Here's a crazy idea...

Make some LDoN's based off of Kunark, Velious, and Luclin. Be sure to add rewards that people would be interested in (clickies, spells, augmentations mostly.)

Or they could use the time-inserted content to introduce Mod2 itemization/heroic stats while not directly increasing HEM on itemization, or through mod2 laden augmentations.

best dev comment i've seen in a very long time

Take a look at Reign of Fear expansion to see how they extended the lore of SoL out. You actually fight Luclin in that expansion and she looks fantastic, I loved doing that encounter.

Yeah, some of the progression playerbase has missed all of the good stuff the devs have done over the years. TSS was a brilliant expansion for a wide sweep of the playerbase. If the Drakkin race wasn't so polarizing... and most expacs since have a lot of nods to the past in a good way.

Only problem I have with the post TSS content is that 70-100 is really devoid of population and I am not interested in playing 10 years of content (with parts I can't do with a merc) solo (and I feel there is too much feature bloat in the game, but that is another topic).

It's a catch-22 in that it would be great to have the planned (even if just roughly) Luclin zones that were never finished "restored" and given to progression before PoP. But unless you make a revamp version for live at the same time (which I am in favour of) you are creating an expacs worth of content for an audience that may not want it... unless you actually sell it via marketplace unlocks?

There's all sorts of "meant to be something in the future" spots in the world from original to LoY that could be infilled. More 40-50 zones open at original era would be great, but then you face the "I want classic" vs. "progression in a traditional style" divide. I have no problem with a vastly revised world that works within the scope of the game "parameters" (i.e., gear quality, available stats, mob style and difficulty, look and lore, etc.) but that is not what progression has been so far.

Expansions require significant time and effort. I'm sure they could make something much smaller that players would love to have and would not mind paying for. Like some of the heritage and anniversary stuff they do that is just taken for granted as part of the game. Turn those sorts of efforts into a single zone, special raids that are sold just like ornaments in the market place. Branching off existing content and making things that are not just max level experiences seems to be welcome already.

This really will be the golden test. Does Pantheon get completed? Is it popular enough to justify the cost and time to produce? If so, we'll get more games like EQ in the future - who knows, possibly even a real EQ3, if the profits are there. If it isn't... then we won't. Plain and simple.

18 year old game on life support and you think there will br meaning resources spent to revamp and upgrade? Be thankful of the resources being spent now to keep the life support on.

This could work with :
a) pick with low threshold -- to avoid other people being detrimental to you --
b) Interface tweaking :

• Obviously implied targeting is a necessity (it does not trivialize things it just save lot of "A" key strokes.
• vertical move in third person should be possible
• gamma should not be so bad (even in inkie form i see nothing in Neth Lair and i see nothing either with acumen),
• click to tell/invite from the guild roaster window
• click to search an item in the bazard

c) Downtime : make/hp regen in "rested" mode should increase linearly, this would imply a mana pool of M is restored in time sqrt(M) -- ie at time T mana restored is something like (sum_{i <= T} alpha * i) which is of order i^2.

d) Lower significantly the repop timer of mobs related to quest, camping 1-2 hours is ok, camping a week is not.

e) allow long duration non combat buffs (>3mn) to be casted from a separated set of gems. You may decide that dmg shield is combat or haste is ... Alternatively low level duration of stat buf could increased or group buff could be introduced at low level. Shaman life from 30 to around 50 is exhausting.

f) clean up the quest mess, i remember starting a quest at level 8 with dr00d hobbit, i ended having to do stuff in N karana then i had to kill thing in FP sewers, then something else and the reward with total crap.

g) Make tradeskill a bit less a time and money sink, just leveling alchemy i can cover the server need for potions for months.

ctrl+shift click an item to search for it in the "Bazard"

I mean they sorta did this when hey revamped the difficulty in the TLP raids. To a lesser extent

Heh I think you are being overly optimistic...

Prathun said "Make sure to add some time / cash to the budget for training! Months and months of training.
There are only a handful of people in the world that know how to work on modern EverQuest and it takes quite a while to get up to speed. "
We will make sure to include money for your training Prathun. Some of the choices the team has made has made it almost impossible to find groups on the regular servers with all the "Classic servers" you have made let alone finding buffs. Great Job! With the time you spend fixing the classic servers you could almost create 4 additional new zones for the new expansion.

If I (or anyone else on the Design team) am going to be making the actual zones themselves, let's swap out the word months in "months of training" and replace it with years. We'd need to be schooled, literally, in digital art and level design. If you're talking about filling a zone with content, we can do that np! But someone else would still need to create the zone geometry, and the cost in design and art time would come at the cost of something else, and... in our experience... new content that tries to fill a niche that already exists largely goes unused.

Pffft, give me a few days in sure I could pick it up nps.

Making a new expansion to fit into lower level slots is a lose/lose proposition. If you stock it with must-have items (for that level), some people will whine that players only go to the new zone and the rest of the server is empty (similar to what we see now with one or two zones being the "best" exp spots, so nobody wants to fight anywhere else). If you don't stock it with must-have gear (or give an outrageous exp bonus), players might go once to see it, but they'll never go back because there are more productive ways to spend their time.

Months? Years? You do realize that us 30 and 40 somethings who wprked in level design and collision coding are still alive, right? Are you trying to say you guys have lost the tools you used to have to create levels with? How do you make expansions now? 90s era level designers were among the more common (and commonly paid) employees when i was working at EA. Often drafted into level design from the game tester pool with no formal education in game design at all.

Learning how to use a level-design tool, and being able to create a good level, are 2 very different things!

Sure, they probably could create some architecture(or landscape) after a few months, but getting vague stuff like "game-flow" and inter-connectivity right and still make it look and feel like a "place" rather than a "maze", do take some experience and know-how.

I'd settle for not putting INT on Warrior planar armor in classic...forget a new zone, how about itemization updates.

Or would that take a 5 million budget too?

zzzzz