RIP Everquest Travel and other mechanics

This is a non-issue. The venn diagram of folks who care enough about being able to travel around the world at a whim that they are willing to throw money at it and use personas and the folks who normally just leveled up their own druid box so they never had to search for a port are probably pretty close to a circle. There will be plenty of folks out there who find it easier to pay for ports. It's been 25 years. Easing up on the travel issues pre-pop isn't going to kill the game.

So lets play it out. I play a Shadowknight and I'm heading to Chardok. I don't feel like running to Burning Woods. I origin and persona over to a wizard and port to Skyfire. How do I change back to SK?

Its not as useful as you think unless you box / have another porter available.

Close but your group evaluations are off.

I would venture there are 4 buckets of players..

The smallest being.. the Nostalgia Chasers

People who are trying to relive 1999 - very small minority who refuse to live in the present. They would prefer no AOCs, No Picks, corpse runs, no QoL, hell levels, exp that is going to see them die of old age before they hit level 40. This is Team #NoChanges

Then you have the Anti-Boxer/Casual Andy crowd:

Still not a majority but a fair amount of people fall int his category. They still like "family" guilds. They hate the boxers (even small 2boxers). They report people for trains/KS even when they start the fight and lose. They come from PXX and the likes. They lack little fundamental knowledge of EQ. They AFK every 45 minutes for "wife" aggro. They like tradeskilling all the time, find it cool to use banded 3 weeks into the server, Not in a hurry to level but don't mind the exp rates - but won't spend the cash on potions. They do play fashion quest and gobble up store Heroes Forge. Wishes MOTM would go away so they could raid with 24 friends and be cool and clear everything without any actual effort. This is the group looking for free handouts.

Now you leap into the majority...The Modern Day EQ Player

Has a family - doesn't need an in game one. Wants exp fast because they don't want to lose said family and/or job
Wants expansions to move along a little quicker because 7 or 8 clears of TOV/KD/SSRA/VT is more then enough
Glad to see MOTM because it means they have an actual guild of good players
Buys stuff from the store
Probably boxes 1 or 2 extra characters
Enjoys split raiding with guilds as that is how you play this game most efficiently for gearing up. A good mix of boxes/mains means you split more and get more loot and mains have priority.
Knows the mechanics/fundamentals of the game - maybe not a master of all classes but has experienced 3-6 classes at end game levels if not more
Happy to have things like bandoliers/potions/click from inventory/teleporters instead of boats/personas/dragons hoard/tradeskill depot
This group probably wishes the Tower would be disabled for Teek/Tormax. Some out of era stuff is okay but the level 65 tower stuff will ruin some POP slot items.
Solid mix of Degens and normal people in this group

The 4th bucket is just as small as the first bucket...the No Lifer Degen crowd.

The folks who havent logged out in 24 years. They play to farm krono. They don't have real jobs. EQ has destroyed their lives but they are having fun so good for them. They box 64. They probably have a sweat shop running their box crews for them. They wish it was no loot bonuses, no trade gear and they could feed their families with NTOV Vulak sales.

1st is obviously not as small as the 4th, since you can probably count on your hands the number that fit in the 4th, while p99 is populated

what about a class that has gate instead of shadowknight? never looked into personas, do they share a bind location?

Does anyone actually enjoy spending half hour travelling to a zone just to be able to do things?

It's always enjoyable spending a ton of time travelling to a place, get there, and have the group fall apart immediately. /s

Classic EQ was objectively terrible in hindsight. We just didn't know any better.

Terrible bugs, zero semblance of class balance, stats that don't really do anything of value, no mechanics to anything, bad itemization, non-existent end game, server crashes, LDs like crazy, pointless and tedious things to do such as lengthy travel or corpse runs or medding, stamina drain which resulted in dumb crap like drowning or swinging weapons slower, badly designed quests and no tools to assist with keeping track of them, no mounts, even worse pathing (amazingly because pathing still is terrible), no instancing, general toxicity of end game guilds. The list goes on and on and on

2025 TLP should be..........................................
.........................................................................

Expansion UNLOCK server
Opens with up to GoD.

HOWEVER,
you only have classic
you can get items from others who got items from other expansions

how do you unlock other expansions?
gotta do a checklist of things they created.
could be things like spend 3 hours in crushbone
defeat 300 gnolls in blackburrow
doesn't have to kill or quest related too
could be group with 10 different people within xp level range in a selection zones


How'd this come up?
Back in my days GoD was open,
I only had triology pack

I didn't have luxury of PoK fast travel

Point is, just because PoP unlocked doesn't mean everyone had fast travel, not everyone was UP TO DATE with expansions back in the days.

You wouldn't know if you didn't play back in my days.

I swear they should have given you guys your own server....theres always the group that wants the #nochanges. You may actually indeed like that, but as its an opinion, you cannot make everyone happy. I dont like persona's because someone with a fatter wallet can just get that much further ahead instead of through hard work / time spent, but then there is the other argument that some people just dont have the time, etc. Word of wisdom, go with the flow, enjoy the game with your group of friends and play it the way you want to. Thats the joy of playing an MMO You cannot play it for them (kind of...) but you can sure play it for yourself.

P.S. personas arent as great as people think either, its going to be a smidgen of leveling speed and helpfulness. The REAL help is going to be keys and flags that go into your achievements. Now that I basically have to pay for the amount of toons I use. I am praying that they just put them on the daybreak store instead of trying to get TLP players to buy a retail expansion.

I am all for a "true" 1999 classic EQ experience (whatever that means, it gets thrown around here a lot), as long as the old PCs and dialups (with occasional cable connection) are used, and social media didn't exist, and we all posted on EZboards.

Oh and also be 25 years younger.

I know it sounds like a deluded crackpot daydreaming - just like the "oh its not close to classic" stuff maybe?

Nearest place you can get to with Personas would be Cabilis. If you are non iksar you would need to camp persona in a safe place and invis the SK when you log in and run to Chardok.

For other things like moving from Cabilis to EC tunnel for selling a days wares it will be a lot easier to have a persona in Freeport. Once again switch SK in Cabilis or home city if not Iksar to persona from Freeport and origin (need level 5 for this) or you could just die and go back to your Freeport personas bind. You can now sell in Freeport without the long run as the inventory is shared.

Cabilis to Guk will be quick, via a persona in Grobb.
Cabilis to Unrest, via a persona in G Fay or Kaladin.
Erudin/Paineel to Freeport persona

Personas could be useful for getting guild invites in the early days. When players are scatter across all starting zones and there are no ports yet.

Personas will make it easier for friends of different races to play together.

Personas don't share a bind/origin with their other character.

My response was directed at the OP who seemed to be concerned everyone was going make druid personas and travel Norrath and switch back to whatever class they intend to play with thus eliminating the need for Joe the Wizard punting folks from the tunnel (at least that was what I took away).

Using my original example I don't think the typical player who values their time is going to run to cabilis after porting to skyfire to change back to SK then run back to Chardok. Its possible, but I think most folks would just spend 20plat for a punt was my point.

Persona's have their use; it is by definition faster to change to an ench persona and do TS stuff vs logging in my Ench alt... of course both of those options are inferior to having my TS box ench already logged in.

PoK was Tunare-sent. The travel options introduced since means we can actually play instead of wasting our playtime traveling and, subsequently, waiting to play.

Indeed, we all seem to be missing the closing statement of the OP. They weren't pining for the days of old eq nostolgia, that was just the setup for the OP not being able to make lots of plat/krono on the new tlp as a porter.

I think you are being overly optimistic.

They need to stop talking on these forums and just go play the horrible experience that p99 procides, its even free. There is zero reason to advocate for a paid version of p99, that no one actually wants. As i said before, p99 exists and its still a thing because its free, thats the only appeal it has.

Yep, you made a good example, I just gave a few where it makes life quicker and easier. It may effect those who want to port to zones close to starting cities, EC for example, but for far away places like Chardok, where there is a port far closer, ports will be better. My Iksar will have a Freeport persona to help with buying/selling in EC. But depending on where she is going after EC depends on if she looks for a port or uses persona to get where she wants to be.

Ports will still be needed, but not to as many destinations.

For the purpose of travelling then Personas in their current format are nice to have, but not need to have.
However, if you could also switch Persona while in near vicinity of your currently active persona's/main's bind point then that would be an entirely different level of usefulness.

Am I missing something? Are they changing personas to allow you to switch anywhere? If not, I don't understand this complaint.

Origin came out in Omens of War, and required level 67 originally..

You're right that personas enable some potentially creative use of Gate and Origin.

Knowing how "hard" it truly is to run to a different starting location at launch.. I would rather run than level to 5 and use Origin. It's harder to get level 5 on a TLP. Months down the road if you have 16 personas at level 5 or higher and have masterminded your way through Origin to travel around, have some cool bind points and higher level casters who can solo stuff (they can accomplish something after gating somewhere unusual), that sounds like interesting gameplay. Sure, it's not classic EQ, but I think it will be super interesting to see how people use personas on the new TLPs and what kind of cool stuff they come up with.

Maybe if it's really terrible it can be changed later. I'd like to see people consider using some different newbie areas than they do normally, or just mixing up how it feels to play on a TLP launch. Of course, it's important to still respect what makes TLPs feel nostalgic and having the game be fair. I just don't think it crosses that line. Things like this keep an old game new.