The only question should be how long.

You are being a little nit picky with the semantics of his post, dont you think? You know what he means.

I mean, yes and no. I think I know what he means, and I am being a little nit picky. I think what I mean is fairly clear too. EQ had a fun launch but they have been added quality of life improvements since the very first patch day.

Just going off pre-Kunark patches, here are some quality of life improvements. I am trying not to include anything which could be considered a bug fix.

• Change was added so players could cancel Levitate
• Wizards and Necromancers are granted Paralyzing Earth
• /pet taunt and /pet no taunt are added
• Yes/No popup added when turning in PK book to Priest of Discord
• Added the ability to re-organize spells in the spellbook
• Added the ability to place No Drop items in the bank
• Party notification when party member goes Linkdead
• Parenthesis added to names of invisible NPC's seen with see invis
• All beneficial speed spells can be canceled
• Loot rights and XP granted to the group which deals the most damage
• Temple of Sol Ro added/class armor quests added
• Non-Common Tongue chat designates the language (if skill level is high enough)
• Tishan and Malise become stackable
• Screaming Terror changes from a fear to a mez
• Spears added for shamans
• Paw becomes a mid level dungeon
• Races with Slam may use Slam on magic creatures if wearing magic shoulders
• Summon Corpse added to game
• Skin Like Nature DS component added and removed
• Shauri's Sonorous Clouding grants see invis
• Paineel added
• Yaulp and Augmentation become stackable
• DoT spells no longer interrupt camping
• Deadly Strike (throwing crit from behind) added for rogues
• Evade added for rogues
• Loot messages added
• Fiery Avenger quest added
• Warning message now given when attempting to mez a creature immune to mez
• Can right click and hold on bard spell icons to see what instrument skill it uses
• Magician Phantom Armor line now grants HP regen
• Kerra Ridge revamp

This is just from looking to Zam patch notes. There are a ton of other things which have been added over the years and I don't really get why people wouldn't want them. You don't want /camp desktop to work? Do you only want 6 hotkeys and 6 hotbars again? Do you want to have no idea what the duration of your buffs are? Do you want to have no idea how much mana you have? Do you want to not be able to use general chat or send cross server tells or create custom chat channels? Do you want the raid UI to not work? Do you want zoning to take 5 minutes again? Do you want tells to stop persisting/queuing while you are zoning? Do you want pets to not persist through zoning/camping? Do you want quests to break when you hand in items stacked? Do you want NPC's to eat your items when you don't hand in exactly what they want? Do you want your target's name to not blink? Do you want to not have a targetting ring? Do you want to not be able to put empty bags inside other bags? Do you not want tradeskills to tell you when the item you are attempting to make is trivial? Do you want the old tradeskill system back in place? Do you want to remove the ability to play in windowed mode without third party software? Do you want corpse runs re-added, /corpse removed, and /consent to give the other player consent to literally loot your itemsagain?


I realize it sounds like I'm being nit-picky, but I'm also being sincere. I like being able to cancel levitate, there's no reason why that shouldn't have been possible from day one. I like being able to equip a spear as a shaman - hell, the epic they added for me later is a spear. I like being able to camp straight to the desktop. I like playing in windowed mode. I like knowing when a tradeskill combine has become trivial.


There's a lot of stuff I like about how EQ was back in 1999 but it's extremely difficult to parse out what is "truly" classic and what isn't. What's classic for one person may not be classic for another. Do you know what was classic for me? Not having a PC that would run EQ so having to play at my uncle's whenever I could get over to his house. Now I'm sitting here on a 8 core PC with 16gb RAM and two 23" monitors. I sure prefer that over my original classic experience


Anyway this got lengthy as my posts tend to do. I know we don't want the bugs back so I skipped all of them intentionally. I like all this other stuff they added over time though. I think they eventually went nuts with QOL improvements, but early on most of them were wholly justified and it's hard for me to imagine playing EQ without them.

Classic usually means everything up to velious expansion. Some use classic to mean up to PoP but no one goes beyond PoP when referring to "classic". So Quality of Life patches done within the expansion's content, is considered "classic" and some people, like myself, dont even care if other QoL patches are added that arent "classic" as long as the spirit and essence of classic EQ is upheld.

Most people just mean back when the game was non instanced, where travel was meaningful and needed, players handled commerce (bazaar ruined this in luclin), no mercenaries so people have to actually group to do content etc etc.

Just because there are differing opinions on all the nuances of what is considered the purity of what is "classic" does not mean that the overarching concept of "classic" isn't pretty well codified.

The thing is, for every person that misses a particular (usually controversial) concept of original EQ (corpse runs, hybrid xp penalty, etc.), there's about 20 that don't.

I *do* miss the original xp rate, including hell levels; I *do* miss the original spell effects; and I *do* miss the nostalgia and challenge of those early levels and what original EQ was like.
What I don't miss is corpse runs, hybrid xp penalties, and some of the classes absolutely sucking pre-Velious/Luclin/PoP. But I realise that's just my opinion, and many others would probably have slightly different likes/dislikes about original EQ.
As others have mentioned, the devs have to appeal to the majority, so they use polls to find what that is.
Simple as that, really.

If you miss corpse runs that badly, might I suggest one of the servers out there?

@Hateseeker...
I love that you get it! So many here do not! When they announced no instancing because "we feel strongly" that competition is classic my instant thought was... wtf? There is no such thing as classic competition without GMs and enforcement. (Proof of this is Fippy/Vulac)
I went so far as to ask that question to Roshen (of course no answer) but it seems critical thinking is hard and those that do it aren't the sheep DB wants.
To me this point is the only valid question, and it goes unanswered and unresolved because DB has decided so "move on". Sometimes the why is more important than the what...

You don't know this and you can't prove this. Go peddle your lies someplace else, if that server was so great you'd not be here lobbying for DBG to make do it where you'd have to pay

Classic refers to Classic, Classic+Kunark+Velious=Trilogy

The trilogy is either in classic, or the definition of classic depending on many different factors. I personally dont consider anything after Velious classic, but dont mind adopting the "classic" word for everything up to PoP....nothing past PoP is even considered classic....but to lots, nothing past velious is because of the major game changing game mechanics introduced in luclin/pop.

Then you should be saying you want EQ as it was in 2001.... not 1999.

Classic has never meant anything other than original, vanilla EQ to me. But if there's anything these last few posts have demonstrated it's that no one agrees on what classic is, not even what expansions are included in classic.

I had no idea that people thought of Kunark as classic, let alone Velious. That's hard for me to believe but I guess I do.

I idly wonder if some people think of classic as whatever expansion they started playing in?

That's a good point, when i see something like "make druid ports useful again!" I wonder if they actually played in 1999 when 99% of druids and wizards ran around anon so they would not get bombarded with tells asking for ports every 5 seconds... the happiest group to see the stones in PoK *where* the porting classes!

You obviously did not play on fippy. Multiple guilds of people "camped" raid mob spawn points for hours. The raid mob died within seconds. Sometimes before it was even graphically rendered. That's just as non classic as instancing imo, just in a different way

And by hours, I mean upwards of a day or more in many cases

Lol what? Log into any server at primetime on live and tell me you believe there is more than 1200-1400 people on. People. Not braindead box armies. Individual humans.

Let's examine that. There are 17 official EQ servers. You think that 17 servers from lowest to highest are populated by fewer than the 1,000 + that play on that other server? I qualify that because I've had it on good authority that the control freak GM's on that server spend huge amounts of effort banning people for boxing, RMT etc. to the tune of 400+ every month.

So EQ can populate 17 servers with nothing but box armies from a player base of under 1,000?

Here's the thing, those free and illegal servers to my knowledge have never even once had a server split to accomodate the supposed hordes of "fans". It just doesn't happen. I'm pretty sure that any EQ server can accomodate over 3,000 consecutive logins and possibly a lot more than that. You don't see people playing because they're off in instances or the huge number of static zones that exist in the game.

That's a lot of text. I meant per server. No Live EQ server has the population of the classic server. Period.

Let's get something straight about those bans. There is a ton of bans monthly. Of course you have it on good authority because it's public knowledge and they announce it on the forums. Hundreds of accounts get banned because like any game a few rotten eggs try to cheat. 400 accounts banned is not 400 people banned. It's a drop in the ocean compared to legit players.

If anything Live EQ could learn to use the same heavy hand on the next TLP. Fippy was far scummier than the other server.

the bolded, underlined part...Yes, this is what I want to experience again. There is not 1 single item you mentioned that I said "no" in my head when reading.

All live EQ servers have higher peak population than the vanity servers ran by a gaggle of weirdo control freaks

If you have a time machine and play live EQ through it, sure. Otherwise... I mean even the most cursory of logins proves otherwise.

Lets get back on topic here...If people don't want as close to 100% original EQ for a progression server, why the need for a new progression server? Everything you could want exists on the already live servers.