Why don't people like the game post POP?

I LOVED PoP! I used to go around and charm with my enchanter, before they nerfed the damage mobs do while charmed. It was sooo much fun! I also thought OoW was a really fun expansion. GoD was way too hard. I think that got released, with the intention of a level cap raise, that didn't happen.

Some of post-PoP is pretty clever and fun (HoT in particular)...but most expansions are too bland, too many AA's, too many clicks-per-minute, and too much statflation.

One of the reasons Mischief stands out is that the LFG window was very active even in DoN (when I took a break). I had never seen this on the previous TLPs I have played, and Oakwynd's population is struggling already and we are. 2 weeks away from Luclin. It was bad already but the depot fiasco has made it worse (by 0.22% heh).

On mischief, I started a shaman well into PoP, and most of his exp post 40 was from pug LDoNs once LDoNs opened.Can you believe it, people still send me tells on Oakwynd about doing LDoNs with me in pugs (Meleegibson, shaman)

For me, I drop off EQ when it becomes a whack-a-mole of keeping two or three hotbars for numerous abilities, clickies and whatnot.

While I do agree classic is over simplistic in the sense you press a button here and there, post TSS EQ is a typing test.

Maybe it was the whole socializing aspect of EQ which also dies off as expansions progress, maybe the statflation is overwhelming. But mainly, the "casual" ( whatever your preferred definition is for this) playerbase has nothing on the table and they leave

Socializing only stops when you are boxing raids. If players want to pay that type of money let em. I still think the introduction of Krono has hurt EQ more than improved it. Casuals just want to see progress, real upgrades that improve their powercurve. This is why FV was so popular as well as Mischief. I remember someone talking about FV when it open and I believe it was Brad. The reason they did 1 character was to help with the social aspect.

GoD was bad because you had to be raid geared to really do something in the expansion. PoP, GoD, etc. were to raid oriented and needed to provide group gear players more avenues of improvement. WoW was very friendly to new players and was a fresh start to casual MMO players. EQ2 was pretty casual as well. Everyone needs a carrot to chase but when there is no carrot what are they chasing? Even if they joined an established raiding guild they would more than likely be in the negatives of DKP and forever try to get to the top for a specific item at some point.

As a raider when I do focus, nothing is more irritating than items not dropping. My team never seen an Ifir Dagger, as a rogue and player that is bad. We lost the other 3 rogues at the time as they either changed mains, rerolled, or moved onto another game. First time in Time we got 2 of those trash daggers. Yet, rogues chase item prior to time was the Ifir Dagger. Just think if the tank weapons did not drop, you would not progress. You also have those tanks who bank DKP to blow in time that can also hurt progression.

PoP is a good expansion but exposed weaknesses in EQ.

There are changes with the intuitiveness of the game that take place after PoP which make it overwhelming and undesirable to new and returning players beyond just the difficulty of raid encounters or prevalence of boxers. I created my own 3 box on Vaniki a few months back and noticed these immediately:

1. Gloomingdeep, the tutorial zone, is boring and lifeless. There is a task system in place which is foreign to anyone who has only played through PoP and feels like a poor man's World of Warcraft.
2. Mobs seem to have huge, convoluted loot tables. It was not unusual for a mob to drop 6-10 items, and I had to sift through them all to see which were vendor trash, quest items, reagents, etc.
3. Experience is fast. So fast, in fact, that I could easily go 20 levels without visiting a spell vendor. When I finally did go to PoK, there were literally a hundred spells available. I had to read through all of them to figure out which were even worth purchasing.
4. Defiant armor works as a catch-up mechanic, but is generic and boring. It completely outclasses any named drops in the zones I leveled in, so I felt forced to use it even though I didn't want to.
5. Mercs are extremely powerful, at least at low level. Because the 1-40 population was relatively sparse, I felt compelled to use them in order to level with any efficiency. The other players I did find already had mercs of their own as well.

None of these aspects relate to end game raiding, tanking, AA's, glyphs, abilities, etc., but rather muddy up the experience from the moment you roll onto a server with later progression. WoW has some of the modern EQ aspects, but it's all much cleaner and more player-friendly. For this reason, I enjoy EQ up to LDoN and WoW Classic otherwise.

Others have mentioned this but there is a "barrier to entry" to join a raid guild after PoP. If you are not in a raid guild, you aren't doing much. You need not only the levels but the AAs and gear. It is more so for tanks and melee than casters but still applies. Then you have flagging depending on the expansion.
Mischief mitigated some of this by having raid level armor/items available in the bazaar. I think that is a big part of its continued success.

Agreed.

One of my big things is that I just don't want to have to schedule my life around raiding with other people. I'm not against raiding at all. I just don't want to be beholden upon a schedule for a game to accomplish anything.

I want to login when I am in the mood to paly the game, and accomplish something in however much time I have available. I feel like if I don't raid, then I am just wasting my time playing EverQuest in modern EQ.

This is one of the reasons why I love Lord of The Rings Online so much. I can experience 90% of the game solo or in a group with out feeling like I am handicapped because I don't do the raid content. EQ went so heavily raid-based somewhere along the way that it just feels to me like it's a raid-or-dont-play kind of game. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it feels to me.

Then there are the stats. You need a graduate degree in EverQuest to understand the novels' worth of data listed on every piece of gear. I feel like I need to create a spreadsheet to figure out what gear I should be wearing. Add on top of that the fact that there are a million different abilities, spells, AAs, clickies, etc to the point where you need a hundred hotbars to put everything on the screen, AND you have no idea which one you should be clicking at any given time.... ok... maybe not a million, but pretty close.

Rather simple.

GoD was too hard for them. GoD is one of the best expansions this game has and people were big babies about it.

Now, as to why i don't like the game post OoW?

Stat inflation.

I believe dodh or don or some nonsense after oow the stats on items goes from like 200hp/mana baseline area to like 400s with excessive amounts of heroic stats They introduce insane crazy amounts of worn effects.

The basics of attack power/mana regen/hp regen + spell focus effects was fine.

They inflated it to crazy numbers and it just isn't fun trying to manage items with insane amounts of stats. They never put it in check and did a stat squish they just continued to spiral.

Then they started trying harder to mirror WoW. It became a tedious game that was far less sandbox and much more linear with tiers.

PoP/GoD/LDON introduced that linear style progression and it was cool the way they did it with lore but the entire game evolved into that each expansion and got away from the concept of exp camps.

You are simply incorrect. PoP has basically the worst statflation in the history of the game. OoW to PoR is pretty mild. It goes from ~300 to ~400 HEM across 4 expacs (originally spanning 2 years).

Frank, you are wrong, per usual.

POP is pretty standard,

Attack is still capped at 250.
Back then it was called Vengeance. Much cooler.
FT is still capped at 15 unless you have AA I believe (i don't caster much).

Beyond OOW it becomes unmanageable.

Evolving gear yuck
too many worn effects - yuck
The stats go from simple accumulating of attack power/FT/and appropriate spell focus effects to having way to much nonsense to manage. They start putting clickies on everything for AA unlocks, YUCK.
And yeah after OOW pushing 400+ is excessive stat inflation. They should have ran a stat squish to keep numbers in the 200s.

Yes POP is a the biggest singular jump for the first 5 or 6 expacs but it is certainly not stat inflation. (at least until like TSS or some crazy expansion where stuff gets really inflated.

Stats are more then worn numbers. There are way to many things to effectively manage.

What? That's literally all they are. Before you ended your post with this statement you talked about attack stat, mana Regen stat, evolving gear which the evolving part is stats, worn effects which are all things that alter statistical numbers, and HEM 400+ which is another number?

There are so many things wrong in this post that I don't even know where to start.

All those worn effects existed in Luclin and PoP.

Those clickies used to not stack and not give AAs. Or did you not know that? You tried to show off your knowledge of the original attack name, but don't remember how the clicks worked originally? The AA conversion occurred many years after.

The stat jumps from Kunark to Velious are horrible. Half the BIS gear in Kunark was group gear which may or may not had above 0hp. Compare that to BIS in Velious with 100? Lol. Luclin to POP went from topping out at 125hp to 250hp. Literally double the hme values. How is that standard? PoP also basically introduced mod2s and all those secondary stats like avoidance, dot/dd/melee shielding, strikethrough, etc. And Isn't VT basically known for the clickies? Like that's one of the most notable things from that expansion.

You seem to lack the historical knowledge of when things actually entered this game and became mainstream. News flash: It wasn't OOW. It happened well before it.

Some people like the complexity that is added to the game. Not everyone enjoys mindless hours of grinding at one xp camp where you stand up, hit autoattack or cast a spell and sit back down. Its extremely boring for others. There is no person that is in the wrong here. There are people who have the capacity to understand and appreciate the complexity that is added to the game, and there are those who lack that capacity and simply enjoy the dull mindless stuff. Nothing wrong with that.

It's really amazing you doubled down on being wrong and then added more wrong information. OoW-PoR is the LEAST stat inflation in any stretch of 4 expacs.

PoP doubled the HEM, had mod2s (later becomes heroics), has an abundance of regen/atk items and introduces some of the most powerful clickies (slows sticks/songblade).

You are absolutely wrong and it's hilarious.

Underfoot is really fun and the Mischief ruleset is so good I haven't been able to bring myself to play any TLP since after playing most of them before.

• GoD was too hard for them.
  • It was for anyone not raid geared
  • No content built towards their style of play
  • I loved GoD but only because I was geared for it

• GoD is one of the best expansions this game has
  • GoD is one of my favorites but I do not believe it is the best expansion

• and people were big babies about it.
  • They had every right to be upset with it because group content was null.
  • Two new MMOs came out one took EQ's title of being the best
  • Verant/Sony/DPG/Etc needed to focus on the UX

EverQuest is a great IP with some very bad leadership and design choices over the years. I am not pointing fingers at those who remain. They are just in maintenance mode. Sony did a ton of damage to EQ, SWG, and other titles over the years.

PoP was new and exciting and even in a casual guild back in the day, we had fun XP grinding in Plane of Disease but over all it was way too confusing with all the flagging. There were a lot of weak expansions behind PoP.

Gates was a rough expansion but it was also a dead stick in terms of gearing. 2.0 epics and augs are probably the best thing out of GoD. Add an agent of change at the port in for slaughter that let's you open up an instance for each of the MPG trials. My guild absolutely hated the run between trials.

Omens introduced heroic stats and it was a tale of haves and have nots. I remember being extremely well geared entering Omens and just getting wrecked until I got some heroic stamina. I get that they needed a way to combat over gearing but they could have eased into it with Gates so you didn't just go from powerful to pwned. Here started the deathspiral of the 70 slog.

Dragons of Norrath
Basically boiled down to two Dragon Raids weekly and then raiding previous expansions. No new AA's. It was mainly just a boring slog.

Depths of Darkhollow was a good expansion in my opinion. Lots of questing and clickies to be camped. The raiding while slightly annoying due to time gated encounters was pretty good and challenging. The gear was slightly off base almost in the way classic gear was. The newest gear often didn't have the right heroic stats especially for healers. The expansion was rough if you weren't geared for it.

Prophecy of Ro - No new AA, Yelinak TLP is about to enter this expansion. My main has about every AA there is and I'm taking the tradeskill AA's to keep from losing them.

Our Yelinak guild was very strong going into PoP and we flagged all the way to Time and cleared it in a week as a casual guild. Near the end of PoP we had lost 25%-30% of the guild due to attrition including the guild leader. I also took a break in PoP and only came back at the end of it. I almost didn't come back.
LDoN, we lost another 20%. Gates we lost another 20%. Omens we lost another 20%. Dragons another 30%. We were 120+ raiders going into PoP and by the end of Dragons we were down to 30 core raiders.
DoDH we seem to have stabilized somewhat. Bolstered sadly by cast offs from other failed guilds. We have a strong core so we may just stay afloat.

5 years is a long time for people to commit to this kind of journey. I honestly didn't think I would be around this long (20 months) and it's mainly because of the people I raid with. I've seen multiple TLP's to PoP and every time the story is roughly the same. These expansions just get too long in the tooth and boredom sets in. They need to be 4 weeks for normal, 6 weeks for level increases. Double loot, Double XP, Double Faction, Double Alt Currency and I would advocate keyless entry.

I think if people are enjoying the content and it's coming quick and entertaining then they'll find themselves still playing in the later expansions and maybe the mold of classic to PoP breaks.

in short, PoP and later expansions made EQ totally different game.
I have no intention of playing the different game.

I don't identify with this, but I think your post represents a significant portion of the playerbase that's worth expanding on.

Exactly this, although my schedule would be more aggressive than yours. We know what attrition looks like when expansions release too slowly, but I don't think we've seen, or may ever see a "too fast" server that leaves behind anywhere nearly as many players than it burns out.

Personally I would love to see a ~1 year cycle for classic-to-live, roughly 4 weeks between level cap increases and 2 weeks per expansion.