Is there any prog. servers with basically no boxing, no tutorial zone, and no POK?

Tutorial opening at PoP is fine. Not necessary, but fine.

Tutorial opening at PoP with the later tuned gear, as it did on Phinny, when the "Newbie armor" was all set to PoP era doesn't add up as it makes the "newbie armor" obsolete the first day you can do the quests on the server. That]'s a waste of good content.

Either the tutorial armor needs to be era-set differently (either older version of armor for PoP and a few expacs, then the better stuff or the whole tutorial set even GoD) or the Newbie armor needs to be re-era set to Luclin (even Velious) to make it worthwhile for a time.

Agnarr... it would be ideal if the later armor came in after GoD and PoP era newb armor basically was a fixture/right of passage of playing on the server. Also, it's probably way less dev work to set Gloomingdeep to GoD unlock than it is to reflag all the quests for Newbie Armor. If it is easy to reset the era of the newbie armor back a few expacs... then do that and leave current version of Gloomingdeep.

I used to love the old newbie zones. There are usually 30-40 people at peak in the tutorial on phinny. Although that sounds a lot splitting them to a zone for each race would be too sparce so it is likely a good thing.

The rewards are maybe too good though. I'm still using all of the tutorial gear in the mid 30s (apart from the weapons) on my first chars on Phinny. Much of the fun used to be upgrading gear, now it's pretty hard until really high levels to swap any of the tutorial armour. There's little chance of making any money from low to mid smithing/tailoring etc either which some people enjoy, AC only items really don't compare.

A lot of people have alts. The tutorials really don't make since other than to give everyone good armor.

The problem is they should have those armor quests in the starting zones equivalent to the ones in the tutorial. Basically most people go to the tutorial for the armor and then all the other zones become obsolete which is a shame as most of them look and feel much better than the tutorial zone. The tutorial zone is just a crammed zone in some caves.

Everfrost, Greater Faydark, etc. those zones are pretty nice.

If Everquest wants a tutorial fine, but why not give some incentive to people to explore their starting city areas at level 1 or close to level 1? Why not spread the wealth of incentives for various zones? I just don't think it's setup very well. What I think they should have done was make the 'tutorial zone' an actual 'tutorial' with a FEW special armor peices for 'special slots' where they could 'group' for those. Then have the tutorial guy direct them to go to their starting city to find 'more armor quests'.

If the above is to hard, then why not just pull most of the armor quests from the tutorial except maybe 2-3 peices and have the rest come from their starting city areas? I know there are armor quests in the starting cities; in classic there was less armor quests, but there were some.. Then after that they introduced more I believe in Luclin. The other day I did some armor quests in the Oggok area, and I did some in the tutorial, but to me it doesn't make since that everything becomes obsolote by doing the same armor slot quest in the tutorial..

I don't think people would avoid their starting areas if the tutorial only had a few special slot armor quest peices.. I'm just saying they should have put more thought into it, and it's not to late; particularly on progression servers.

The whole point is that by the time the tutorial enters the game, there are not a ton of new players, so it's better to concentrate 10-20 in one zone than have 2 here, 2 there, and 2 somewhere else. By the time PoP rolls around and the tutorial opens, the newbie zones are pretty empty already and have been for some time.

We don't need no stinking tutorial. By the time it opens people already know how to play. It's only good for twink gear. We don't need PoK either. 4-hour group buffs are not conducive to team play, because you no longer need that cleric/shaman/chanter in your group, just get the buffs in PoK and head out with your max dps group and OOG healer.

I say get rid of the Sol Ro armor quests and come up with something better. Give us a reason to play the old dungeon content.

There are some interesting, if not radical asks in this thread. I think asking for simple might allow it to happen in time to benefit Agnarr (and all servers that follow).

Simple is separate "Newbie armor" era from tutorial with good armor era.


My personal thought remains that Agnarr does not need the tutorial, so setting the tutorial to GoD era is the easiest fix.

How is anyone going to do PoP with no PoK? You can't progress without the quest givers, you can't get spells or tomes without PoK, and you can't even get to PoTranq without PoK. It makes no sense.

Or is what you really want a Luclin-locked server?

PoK is for the most part unnecessary. I'm sure you could easily come up with answers to your own questions without much effort.

The real sticky part is the portals, because after awhile using boats and begging other players for ports gets tiring. I would make a new hub zone, but access to the portals would require some levels, faction and some coin. Always good to keep the newblets drooling.

As others have pointed out, old world newbie zones usually are barren once Luclin opens up on the server. By that point, there are many different places to level up characters. Even on Phinigel where the population is far larger than other servers, by the time Luclin opened up, most of the newbie zones had maybe a group in each zone during non peak US times.

The game has always been top heavy in levels. At least the tutorial zone is a central location where all people can level up new characters instead of spreading everyone out.

1. Many old world spells are obtained in PoK.
2. PoK is needed for PoP progression flagging.
3. PoK is a central location where everyone hangs out for buffs since the buff timer doesn't count down there.
4. Many trade skill vendors.
5. This is where anniversary events are located.
6. Many quests run through PoK.

That's just off the top of my head. PoK has always been a huge travel hub for the game, it doesn't make sense to get rid of it.

Have you ever actually played through PoP?

The entire expansion revolves around PoK. You have to go see NPC's in PoK constantly as you are doing progression. There are probably 50 other quests where you need to either talk to POK NPC's or buy items that aren't sold anywhere but in PoK. Without PoK, you can't get your 61+ spells anywhere, you can't make any of your group or raid armor, you can't complete quests like Aid Grimel series.

They could create an alternate way of accessing potranq and move the several hundred npc's that are critical for PoP to work properly into potranq, but if you think they will do that you are nuts. PoP was designed around PoK, they aren't going to redesign the expansion for a few players that don't want to deal with easy travel.

if your only concern is to remove ease of travel you just have to remove the books to PoK. That would be simple

Yep!

And the net result would be...more wizards/druids hiding in /role or /anon because they don't want to deal with incessant tells from broked***s asking for free ports from BFE zones like Qeynos.

Great use of dev time.

People say they want the nostalgia of playing a hard game, but as soon as they've leveled one toon up enough to have spare plat, they never make another alt that doesn't have 5ac 55hp rings, decent weapons, and close to a full set of class appropriate gear.

The gear isn't that special, it's just that classic EQ and Kunark offered few "upgrades" that weren't utter trash from mobs.

Tutorial or not, at that point in the game people twink and PL solo to crush through until about level 20. After that groups pick up.

Agnarr is what you want to go through it a few times with multiple toons since the exp will be good enough to level 3-4 50's before Kunark. YOu just need to focus getting all the toons you want to like 30 before PoP launches so the tutorial doesn't open on you and POK will be closed. That way the starting zones will be obsolete because you already did them on your toons.