Personally, I'd like the expak to reward true vets the way RoS did for long derided Tradeskiller's ...meaning those of us who actually waded through the original progression start with access while new-comers start from scratch. Yeah, it's sadistic to hope noobs suffer through Planes' stone age, "no clues for ewe--just guess and hope" progression...but that's just the way I roll...sneering has always been part o the fun, no? MUHAHAHAHA...suffer, fools!!...huh? What? canceling sub because it's boring and arcane?..nooooo...come baaaack...
What do you want to bet those snail mobs hunt you down at bard speed and are immune to run speed changes?
Speaking as one who DID play back during PoP, but casually, and never did ANY of the progression until fall of 2016, in order to get access to the Artisan's Prize, I think it was a fine way to develop it. Doing that progression had been on my to-do list for years, so it was a good excuse to get it done. And, as a 100+ level toon, it was all easy enough to do. The spawn competition wasn't bad, considering current server pops. And to top it all off, regarding "Yeah, it's sadistic to hope noobs suffer through Planes' stone age, "no clues for ewe--just guess and hope" progression", I found several web sites with pages devoted to understanding and working through the issues and progression, so it really wasn't bad at all. So, it all took WAY less time and effort than it did for the folks who did it back in 2002-2003. My thanks to the devs for adding Artisan's Prize, and letting me make the first useful item from tradeskills in well over a decade! And my thanks to the folks who maintain those excellent web pages to help folks through it (the ones I can think of now, Bonzz, tancidtherogue, crys, Fanra, brucehalpern).
If something is relevant people will spend time to provide the information, with a handful of people spending the most time. https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/ldon-layout-demystified.242832/ Goodurden is one of those handful, he actually did much more comprehensive analysis than the Dev(s) who created Slayer for the expansion. If something was more relevant than 1530 ach points then you would have various sites with the information and posts created or copied to various guild forums. It really doesn't matter how obscure or complex something is only bottlenecks matter. Plane of War flagging is reasonably complex but other than the bottleneck of trees in PoEarth it was trivial to flag for the zone provided you could actually effectively contribute to a group in PoWar. If some Dev had helpfully posted that the reason for the keying process is that they leaked the requirements to some buddies who wanted "free" Krono for killing largely uncontested trivial mobs in advance of the quest information being public it would be easy to understand. Instead it's super puzzling why someone is so sadistic and/or clueless to want to create all sorts of player tension in PoEarth after than zone had been largely irrelevant for a decade or so. If there is PoP related keying in TBL it will because a Dev is some combination of greedy, sadistic and/or clueless or the quest will be intelligently designed with triggered mobs, be paired with Agents of Change appearing on live servers or some other mechanic that ensures that player effort is the primary factor for how long it will take something to complete the PoP portion of TBL flagging.
