15th Vet reward

Is there an ongoing joke I'm not aware of that whenever you don't agree with a developer decision it is a "slap in the face?"

I don't joke in here. And frankly it is a slap. I'm over 60 years old, and like everyone in here, I have an opinion.

Why is SOE discontinuing Vet Rewards?

Because they know best what we want.

You can still visit old freeport in a monster mission: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=3242

You can visit it in a zone explorer, it doesn't have the npcs or quests or anything.

15th vet reward should be a single target coth. Useable once per day.

More likely, just because they ran out of good ideas for them.

He means retired from working not from playing EQ. He's talked about that before.

1) Freeport (or any original town) housing district. Tons of work, but so cool.
2) An extra trophy tribute slot. If you say that gives power, you're right - many of the vet AAs do.
3) 72 hour reuse ability to instantly revive a merc at full hp/mana.
4) 72 hour reuse ability that randomly picks from any model in the game and illusions it on you for 30 minutes. Some of them excluded due to size, or they're shrunk to reasonable levels.
5) Swarm pets that consist of newbie monsters like decaying skeletons, orc peons, and rats. Useless and does no damage.
6) I'm bored of thinking

Point is, there are lots of good ideas. Its a matter of getting the time to make them, and if they are not game breaking.

I'm not saying there aren't good ideas, at least what we consider good ideas out there. There are just none that the Devs thought of and are willing to do.

Of your list, 2 & 3 would be cool. 4 would not be possible as you currently have it worded since it would require that all models in the game be in the global file which they are not; but you could easily change it to be any illusion or any model that can appear in that zone. 5, I would change it so that they have a super high chance to hit; so while they might just hit for like 1-20 hp per hit, they wouldn't be all misses; which practically would still be useless but technically would not be.

Precisely.

Veteran reward was one of the few things that I looked forward to every year.

I think it speaks volumes on what the SOE brass thinks of Everquest 1 when EQ2 gets an entire zone for this years veterans awards and we get nothing.....

Sounds to me like a certain team at Sony is pouting.

They decided that vet rewards are not fun going forward.

EQ will be in Sunset mode in about 2 years with this kind of pattern of cut back (i.e. expansion volume to vet AAs). It will probably conveniently coincide with the EQN release.

EQ has been dying since release, Chicken Little.

If SOE is even around in 2 years. The way Sony is losing money & cutting costs who knows at this point.

The naysayers were wrong for 15 years but sadly eventually they're going to be right & SOE seems to be doing everything in their power to usher EQ into it's grave. I think they'll come to regret that decision when Next doesn't do as well as they'd hoped if it even sees the light of day with the way Sony is going lately.

Asheron's Call and Ultima Online, two of the big three MMORPGs that released in the same general time frame, haven't had expansions in years and they are still running and getting updates. It is very cheap to keep an MMOG running. The only way EQ is going to suddenly die off is if SOE files for chapter 11.

EQ will eventually get Kelefane'd, but I expect that to happen once we've seen massive server merges, no expansions in years, and infrequent patches.