This post has 2 sides to it .. Firstly , I want to say thanks to the Dev's for making the servers stable these last few weeks and for the additional xp earlier . I know you guys are overloaded at times and believe me I know sometimes we can be spoiled ingrates especially when we are locked up for months at a time, However I do appreciate all that you do even when I get irritated and furious at you on occasion. so thanks again for all your dedicated hard work and I hope and pray that you and your families have been kept healthy and safe during these past few months .. secondly, now please screw up and bring the crashing bug back cause these forums have been pretty quiet these past few weeks and I'm not getting my forumquesting quota in .. j/k .. another reason I made this post not only to give thanks, but to stir the forumquesters up ..
The lack of drama on Veterans is actually pretty sad. I mean there are really only 2 threads showing any amount of hate. The perennial anti-boxer thread and the really weird thread where people are actually complaining about too much raid loot dropping! It seems TLP really is keeping the game alive!
If by years you mean weeks or months, I think the odds favor an explosion rather sooner than later. As for the TLP forum, it reminds me a bit of a toxic sludge overflow. You know it's going to be unpleasant, but you just can't stop watching.
As a first time TLP player..yes. It's way more fun than live right now. I haven't yet made the full dive, but it's just a matter of time before I only start logging into live once or twice a week and I'm MIA. Live is going down a terrible path of monotony and raid loot handouts. It's not going to be long where it's a visible detriment to the game. It's only a matter of time before more and more things become tuned around having raid gear (and why shouldn't they? You can drag 40 casuals/alts to t1 and get half geared in BIS armor by expansion's end), true casuals/non-raiders cannot keep up, it swings drastically the other way to help them out, raiders get bored and leave, it swings again drastically, and you find yourself stuck with an SoD to UF type experience and raid guilds fall apart. I guess it's difficult to have any semblance of foresight. The writing is on the wall. Just read it.
As someone who doesn't raid I've got no complaints about the gear available outside of raids. My only complaint is that ToV was so easy it didn't really have an end-game and wasn't really worth playing besides seeing the content in the first couple weeks.
I'm in the same boat, it was really enjoyable to start fresh with a massive community. I forgot how easy and fun, it was to just start grouping with people out in the wild. People are social and actually want to PUG. The game is pretty forgiving, so you can make do with just about any class.
It truly is a breath of fresh air. Being able to put /lfg on and have a group within minutes or assembling a group within minutes with just a bunch of random people is such a luxury to have. I haven't utilized those tools since DoN/DoDh days and I thought they were long forgotten tools. However, TLP really opened my eyes. The community is gigantic. Everyone is social. I haven't seen any toxicity yet. The entire atmosphere of TLP just really captures how good EQ was and how much of an antithesis it is to live now. No box armies, no mercs, no anti-social/clique behavior. The live servers are, and have been, really missing that MMO feel and social aspect for far too long. There's no sense of community as everyone just operates in their own little bubble worrying about nothing more than alts. I do miss the complexity of modern EQ a bit, especially as a warrior with literally 1 aggro button and no defensive abilities, but I'll sacrifice that any day for the overall satisfaction on TLP.
Pros: Community is great, find groups easy, a million things to do. Cons: playing at low level again , NO
