Bored on your nights off from raiding? I got you covered

I am actually in frostfang sea (Vahshir BST) and still quickly out-quested my level. I had been grinding for the last 2 levels before I quit too. Then again the last time i was there was the opening weeks of the server.

If you decide to pick it back up, just shoot me an in-game mail, and I will power level you some on my paladin. I drug my beastlord around behind me last night, and with mentoring and just blowing everything up I came across in Frostfang Sea, I took him from level 6 to 16 pretty easily.

EQ2 really is fun up to a certain point. I only quit playing it years ago when the devs started getting lazy and putting out expansions with one new instance, granted it was 4 versions of the instance, but it was the same thing over and over. I'm not a fan of everyone being able to solo to max lvl, but yes you can.
The ingame voice chat is nice for everyone, the crafting is... well its crafting, its gonna be boring but the decorating your house is kind of cool. The raids were fun and semi challenging, and the PvP was decent.

Well I'm convinced enough to at least give it a shot..

I have always enjoyed EQ2 for what it is, but it has a metric ton of issues for new players.

Buying a lvl 100 character is the worst thing you can possibly do. Besides all the skills and AA's from numerous expansions to learn and understand, raid guilds (even the ultra casual ones) require your epic 2.0, and this will take weeks/months to do all the grindy pre-requisites from previous expansions. Kunark factions, the ToT quest line and so on. Ascension spell research is the devil (30+ days to upgrade 1 spell), and it's even worse to set it up as a pay-to-win with DBC. I suggest starting fresh, exploring the world, and do those pre-req quests as they are current as you level.

@OP, your info on bards are a little off. You can be a Dirge or a Troubador, as either a good or evil race. I think they made a change to some of the neutral classes that allow you to select either side. Things like mystics and defilers (shaman), templars & inquisitors (clerics) are still separate, I believe.

The TLE (Fallen Gate) is cool in theory, but has awful exp rates, just like Phinny at launch and Coirnav. Unless EQ2 is your main game, this grind takes too much time and effort to be viable. It's basically a cash grab for exp pot sales. I can swarm an entire area with my SK and only net maybe 1 or 2% worth of exp. It's painful.

The most popular Live server in EQ1 (FV), with the most popular rule set, has the least populated equivalent server in EQ2. For some reason, people will not go there, despite the perks (faster exp, quick travel everywhere, tradeable raid gear). Less than 100 people online, most nights. At one point in time, there was no more than 30 online during the evening EST.

With SoF coming out, I won't have the casual off nights like I used to, but like the OP, agree that it's worth trying out EQ2. It's a beautiful game, has some pretty neat features that even WoW has ripped off from them, and gives you all kinds of flexibility to play the race and class you want.

EDIT - Fallen Gate is called a TLE server because it's a Time-Locked Experience. Progression has no impact on when the next expansion gets released.

Thanks for the update. Things have changed a lot over the years, and I am certainly not the expert on those changes.

I tend to think that even though the experience rate is slower on the Fallen Gate server, the fact that you are playing up through the expansions as they release on the server gives you more time to accomplish those things that you said were a deturent(sp?) to "catching up" on a Live server (like the Epic 2.0. The 2.0 isn't in game yet on the Fallen Gate server). From my experiences over the past couple weeks (starting fresh at level 1 with no help) on Fallen Gate, I have found that there are groups at the mid levels to join and get help accomplishing things. The server is not nearly as busy as a typical EQ1 TLP server, but it's the best you can hope for right now for EQ2 in my opinion. On a live server, you are probably going to be completely on your own until you get near max level and completed those pre-requisites you mentioned above.

I find this interesting because technically the Coirnav TLP server on EQ1 has the exact same type of release schedule. Both EQ1 Coirnav TLP and EQ2 Fallen Gate TLE open a new expansion every 12 weeks regardless of any progression made on the server. So... then is Coirnav a TLE server?

Yes, at launch, EQ2 crafting WAS that bad (I know several who were killed by the forge). But, I still did it.

It improved a lot a year or so after launch when they got rid of the WORT (washes, oils, resins tempers) subcombines.

You made it 2 hours and 10 minutes longer than I did.

I honestly don't understand these statements. I played EQ back in ~2001-2005. It was fantastic. I get that bit, and I get the nostalgia and the 'I only want more of THIS game, not a different game!'.

But then WoW and EQ2 launched (Same month, even), pretty much together. A large part of my guild, and server population (Povar) left to play one or the other.

To me, WoW looked cartoony and like it wasn't going to try to be a serious game like EQ had been for me. I passed.

EQ2 still seemed a little weird, maybe like the introductory anime of MMOs, and I held off for a while. After a year or so, I tried out the trial. It wasn't quite EQ - it was a more streamlined, laid back experience. There wasn't so much 'figure it out' as 'be told to do X', and I was fine with that. It was a nice break from constant high effort playing, still had the world and style of lore I loved, and still had *plenty* to do. I stayed around for a while, maybe 4 years. There was still the opportunity for raiding, and it was essentially just a modern MMO. Easier, faster, more 'rewarding' for less effort. It's the way games were going.

Where I see some people complain about the tradeskilling, it's by far my favorite part of EQ2.

EQ1 Crafting: Maybe learn recipe. Put stuff in a bag, click 'GO', fail/succeed.

EQ2 Crafting: Learn recipes. Get materials. Start craft. Actually interact and affect the outcome via skill-based mini-game. It was awesome. I still haven't met another game that has crafting I enjoy as much as EQ2. You needed to know what you were doing, and hard was hard but possible if you knew how to counter things.

ive always felt they would have been much better off putting just a fraction of that money in to original EQ rather than developing a brand new game. I believe it was a failure on SOEs part to understand how MMOs work. you dont make a sequel to an ever expanding, living game. its a huge cost investment with almost no chance to grow your base. EQ2 was always just going to siphon off its parent game, rather than attract any significant amount of new players.

funny thing is, sometimes it works. Lineage 2 did really well. Guild Wars 2 is a different game, but a fairly popular one, but that might have been the number of years between the two games, who knows. FFXIV sucked at first, but ARR revitalized it and made it the #2 MMO in the west.

Then you get things like Destiny 2.....

Haven't played in forever. I remember EQII not having the same "feel" that EQ has - it was better graphically and all that but it just didn't feel right. So I left. You triggered something in the back of my head though so I figured what the hell. I just tried to install EQII for the first time since... I dunno... 2010? It crashed 3 different times.

First time I didn't even get to the character screen.
Second time I made a Kerran Conjuror and it crashed before I could name it.
Third and final time I actually got to the boat where I guess you start your "new adventure".

No error messages, no lockups... just "Hey! There's my desktop!" Nothing running in Task Manager. Like the process just disappears.

MSI GT70 Dominator
8GB RAM
nVidia GTX870M

So I have the horsepower to run this with NO problems. *shrug* I dunno.... won't be joining you though.

Sorry to see it's not working for you. It never does that to me, so I have no idea.

Even when that 'ever expanding, living game' is built on an ancient, out-dated engine that has absolutely no draw for new players to join, because it looks like a pile that was left in place 20 years ago? There is definitely a component of first impressions, and EQ looks like a 20 year old game. Because it's a 20 year old game. 'Mah nostalgia' doesn't do anything to get rid of the need for actual new players, and those new players need to be attracted to *something* about the game. Quite frankly EQ at this point is a daunting, overly bloated game built on an engine that should have died 10 years ago. I play it for nostalgia. Most people I know play if for nostalgia, and for the ages-old 'grump grump back in my day' fanfaire that gets nobody anything. "Its harder, blahblah, QoL ruins the game, blahblah". No, you just got used to it back then, and decided that was the 'right' way.

Let's be honest, EQ population is tiny. The extra 15 expansions really haven't grown the game, and EQ2 did just fine, at least for a while. WoW just did better, that's all. And at this point, EQ2 is an equally ancient beast. Now, new MMOs are out. People play them because of higher population, which is won through graphics whoring and 'features' and calls back to past franchises. EQ would not be stronger if it had gone a different route. Ultima isn't still a bastion of gaming, EQ isn't, EQ2 isn't, WoW is definitely fading and has been for a while - these are old games that deserve to die, and just still have some amount of player base that lives it for nostalgia and because it's what they're used to.

I did a search on the EQ2 forums, and found a couple things.

First, here's a thread about something that sounds familiar to your game crashing.

In that thread, I saw the following that might help...

I hope that helps.

Oh IDK about THAT... If you truly played the first month.. both drops AND crafted sucked.. drops cause well NOTHING dropped.. I remember "trying" to kill in runnyeye and nothing dropped even the named mobs didn't drop anything.. you were all but stuck with your lvl 20 class armor cause the game didn't seemed like it was even itemized yet.. and crafting was beyond a joke.. They basically released a unfinished game and made you pay for it

Do people really play them because of higher populations? I truly don't get that at all. My original group of friends in EQ were a bunch of game hoppers then and still are today and they cheerfully abandon whatever they are playing for something new when it releases. In fact they're usually tabbing over to read about the hot new release for something a few months out while they are still at character select.

To me a lot of avatars wandering around may as well be NPC's who just cause lag and get in my way when I play. I hate heavily populated areas and always will as it totally breaks anything I have that even resembles immersion

Perceived higher population. New game, new advertising, obviously everybody is playing it. Also impacted by 'HEY THIS IS FREE NOW CAUSE WE HAVE NO PLAYERS' so you start playing a game you heard about 4 years and forgot, and then realize it's not actually all that populated and move on to the next MMO/Deal of the Week. Or you don't like it, so you... do the same thing. Etc.

New games /appear/ to have a higher population, and often do at least briefly, so people switch. And then switch. And then switch. Todays game market is absolutely oversaturated with options to the point where finding a game with a stable population and a dedicated group to play with is harder than finding no line at the DMV.

theres a belief that a game's success is directly proportional to the number of people playing, and that If you dont see something like "x million players" in advertising, the game is dead, or soon will be. Its the same group of people who comment "im surprised EQ/EQ2 is still around" every year when the expansions get announced. People don't realize that a modest success is still a success.

I've often found that MMORPGs are typically a lot better at the 5 year point than they are at the day 1 point... assuming they last 5 years. Typically this is because they have time to work out the bugs, change things that just don't work like they expected, and add content to the game.

Along those lines, EQ2 (to me) was a much better game at 5 years in than it was when it came out.

I played both WoW and EQ2 beta, and quite frankly, EQ2 was not a good game in beta. It was that same "not a good game" at release. Group shared death experience debt, mobs calling their friends to join the fight from across the zone when you engaged them, and so many other horrible design decisions made it a very unpleasant experience to play.

As if the game design decisions wasn't bad enough, the game ran really, really bad. I mean reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallly bad. Walking through any city was a lag fest. You would stutter through town face planting on walls, and every single NPC you passed would try to talk to you as you passed by. Not just text.... noooooo. Voice overs. Imagine walking through a busy city street, and every person you pass screams at you something completely out of context. That was the EQ2 experience on day one.

EQ2 got vastly better around the Faydwer expansion, and got even better in the Kunark expansion. Today's EQ2 is sooooooooooooooooo much better than it was when it came out that it's hard to even compare it to back then.

Again, it's not for everyone, but for those who remember how bad it was on day one, trust me when I say that game is gone. EQ2 of today is vastly different from the day one EQ2.