Best vs Worst Decisions/Turning Points

Just curious as to what people think were good decisions in the game versus bad decisions. Maybe not even good or bad, just major turning points and how you perceive them.

Some changes are generally just good. Like most expansions. Not all but most. Like Velious and Kunark were awesome. Luclin I wasn't impressed with. Outside of expansions, I like some changes and not others.

I think the best game play decision ever made in EQ was making Iksar a playable race. The newbie quests were pretty sweet as was the starting city.

I think the worst decision was introducing defiant gear. Nothing obsolesced older content more than defiant. It wouldn't be as bad if older equipment and quests had been updated to compete but compare great stuff from before defiant and none of it is worth much.

I'm of mixed emotions about Mercs. I use them to molo but they hurt grouping. At lower and mid levels, without them the game would much more difficult for most classes because of the lack of groups. But when you don't have a group, mercs rock.

What are some decisions you can think of that were in general gameplay that were good or bad?

Let's see...Porting Books is one of the worst...i would also say the Bazaar..if you are going to do that don't make a clunky system like character traders just make an auction house and stream line the process of trading.

Mercenaries is one of the biggest killers of the live game..faceroll content for hours and hours and hours is not a way to attract players.

Defiant gear is also not good for reasons mentioned above.

But the number one issue with the EQ franchise was the bad decisions on direction to go with Everquest 2 and then the resources wasted on Everquest Next. The player base has always been asking for Everquest with updated graphics, UI, animations, etc. and instead the devs always spent massive resources into something else.

The best decision was to make the TLP servers...EQ would be closed down without them...and the improvements made over the years to the TLP server rule sets has been very well received by the player base.

Worst decision is Miragul, followed by POP locked era for the 2 new servers.

Plane of Time and Anguish were examples of raid zones I think they got right.

Gates was where the game started to come off the rails to me. Not so much from the content, but the gameplay where a couple of dark blues could easily flatten you within a server tic. Later expansions just made it worse and started to feel like player vs character vs environment more than anything else. It becomes a button fest and hunting for the right ability simply becomes a chore. (some classes are way easier than others).

Classic - POP is so popular as it still a pretty simple PvE game. There is some really great content post PoP that people sadly never bothered to experience. (we won't talk about some of those level 70 expansions.) .

Instead of mercs, I think they should have embraced boxing and allowed you to set up characters server side with some penalties. For the later game, it would also allow you to return to a more simplified PvE experience. They have already taken baby steps towards this in auto activate abilities. (yea, I know, that's crazy talk)

Oh, and the elevator in POK is another place they went wrong. LOL.