No, I don't personally care if my connection is encrypted. What I do care about is daybreak being proactive about anti cheat. I see blatant cheating regularly on the servers I play on, and enforcement appears to be very selective at best.
As has been said before if your computer has access to the data so does all the cheat programs that you are worried about.
You are not wrong, but currently, those programs do not have to touch EQ's memory (I could be wrong but I think they just read the raw traffic). Encrypting it would then mean having to get something not readily available to decrypt traffic, you're no longer in the realm of 'the info is right there'. At the very least, it would require a massive rework of those programs, which could be about enough to make them just die off, or at least die off from the current level of wide-spread abuse.
I think you are overestimating the amount of work needed to do something like that and underestimating the amount of work people are willing to go to keep the programs working.
Oh, didn't realize that had already been said. I guess they should just continue with the status quo then and not try to address the problem.
Disable all spell casting in the Guild Lobby, with a few exceptions: resurrection spells and teleportation spells. Character name rules and enforcement à la P99.
Oh, I've got another hot take: Make buffs count down in all the zones. I'm tired of the peasants lagging out PoK on Bristlebane by grouping up by Franklin Teek.
Apprehensive is a stronger perception than dubious. The order of Faction should be; KOS Threatening Apprehensive Dubious Indifferent
the lion fella? he looked really good! solid aesthetic, ferocious. He didn't look like a EverQuest player model, per se, but then EQ player models aren't exactly renowned for their dynamicism.
hot take is this game hasn't done much compared to what the competition has done. Tradeskill depot, other games done that long time ago. If thats main selling point for an expansion thats pretty sad. Seems like every year 1 little extra new thing. Other games, the competition, already done it. EQ is very slow in progress follow, that should be fixed already. Like 10 years ago.
Shaman are low-key the 4th official pet class. In the last few years, i've become more and more impressed with the tanking abilities of goodboy spirit wolf. Shaman on full burn mode + Cleric actually make a decent duo.