Why don't people like the game post POP?

Only hundreds? Try tens of thousands in the later game.

But think of all the time people invest into new characters every year though and this excuse doesn't hold up.

So people just had a bad taste in their mouth from memories?

That's truly a shame, I also quit during GoD for Wow originally but then came back later and regretted not sticking with EQ. The devs take a lot of crap for trying to band aid this old game together and not enough credit for the many great expansions that came after PoP.

ws ranger for tanking tipt boss worked as well

For me, and I speak only for myself. I enjoy the progression of the character...Once the character has max level, a glut of AA, tradeskills raised, Spell Disciplines are raised. Adding more and more AA and the level caps beyond 70 were just not fun, Defiant armor chased me away from live servers forever. I get they helped people play catch up....but for me it hurt the game...so EQ once you see defiant armor would be my end anyway you cut it. But to answer the question, I think many people like the original progression through level 70. While raids did get better the rest of the game got flat.

Pick Up Grouping hits it peak in Velious because Velks is 3 steps from a druid portal.

It takes a big hit in Luclin when Griegs is 2 full zones away from the Nexus.

And it dies off entirely in POP when most useful content is locked behind flags and the pickup raids don't happen until Guilded boxers need to get their boxes flagged for at least Tactics and star running MB like 3 weeks into POP. By then everyone has run around Plane of Nightmare/Disease and spent the requisite 30 seconds in POI to make a forum post that AOE is ruining EQ.

This is what kills EQ every cycle. Whats left is murdered by months of plane of time and ldons.

But make no mistake. Its the death of pick up grouping that murders it all. And I'm not even saying pick up groups are the lifeblood of eq, it's just a reminder that being daisy chained to 5 old people who havent grinded enough cash in real life to at least buy a second laptop from a pawn shop rarely have the necessary skillset to accomplish much beyond running from the druid rings to velks to join a virtual representation of a 6 people with limited imagination trying to run a DND campaign with 2 people constantly in the bathroom and a 3rd chain smoking on the backdeck while everyone waits on pizza rolls.

PoP has next to 0 content for non-raiders. You can grind 5 more levels and some AAs for....for why? All the cool gear, tradeskill stuff, even spells etc are locked behind flagging that you need to be in a raid guild for. You're stuck with no content until LDoN. LDoN brings new content for you, but are you going to wait 3 months for that while all the cool kids are in the elemental planes? No, you're going to game hop, taking a break from the TLP until the next one.

Once the non-raiders leave, you're on a server with only endgame raiders. Every time one of them quits, that's someone your guild either has to poach from another guild or never gets back because there's no LFG scene to recruit from. Everyone knows some portion of their raid guild are serial TLP rerollers who are quitting when the next one comes out anyway and people lose confidence in their guild's ability to survive long term. The slog of 3 months of PoP weighs on people, they get bored and quit, guilds start dying, some of their members quit until the next TLP, some go to existing guilds etc. Point is the server's raiding population shrinks, which causes more people to quit.

It would be really, really nice if LDoN released a couple weeks into PoP like it did on the Fippy Darkpaw server (10 years later, Fippy Darkpaw still had this right). This would be good for both the players interested in playing beyond level 65 on these servers and DPG. The casuals and serial TLP rerollers are still going to quit and roll on the new TLP, but they'd make it to GoD. (...No real solution to keeping non-raiders interested in GoD other than launching OOW at the same time which is a non-starter for the raiding population...) And the serial TLP rerollers were always going to roll on a new server whenever they got the chance. But with LDoN available, you get a couple extra months of sub/microtransaction money off the non-raiders. Plus, you delay the collateral damage to the endgame raid scene caused by the casuals all quitting by a few months. DBG still sells all their bags/xp potions when the new server comes out, but there's a much healthier server population headed into the 70s. By then, the server's longevity is purely a function of the size of the endgame raiding population as the population drops off linearly thereafter.

Omens of War has a similar problem to PoP, but instead of killing the non-raiding population it bores the raiding population to death. They sort of addressed that for Oakwynd by giving it DoN with OOW launch. That's an improvement, but by now they have to be aware that 3 months is way too long for any expansion pre-HoT. Part of the point, I think, is they want to bore people to death in this era so they roll on a new server and buy new bags/xp potions. How long can that business model last? Think at this point everyone knows what they're up to and they'd be better off just providing a better product.

What they need to do is streamline the exp after PoP for early levels to go faster to catch up. Incentivize people to make lower levels on their starting cities (say drop mana stone , Jboots , rubicite armor, make epics 1.0 better after 15 expansions make them level locked and all no drop no trade and cant pass them down and make then have better stats or stats that get better all the way to 125 be cant be looted past level 45 or so, make it fun (the mines are just to dam ugly all armor sucks in color and freaking hate the mines. There is literality no incentive for upper levels and expansions to go and visit old zones.

I think you've got it nailed here. You'll find PUGs when there's new stuff to do, and you'll find them when there's old stuff to do again. When the old stuff becomes new stuff (or the new stuff becomes old stuff...) losing the reason you kept going becomes the reason you stop.

I think you're also onto something here....

...maybe not.

This is one of the better threads I've seen on these forums in a while.

EverQuest started off as a grouping game but eventually as more expansions are released it became more of a raiding game. Planes of Power has far too many zones that requires flags and keys. By that time being a EQ player in a raiding guild is a serious commitment. SOE stopped caring about casual players and group players and got distracted by focusing solely on raiders. They forgot who their target audience was and the core mechanic of grouping and that was a mistake that cost them millions in the last 24 years.

As many have said, EQ became too hardcore for normal people to handle. I quit in disgust after Omens of War and started playing World of Warcraft. Gates of Discord was dreadful. The zone names were unpronounceable. There were only a handful of new NPC mob types.

EverQuest starts off as a Tolkienesque DnD fantasy MMORPG and morphs into weird unappealing sci-fi content. SOE should have hired a serious fantasy writer instead of using newly hired interns from the GM pit to write the lore. There was too much bureaucracy, a lack of vision and a paucity of professionalism at SOE. The staff turnover was very high and as a result the design ethos kept changing all the time. It was a complete mess.

For older expansions, House of Thule is a masterpiece.

I'm glad WoW came and blew EQ out of the water. The devs at WoW started working on it just a few months after EQ was release in 1999. They saw the potential in EQ that SOE did not see. It's just too bad that the people that ran EQ did not care to aspire to learn the lessons from Blizzard that could have taken the EQ franchise into the stratosphere.

I've played most of live content yet enjoy the pre-PoP content more in many ways. Reasons, either my own or heard from others:

1. Group centric / first, which arguably turns very quickly toward raiding.
2. More role overlap, ie. a non-tank won't turn to a pink mist on trash mobs, dps differences aren't night and day, etc.
3. Less / no keying or flagging.
4. (more of a post PoP thing) No "EQ on rails" flagging, 'questing', etc. It is one thing to have a quest system to track stuff but another to force ppl to complete uninteresting, repetetive tasks or fail good ones bc you weren't on the right step yet (ex. tradeskill combines in certain quests).
5. Less buttons. The class abilities and AAs that come later add flavor but for most folks, ultimately result in a couple of multibind spam buttons & bars or a cycle of stuff you must keep up now all the time, thus not really adding interest of value, just more to manage.

usually by the time pop comes round the next tlp lands and the krono farmers jump ship as it's super simple to monopolise early camps to make krono. With the exodus of the farmers, the server population dips and you then get the wails that the 'server is dying' and real players jump ship, thinking that the next tlp will be different.

Best thing i ever did was get off the tlp ratwheel and move to live.

Ive been playing since 99 and the only advice I can give is to try not to think about the aa grind and immerse yourself in the PoP onward storyline. LDoN was a drag back when it was live and the release of WoW along with a really poor release of GoD led to a sharp decrease in the EQ playerbase. Really, just try to enjoy the storylines is my answer

Some good points with a grain of truth or more in them so far.

For me I think its a lot of things but mostly about diluted impact.

Early on you get a single new gear upgrade you can really feel the difference it feels huge because all you upgrade early on are raw base stats it's a big chunk of extra power in a very small spread of stats, like a War will get Sta Str Dex and really notice the upgrade.

Later on your single new Gear upgrade is such a small increase to your overall character you cannot notice any difference, you would have to parse it due to it being in the tenths of a percent or fewer, that upgrade is big but it is spread across a much larger pool of stats.

Early on you have a few abilities but each can make a big impact on how much you do.

Later on you have a massive amount of abilities and each one is a much smaller amount of your overall output.

Everything has been diluted so much that it has lost that feeling of it having a real noticeable impact.

After PoP the game gets noticeably tougher for group players, the content starts to feel like it was designed to give raiders more content, and the ability to do a lot of stuff in an open world is eroded.
By the time the game reaches SoD all sembalnce of the "OLD" EQ has been lost, now there is only the Progression system of guided content that players are forced into, the game went from being a world to an on rails hamster-wheel.

Leave LDoN alone. It’s already been shortened and some people actually like to play the EQ content.

Most people play EQ for the nostalgia, and for many that’s classic-PoP. They want to play zones and do quests that they already know so they can feel a degree of mastery. If they wanted to venture into the unknown and have to figure it out there are plenty of more modern games they could do it in. Doesn’t help that the new TLP (offering more of the nostalgia they crave) announces and launches at the same time.

IMO, the fault largely lies with the quality of expansions from GoD through PoR. GoD itself is confusing with obnoxious mob types throughout, and most of the level 70 cap xpacs are forgettable.

If more players were exposed to what I would call the second golden age of EQ, between TSS and HoT, I think we'd see a lot more people calling for TLPs that start with TSS. Mischief is doing a lot to expose players to these expansions, which is great. I really hope we eventually have a TLP that starts in TSS with an extended unlock schedule so we have time to really enjoy content-packed expansions like Underfoot.

PoP is also usually absurdly long on TLPs, and has lead to boredom/burnout for me every time I try to wait through it. Follow that with GoD and Xpacs like DoN/DoDH/PoR and the dead zone is just painful. I often play TLPs through early xpacs, get my couple months of PoP, then quit the TLP until TSS drops and I return to catch up and enjoy the following series of xpacs.

My take:

PoP is a pretty heavily gated expansion with a lot of flagging, which is required to reach certain zones, which require more flagging etc. It takes not only a certain commitment of time for raiding, but a guild capable of taking down some targets to progress. I've seen many mid-level to casual guilds fall apart, either from the time requirements or they couldn't beat a certain encounter and got blocked on flagging.

PoP also introduces the sharpest change in gear. The difference between non-elemental and elemental / time gear is pretty stark. The casual player really falls behind in this expansion.

Lastly, I think the schedules are such that a new TLP opens up or is in the works and people just want to start over again.

The game turns into single player game. Everyone starts to box multiple characters, cliques also form and the same people duo with their boxes.

There also seems to be a lack of content outside of raids. Outside of Omens of War, there really isn't much to do once you get your expansion gimmick/flags/keys.

I do like the mid game, never played the later game 100+

for me sometime 80+ tlps start to feel more like work than a game to just relax and play which is why Im here in the first place and why I end up quitting

every expansion has aa, some kind of currency and faction to farm, group progression just to get to the good exp zones, the early game is just more casual friendly

I already work 10 hours a day I dont want to have to come home and work a few more hours before raid just so I have the aa people are going to expect me to have or the faction to buy the spells etc

lore wise this is a fantasy game so I can put up with a lot but I tap out at learning some dumb alien language, this is America and them aliens need to learn common tongue

One of the main reasons people replay Everquest is for 'Knowledge'. Everquest is a 'Knowledge game'. Knowing exactly which items to farm, bid DKP on, Min/Max, knowing the best camps to go to etc is part of the fun factor for many.
People feel comfortable replaying things in which they have a set path in which they can optimize their gameplay, without having to learn new things. Some would argue the grandiosity effect of looking more knowledgeable and ''smarter'' than others due to the many times one has done such content. With that being said, progressing through new expansions, brings insecurity and gets people out of their comfortable zone to not look as 'powerful' and knowledgeable as they once were.

This causes drama on TLPs especially with your tanks no upgrading to save for Time.