Why don't people like the game post POP?

Most TLP players (actual players, not krono farmers), are looking for a predictable experience, a comfy food players go to where there's no surprises. Trying to figure out new zones or mechanics is not part of that.

It has nothing to do with the expansions themselves, OOW-DoN-DoD-TSS are objectively better expansions than classic, with much better graphics, better tuning, more dynamic raids, etc. But people won't try the expansions because it is outside of the experience they remember.

People sometimes call it nostalgia, but I don't think it is just nostalgia. It is about players wanting an extremely predictable experience.

It's a human characteristic to not stray much from a known path, the unknown comes with dangers. Homesickness is an evolutionary mechanic, an emotional distress signal to bring you back onto a known path, to reduce risks associated with exploration. It's not just EQ, many gamers will stay within one game genre, within one game even, choosing the same type of character every time, for decades. Statistics show many people buy a console just to play 1 game. It's their comfy food.

FROM MY UNDERSTANDING the og Planes of Power elemental planes and time had very bad balancing issues and nor was it complete at the time, plane of time wasn't even an instance back then and this had people unhappy. This was around the time World of Warcraft launched as well. og Gates of Discord then releases and it was one of if not the most unbalanced expansion ever released and unless you where a bis raider you pretty much got ran over in the easiest content and it was like this the whole expansion, even the end boss Tunat wasn't defeated until after Omens launched. Gates of Discord was the final nail in the coffin for a lot of players and was the expansion that people quit to move onto og World of Warcraft.

TLPs are made for boomers to relive former glory and for most there was no glory to be had in og Gates of Discord
Also people do the 8hrs ixt/anuek/goat Autisim but nobody really wants to deal with any of that at the end of the day. It also didn't help that Daybreaks answer to this was to have them as one time spawns in a six day lockout instance.

It's simple. People WOULD love the newest expansions but Everquest, Daybreak, Darkpaw, etc did not do enough to modernize the game the right way. The amount of work to get "caught up" and the fact that 54 man raids are required in modern MMO history is absurd. Now, don't get me wrong, I think there should be 54 man raids, but the fact that there is not a smaller version of the raids for more casual raiders/friends is what keep people from continuing to play as expansions come out.

New TLP's mean a rush of players, easy recruiting, and plenty of people to talk with. As expansions come out, you lose a few players each time, less people playing to find replacements, and the game becomes a recruiting simulator for guilds more then a progression focused guild. As expansions come out, 10 raiding guilds merge into 7, then 3, then 1-2 by the time it is close to live, IF it guilds survive at all. Also when you do get someone interested, you have to devote weeks to getting them caught up and raid ready (Epic, clickes, AA's, DoN missions, Omm trials, Ancient spells, etc)

Games like WoW and FFXIV and countless others, a new expansion comes out and you use NOTHING you had previously outside of it being for cosmetics. Each expansion FEELS like a new TLP because you start on the same footing at other returning players and you are not far behind current subbed players.

Simple fact is, people would love the next expansions and exploring them, but Daybreak does nothing to ensure that players stick around to explore them together. Guilds that have been around for 10+ years on live are because the leadership of those guilds are awesome and find ways to keep people interested, not because Daybreak has made their life easier. They know they get 1 expansion a year, new raids, new spells, new aa's, and maybe one small quirk per expansions. Nothing changes. For those few guilds that have stuck together, it's because that is what they like and they are fine with it. For the other 80% of the playerbase, they rather play a new TLP because they can't stand their running in place for an entire year waiting on something "new".

Early EQ was simple & easy to play compared to what came later. Get group to exp. Tank & spank raid boss with 1-2 simple AE attacks.

A raid wouldn't fail cause 1 person forgot how to pass the mechanic check unlike later on. It's not fun to fail raids over & over cause the weakest link screwed up.

It's a vidja game. Should be simple & relaxing to play not complicated & hard.

Oh yea this too, people just wanna sit down and push one button
Classic EQ - push one button
Classic WoW - push one button
What people HOPED Pantheon was going to be - push one button

Once it goes from one button to two buttons people start to lose interest and once it goes from two buttons to two buttons and you have to move left half go right then the raid wipes then people really start to lose interest.

This is generally how it goes and now let me tell you a story. You see the last time our guild raided Luclin we had two monks. One with the best monk weapons and one with a modrod. The monk with the modrod out DPSed the monk with the best monk weapons everytime because the monk with the modrod pushed both his buttons while the monk with the best monk weapons only wanted to push one button.

For real! Asmongold talked about this. Peak WoW was classic. Why? Cause mmo players suck. We want an easy game that's new player friendly. The game gets very inaccessible when you gotta download an add-on to track the 10+ mechanics of a raid boss. That is if you configure it right. You shouldn't need GINA Triggers in EQ. It's just a bonus if you want to beat bosses efficiently.

EQ was not a hard game. All you had to do was dodge random high level pathers in outdoor zones & pull only 1 mob at a time. That causes 99% of deaths in EQ. The other 1% are freak accidents.

Old EQ raiding boiled down to debuff mob, refresh junk buff on dispel, swap tank on death touch, heal AE damage, & cure AE dot. Then kill boss before healers OOM. If you can do just 2 of those things for any fight, you'll beat every raid boss classic to velious.

Raiders always try to say this...
It has nothing to do with difficulty. It has to do with the vast amount of time that is required. When I was in high school or my early 20's playing 16 hours a day was nothing. Now I put in 3 hours a night, people don't want to spend every waking moment playing the game or making sure they have the keys and flags... most players i would wager are 40+ and have a life.

It has nothing to do with the above , it has to do with the fact DBG launches a new server around the time a server hit's POP or shortly afterwards.

This then has a ripple effect that kills off the current server and the cycle start's over. If there was no new server's launched yearly , this issue wouldn't be as sever.

The problem with TLP's is the server's and character's are disposable due to the yearly cycle.

Heck, I quit playing a monk in the old days, when Kunark weapons came in. You have to remember, EQ was (unhealthily) larger than life in the good old days. It literally put gaming addiction, virtual property values on the map for the common masses!
I remember spending hours daily playing, and then hours on the forums for monks.

- We first had an ezboard forum (moderator was a quiry guy with handle as Q), then we moved to the short -lived The Dojo, then finally to monkly-business.

We took EQ so so seriously, it wrecked many of our lives; It was addictively magical in-game. Out of game it was nasty on server forums.

I think WoW took EQ to the "common man" so to speak, but this isn't about WoW.

I distinctly remember feeling ambivalent about PoK but ended up loving it. Initially it took away the feeling of the "bigness" of the lands!

Also, advances like social media (heh), alongwith severe RL price many of us "hard-core" addicts ended up paying, amongst other things lead to people moving on.

Having said that, I always thought EQ2 was the biggest mistake -- Wish money was ploughed back in to make EQore amazing...

I do believe though, giving /gems as a solution to people complaining about downtimes being too long, is, on hindsight, a case study of a solution which doesn't recognise the actual problem.

Nope, I'm a Boomer and I really want to know where all those other boomers are. Fact is that I started the game back in early 2000 I was almost always the oldest guy in a crew and the other boomers tended to drop out for the latest and greatest like DaoC and what have you. There'd be no long queue on opening day if TLP's were what you're claiming here. EQ has always been primarily populated with late X ~ early Millennials and would have sunset a long time ago if it depended on boomers for support. You can "Okay" me all you want but that just proves my point since you ain't a boomer and yet here you are playing and whining

"boomer" is just slang for "old guy" now, nobody cares what year you were born in

And 2+2=5 I suppose

Zoomers consider 30 to 40+ to be boomers now but do please understand that they are REALLY not good with numbers.

Wouldn't that be mostly gen alpha?

The reason is because the overworld and the leveling experience is what makes people even care about everquest in the first place. Planes of power and later expansions remove that and try to force people to care more and more about raiding and grinding the same zones over and over, which is not what anyone actually wants to do. What actually makes everquest fun is just leveling up in the world with other noobs and trying to make it to max level, THEN you raid or go out into the world and try to farm stuff. Once the leveling/world part is removed there isn't much reason to play this game, is there?

Is that why the non-raider community on live outnumbers the raiders? This entire statement is not based on reality at all. The game is more casual-friendly than it ever was and the group content heavily outweighs the amount of raid content. Even in the "middle" eras where EQ raiding is at its prime the group content is vast. You have large open-world zones, dozens of rewarding quests, lots of items to farm, etc.

And how can you even begin to say that people don't want to be in the same zones over and over? That's literally what TLP re-rollers do every year with the exact same leveling pathing every 12 months. There's a reason why blackburrow, unrest, crushbone, seb, mm, solb, hole have multiple picks. Everyone goes there.

People love spellslots. abilities and utilities, but when performing in basic combat requires multibinds and a half dozen hotbars, we've lost track of things.

I think the original devs had it right with the 8 spell slots, they just didn't know what to do with melee classes or resource regeneration (and 20+ years later we somehow still haven't figured that out)

That keeps learning a character relatively simple. To some degree, having enough abilities that you need to learn content is reasonable.... hail an NPC, trade an item, follow a line on your map... sure. But when you have to use 3rd party sites and download stuff out of game to setup audio alerts that tell you when to push a predefined set of macro keys, you really wonder why people quit?