meeting a "vengeful", not sure which one. So it took me about 30 minutes just to reset my bind point, before ever attacking anything. If Daybreak thinks this will entice me to subscribe, they're sorely mistaken. I'll go get my nostalgia fix with P99, thank you very much :)

    PS: I do have "the old account" called Silver, so I have 4 slots, I think. Also, In one Daybreak's something-or-other years ago, I lost my only level 20+ character (38 Half-Elf Bard with Lambent Armor) and all his stuff, never to be seen again. They are not doing well in trying to bring back old players. They may not even care, for all I know.
  6. Protagonist Tank

    "Old School" games required you to pay to play at all. Expecting more features for free is very much in the "new school" line of thought.
    Diosces, Celithan, Shanarias and 5 others like this.
  7. Xianzu_Monk_Tunare Augur

    If you're old school, then being able to play EQ at all for free should "wrankle you." You shouldn't be willing to play without paying if you're actually old school.

    Next, your claim that choice vanished when SOE added a full tutorial and CR when TSS came out, that is simply untrue. The Tutorial from the first day TSS came out has always been fully optional, and this did not change with EQ's move to F2P. Further when TSS launched and introduced the Drakkin's and their starting city of CR to EQ, CR was not made the only option for new characters. It was made the default choice, but all players had the option to change it to their race's traditional starting city for their class/diety combination. The only change to any of this was with EQ going F2P which restricted choices other than CR to an active subscription.

    Also, I am confused on how traveling from CR to Moors to PoK to Everfrost to Halas had you running into 3 Gnoll Pups. A vengeful I can get because occasionally one paths down there, but it is rare.

    No characters higher than the level of 10 have ever been deleted by SOE or Daybreak. More likely is that someone either hacked your account or had your account and transferred the character to a different server; or a third option is that you're looking on the wrong server all together. And since you say "for all you know" that implies that you have not bothered to contact them regarding your apparent missing character.
    Gorgol the Ogre likes this.
  8. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    My guess is you are looking on the wrong server for your Bard. There have been several mergers and mergers on top of that. Do you recall your original server?
  9. Merrigrin New Member

    Maelyn Starpye. I believe it was merged with Drinal.
  10. Fluid Augur

    I've been playing through all time periods. FWIW: Played the progression servers recently so more then familiar with the old school refresher. Old starting zones sucked. Understand they have been improved with more items on vendors and better drops, but they still suck hard. On top of that, if you go to an old zone on a current server via P2P, they will suck just a tad harder then a progression server. Definitely hard mode since you will be all alone on anything but a progression server.

    Gloomingdeep is a good choice. You end up with gear that is good'nuff to take you to level 50. Ditto for grouping, if you are going to find anyone to group with, you will find them there. Otherwise it is solo killing rats in the Qeynos newbie area and repeated deaths in Blackburrow<for example> to level.

    One of my favorite things in Gloomingdeep is that totem that gives you SoW. Even if I started a Druid or Shaman and leveled them outside of Gloomingdeep, I would still run that quest just for the first 9-10 levels. If I had a slow mover i.e. Cleric, Wizard, et al, I wouldn't consider going through the first 51 levels before Run Speed AA w/o that totem.

    Travel has much improved. Were you looking for some Iron Man game play, just run from Cresent Reach to Moors, to PoP. Use 'Find' to get the teleporter to the original starting areas, then bind there. Even if you happen to come around to my way of thinking, it is easy to recover. Just use the PoP book located in the old zone or choose enter tutorial to get back to Cresent Reach.

    Also on your best character, that is the one you like to play the most, type /reward and you will get a lot of perks including the ability to resurrect w/o penalty, enhanced advancement rate, transport to the Guild Lobby in PoP, lots of stuff that makes it fun.
  11. KermittheFroglok Augur

  12. KermittheFroglok Augur

    What Fluid is trying to explain is called the Veteran Rewards perks where you get special AA on tagged characters. To clarify, I think the rewards are based of subscribed membership time, although I heard free account that are a year old get the 30 minute exp. boost too? (Can anyone confirm, I don't know how it works because I forgot to cancel my subscription for years ). If that's the case then you might be just shy of the 4th year's ~once a week all corpse rez, the guild lobby port is an 8th year membership reward.

    Here's an article link for veteran rewards.

    http://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/EQ:Veteran_Rewards
  13. Aurastrider Augur

    Vet rewards are only based on account age and status has zero to do with it. I have ftp mule accounts with several years worth of vet rewards and they only have the miles and have never been all access ever.
    KermittheFroglok likes this.
  14. KermittheFroglok Augur

    Also, F2P players have a lot more options compared to when I first checked F2P accounts out. Back then they only had 4 race options and 4 class choices. I think DBG is very generous now :p

    With a Silver account you get a bit more features than other players (higher AA and loyalty token "velocity" cap)

    http://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/Free_to_play
  15. KermittheFroglok Augur

    Thanks for clarifying! That's neat that they do it that way now, makes me wish I started my alternate accounts awhile ago :-/
  16. Fluid Augur

    From your account age, subscribed 2001-2004, it could mean you have ~18 years of veteran benefits accrued. You also should have the ability to claim the veteran rewards on more then one characters so you are golden. Most of my played characters across several servers have claimed their veteran rewards. Best thing since sliced bread!
  17. Password1234 Augur

    I'm still annoyed that the characters I made in 2001 had their starting cities changed to CR at some point before I came back, to be honest.

    On the plus side, CR guards don't give faction hits, so there's no downside to killing every single one of them out of spite whenever you use origin.
  18. Neranya Journeyman

    I returned to EQ this last December after stopping in late 2011. I started a character on the Phinigal server to try a progression server out. After finishing the tutorial I went to Crescent Reach and a friend advised me to open the Achievement window ( /ach ) and look at the Hero's Journey tab. It turned out to be a nice guide to follow, vice just running around grabbing quests at random. I think it's helpful for returning players. Good gear rewards too (at least I think so).

    From what I remember, having everyone starting in CR was done mainly to make it easier for people to find groups because at the time the EQ population was shrinking / changing. The only issue I have with that is that if you should follow the TSS/CR quest-lines for multiple characters, the repetition can get old. I know you don't have to follow them, but they are laid out nicely. As far as I know, the other starting cities (Neriak, Oggok, Halas, etc) don't have a detailed, comprehensive Hero's Journey laid out like the one in CR, if any at all. It would be great if they did, with all the good rewards. But that would be a significant overhaul of the game.

    Just a thought.
  19. Captain Video Augur


    This should not have happened. Every toon rolled prior to the F2P launch should have had all of their properties grandfathered in, including starting city. You should be able to /petition to have those changed back.
  20. vickster339 New Member

    I log in for the first time in like 15 years... Run from Crescent City to Grobb, bind, go out to explore and fight, then I go to port home for the night and get sent to Crescent City... even thought my bind location clearly reads: Grobb... found it strange that my mounts and dathor great hammer were missing... oh well