Not the community i remember.

It starts with you leaving your group. Glad you did that. Not everyone is a complete , but many people ease their conscious by just "following along". It happens more often in raiding guilds where the "phat lewt" is on the table.

Be the good guy, tell everyone it's a bad idea. If they persist just leave.

Krono farmers from the US are much more aggressive and confrontational than chinese plat farmers from the past. They're adult men behaving like 14-year-olds.

Krono farmers from the US, are completely different from Chinese farmers who pretty much left people alone. Krono farmers will steal your camp, they will train you, they will play during primetime, they will take over the best camps and they will threaten you. That's also why so many more people are bothered by krono farmers than they were by chinese plat farmers.

This whole power tripping from krono farmers and power guilds on TLP has gotten out of hand since phinny.

Casuals have no place anymore on TLP, the behavior is cut throat. Even though it's a silly game and old content, many on TLP are on some kind of power trip for whatever reason.

There should be a casual TLP imo. So people can actually relax while playing, which is the whole point of gaming, to relax instead of aggressive elitist behavior in a 18 year old game, which makes no sense.

Not sure what game you were playing. I raided back in 1999-2004 as a cleric and that was before I was even a teenager. Never noticed any of those behaviors...and I was a sensitive kid so I would have picked up on those things.

Are you explaining yourself in this post how you were back in the day? Cause I have never encountered anyone doing what you just described back then. And i played A LOT.

The community today is much more harsher, trollish, and the new breed of Farmers, Krono farmers. Makes all the popular in demand items a pain to get to.

It was far less common then no doubt. So you are are correct.
People do not seem to grasp the concept of scale.

I find that most of the community is just fine. The bad apples stand out though.

The reason your memories of the game are better than now is the people that played in the 90's were an older crowd. The people that finally got to play DnD on a screen instead of paper. Yes we had the 12 year old teenages playing, but the reality is your guild, guild mates, guild leader were mid 20's-30's in the 90's. They were raised with manners and they are now 50-60 and probably are not playing and were are stuck with the former 12'year olds as the new base that have no manners.

Actually, I would have to say that the peak of kill stealing and the taking of "camps" was during the Ragefire server opening. It was absolutely a cesspool. At the same time, it was a lot of fun fighting back lol. Phinigel had a lot less of it, but it still had it's fair share.

I haven't seen much of it on Agnarr incomparison to Ragefire and Phinigel.

I've run into a few bad apples, but my interactions in grouping with folks and the overall community has been very positive. It's my hope that once the server moves out of Classic the "mania" many have experienced the past 4 weeks will have dissipated.

I also hope that many of the "old-timers" who've been away from the game for years and years will stick it out. Things will get better.

back in my day people use to have RESPECT & HONOR & DIGNITY.

Damn kids these days and their dang selfies and pokemans

Its a little bit of Rose Colored Glasses. And I did specifically say PUGs. As guild based groups and raids were fine. In fact the couple of raiding guilds I ran with were quite awesome, even though they were the targets of alot of envy.

But PUGs were competitive. Especially around the 2003-2005 timeframe. That was when PoP came out. It used to be even into Luclin you could use a set of banded and random drops and get regular exp groups. PoP was a little different. You needed to go into the harder stuff to get a few pieces to really boost your stats.

This was just for areas like Nightmare and Innovation. You needed gear to survive these areas. Spell casters needed some of their dropped spells as you progressed (lots of drama over who got the GRW's when they droppped).

I did fine, as I like to believe at the time I was a bit better than average even though EQ was my first MMORPG. Many people I was friends with were not though. Some of them 'drank the koolaid' and got jealous of others. Claiming they had no lives and thus this is why they had better gear.

They wanted to see the harder content but without the gear and the general knowledge of how to use their class in ways outside of their 'comfort zones'. They did not succeed. Even when trying to show them how to succeed they would lash out and claim they're not that hardcore. And we're talking simple stuff we take for granted today, like keeping buffs up, snares up, and so forth. It doesn't take two druids to keep a snare and sow going, especially when Clarity, Clarity 2, KEI, and VoQ are available.

And it wasn't just people I knew, but happened in PUGs alot too. Big stigma against better geared and better practiced players. I didn't see this in raiding guilds obviously. As they filtered those players out. And of course running with them caused friction with others.

You literally had to pick are you 'casual' or are you 'hardcore'. Those who identified as casual claimed that hardcores were such because they didn't have lives outside EQ. Hardcores would sometimes claim casuals were just noobs. And I'm sure you all saw these attitudes creep into other MMOs. But I've seen it as early as PoP in 2003.

You said the Evolution of the Internet is also part of the problem. And you're about 95% right. Its actually cultural and it influences the internet, but the internet community also reflects back and impacts the general culture.

I'm just going to put it simply as going into detail is not just beyond this thread, but beyond the scope of these forums. People generally believe other people are in their way. Try this next time you go to work or the store. Are the people in front of you also going some place, or are they in your way?

We're all guilty of the latter. As decent and polite as we try to be, we're still influenced in some way by the general culture. In game people will get a pang of anger if a stray fire bolt from a mage outside the group snags a mob you pulled. Our first reaction is, 'did he just KS' rather than, 'maybe that was an accident...?"

So I'm actually agreeing with your points. My points are this all started prior to 2005 and closer to 2000 and 1999. Just wasn't a change overnight. It took a minute to cover EQ. And it took a minute to cover other MMOs around that time too, we can't blame WoW for everything. It didn't get ugly until 6-9 months in, halfway through 2005.

Almost every change we've seen in EQ, MMOs, and online in general evolved slowly over time. We could probably go back further to Ultima Online and find "things" that sparked changes. Everyone always talks about PoP being the height of EQ. To me it was the downfall. The Nexus kicked it off and PoK killed it. The vast wide open world was destroyed by creating a single meeting place with raids all a click away. New players started to complain about a host of new trivial things, while old timers talked about waiting an hour for the boat.

I also remember that was the first time I heard of someone playing 24/7 to be the first to hit the level cap. EQ was popular and more and more people were playing. It sounds like your friend was one of those newer people.

Why? He has every right to it, same as you. Pull the rest of the mobs but leave him frenzy. He'll leave after a bit.

Here are some of the things I remember very well when playing from 99-2001 on Fennin Ro.

-Being KS'd half the time in Qeynos Catacombs first couple days of launch.
-Having all my gear stolen in the first month of launch by someone who offered to drag my corpse to the zone line.
-The guy who ran the website that was dedicated to his stories and pictures of him trolling people in game. Intentionally lagging out newb zones with mass corpses, scamming, and training people. (he was ultimately banned at some point long down the road, but the website was hilarious)
-A group pushing my solo mage out of the 2 spawn aviak look out tower camp in Lake Rathe.
-Constant DPS racing in Aviak town in southern karana.
-Groups pushing each other out and DPS racing over the gnoll rooms inside Highkeep.
-Having a group mate get his equip stolen by someone who offered to drag his corpse.
-Non stop trains in SolB and Lguk, with ogre walls set up to prevent people from being able to zone out.
-Not being able to camp manastone, or most of the other valuable Lguk items because of farmers, and even if you did find a camp open it wasn't long before you'd have another group competing. I don't really remember a lot of the valuable SolB loot being discovered yet or well known while I was leveling there.
-Kunark launches and Karnor's and Sebilis being a train/KS fest for a long time.
-People in groups and in raids ninja looting items and running. I remember this being a huge problem.

The list could go on and on. The point is I don't remember this fairy tail land that most people talk about in classic EQ. I started playing on launch day, and leveled up fast. Maybe I was just leveling up with all of the other players going hard and thus why my experience was much more brutal. What I remember was constantly having to be looking over your shoulder making sure no one was going to KS whatever random mob you pulled, or people scamming you, or worried group mates were going to ninja loot an item. EVERY item was valuable back then, so people would race you for mobs that would be considered pointless to kill now. From MY personal experience from 99-2001, phinny and agnarr seem tame to me, or maybe it's just cause I'm on the other side of it now and box so I don't have to worry about these things.

I was 28 back in '99 when I started playing, but was not into end raiding at all. I am 46 now and started on Agnarr playing P99 for some time before.

My generation was down at the 7-11 placing our quarters up on Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Centipede WAITING for our turn to play. I remember Atari having a contest with Kaboom (game with all the bombs) where you could take a polaroid of your high score and mail it to them for a chance to win (cant remember what the prize was). Anyway, I am so old I can't remember what I was getting at here. I will be playing games forever, why stop now.

I suppose we will be playing EQ in nursing homes one day and knocking each other over the head with our walkers because someone stole our FBSS.

The forums may give a very distorted image of a server, Phinny community is nice even if due to a long break i m only 50 now and not rushing to 65.

I considered restarting on Agmar, but honestly i was not up to restart killing polar bears or grouping in BB to grab fangs and the simple idea of hours in Lguk killing the very same mobs for hours was not appealing at all.

On top i m not really wanting to get back to the state where my buffs lasted a few minutes and where constantly refreshing them was just annoying.

On top back in 2015 on phinny my level was above the average one, even if i did not rush to the top, i had not issue to find a group -- even i often was the lower in the group, which is common for healers --- and i never experienced any harrasment or bad attitude.

When i created a toon on Agmar the newbie zone was devastated by twink with a level 50 power levelling and they would not even group.

So i won't play there, i have decent money on phinny and i get group without much problem, even if often i simply solo because i don't have enough time.

I truly hope that Agmar is not as bad as the forum suggest, Phinny was fine, even back in 2015 when Lguk was super busy we never got trained or KS and soloers where just non existant unless they coud find a spot in some less busy pick.

I also remember camping the ancient croc in my mid 20 (he was white) and we took turns or changed pick, there was a wizzie there and he could have KS me easily (shaman dot are slow) and he did not.

On phinny 99% of the people i met back in 2015 were nice, and currently it is the same.

Since i came back i crossed only 3 really nasty players, a mage, a ranger and a lonesome necro. This is very few. And for group i ended up only once in a terrible group, 3 members were totally stupid -- they pulled with 2 afk and me asking to wait for mana since i just did a complete buffing -and cc was afk -- they wiped us almost immediatly because on top it was a massive pull, the 3 dump left but the rogue who was really sorry dragged my corpse and popped a cleric to rez me ...

Ironically i met much later the corpse of the guy who pulled, he as not in my group and the cleric in my group was at first refusing to rez him, finally he reluctanly accepted to do it..

Damn, this post made me feel old!

I dont think Agnarr is this bad! Seriously there's some bad apples, like the guy who charmed Hasten and dropped him in a remote spot so no one could do turn in or kill him to spawn brother Z..... Overall tho i find it is rather the opposite, people are friendly and i know personally im having a great time. Probably the best time since i've rejoined after quitting after OoW/GoD era.

Another person who needs to learn the difference between botting and boxxing...

Good job, don't steal Fbss camp from a poor 50 necro that's farming Kronos on his laptop while raiding on Phinny with his main.

The community is bad because literally half the server is farming Kronos for their mains on Live / Phinny, they don't care about reputation.

Agnarr is tainted, its unkempt. Not sure if it will carry over to Kunark. So far a minor failure in my book. Sad! Don't see much reason to continue to patronize TLP.