The reason fast exp/easy gameplay is killing each tlp

Just to add maybe. I also think it's simply that people tend to remember the good things about EQ and forget the bad. Nostalgia covers everything in gold.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. But the shine of Nostalgia also wears off once people remember the timesinks of trying to find a group, trying to get a mob to spawn, grinding AA, grinding epic questis, grinding raids, etc.

When the Nostalgia shine wears off, people generally jump ship to games that don't have such an impact on their lives. Until they get Nostalgic again, and have once again forgotten all negatives about EQ.

And so you get TLP....and the business model that relies heavily on short Nostalgia trips.

Have to agree with this
somehow i always say I will raid at best once a week
I join a guild with same idea and then guild goes all nice friendly and casual
Then suddenly they recruit a "new experienced raid leader" who demands we raid 4-5 times a week and all without 80% attendance cannot join
Some leave immediately most stay and then most burn out and just do not log in again .Guild dies rest quit lol
Seems to happen to me on all the TLPs i played
Maybe maybe this time would be different!

Right. I think the same happened to everyone who ended up raiding 5 days a week, including myself.

There is a desire to gain more power, and it's partly compulsive behavior in my opinion, and you even feel a responsibility to others in the guild to be present at raids. There's even punish mechanics in most guilds if you're not consistently present, demotion, removal, etc.

4 hours, 5 days a week. That is 20 hours a week.You don't do this unless there is some psychology involved that makes you do this.

At some point this does lead to burnout. It start to feel like work at some point. Unpaid work almost. Or alternatively your loved one tells you you spend too much time playing games, or your pet starts to look at you funny.

Happened to me on ragefire .Was worse there since i was one of those that "stayed" to try it and we even had to stay online to be given permission by the alpha guild to get content so sometimes just actually standing outside for hours!
Quit just before kunark
Agnarr i researched the guild and thought ok same would not happen as i did my groundwork
Wrong!
So i accepted from word go I would not be at raids and then kunark opened and helped others with their epics and then since I was missing on content decided to choose and quit was the solution again
Hoping this time i can find a casual guild who either raids 1-2 times a week and no "punishment" .

I very much agree with the OP. Back around the year 2000, I played casually. I didnt even get to max level until into Luclin, but I always felt like I was making progress. Being max level wasnt the norm on the server, it signified someone really putting in the time and effort to play the game.

None of the TLPs, or any current game for that matter, ever gives me any sense of accomplishment anymore. That is because everything is easy. Ive stated before my ideal server is just how EQ used to be, time sinks and all. I loved that crappy mid level camps could yield some very useful items if you got lucky. I loved that there werent instances so not everyone just had everything they wanted, but instead had to find other means or wait their turn. I loved the communities each server established and the rules they chose to enforce to keep thing somewhat civil.

I dont fault EQ for getting away from this, its the current culture of society. I realize Im a dinosaur who didnt need everything handed to me simply because I paid the same subscription fee. That isnt the majority perspective in the world today, cest la vie.

Well if TLP's are just too easy then why don't you hop on one of the live servers, say a low populations one like Trak, and play?

Getting to max level, max AA and checking off all those achievements much less getting geared may be just the sort of challenge you need.

Classic EQ is bone dull, I use to get on TLP servers to play casually but I finally gave up on them because live with a handful of boxed characters is much more rewarding than anything happening in early TLP

I’ve never understood why EQ players think casually raiding is 4 nights a week. 2 nights a week and you should be able to clear an expansion ina year (yes that’s live, I know), the guilds pushing for world first raiding everyday are not the casual ones! Lol

The elephant in the room no one has thusfar addressed.

I'm not going to comment about the magebot army claim since that has been debated to death over a decade now. But I will say part of it is symptom of the other issues brought up.

There is dozens of challenging MMORPGs out there. If TLP was too easy and people wanted a challenge, then they would simply play FFXIV and do their savage content. Its a much better polished game than EQ is. If they wanted easier content, they would play some of the normal or quested stuff in WoW. Ease or Difficulty are not why people play EQ.

Hell I'll even say nostalgia isn't the reason why. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion. We'd simply drone on in every TLP they make.

Its that one in the center I bolded in the quoted. Login to your favorite TLP server and ask around why people like playing. Its because of the social aspect. I can join a group, pull some mobs and grind some exp all the while chatting with some peeps. You can't do that in FFXIV or WoW or ESO, those games require you to have a button press every 1.0 to 2.5 seconds. Even at a quick 120WPM typing rate. You're only getting 1-2 words typed before having to use another ability.

Where as in EQ, you're looking at a 5-6 second use between abilities at the quickest, and downtime between pulls. In other games. You're not sitting in a spot but moving forward constantly. This allows for a social aspect that even EQ2 cannot work in.

What happens when you cannot find a group? Well you cannot socialize, and at that point why play EQ at all? Why not pick another game that will find a group for you so you can at least do 'something'?

Exp rates don't affect this issue. You can 10x them, or /10 them. It doesn't mean squat if the social player cannot find people to group with. Part of it is on the individual. But some things can be improved by the game engine as well. So lets assume we have a charismatic player who wants to start a group.

Lets say you've got a level 55 player in a 55 zone with a level appropriate camp available. They're in general chat saying X camp group LFM. What's the number one cause of that group not forming? For the sake of argument lets just assume the expansion is Omens of War.

Most of that social aspect happens over voice chat these days...even in EQ. You can click buttons and chat all night in any MMO, people divide out into their guilds and group that way. What has changed is the population tends to be anti pug very quickly, not that people don’t chat. All of this is true on modern TLPs.

They don’t chat with strangers outside of their guild tag.

Speaking only for myself, I've considered going back to Live (the last time I played was in RoF). Then I log onto my friends 110 monk and just remember how ridiculous the ability bloat and numbers have gotten.

When live players are asking for more hotbars because they've filled up every available one, something has gone wrong. I wouldn't recommend they swing as hard as WoW did in terms of their ability culling but man, I don't want 50 activateable (how do I spell this ?word?) AAs.

I see a lot of what amounts to Gamer Socialism in this thread. "I don't have the time anymore to max out all the characters I want , so make it easier for everyone".

Part of the fun of games like this is being able to invest in your character and stand out from the crowd. Be it in camping rare drops, grinding levels, AA, etc. When you take all aspects of the game and make it trivial to achieve, it takes away from that.

Even the latest change to skill gain removes another aspect of character differentiation. Use to be you had to carry multiple weapon types and cycle through them as you leveled up to maintain skill. If you neglected this, you paid the price later by constantly missing on higher level mobs as your skills slowly increased. Guess that was too "tedious" and now its everyone gets a max skill trophy!

Socialism in games, as elsewhere, saps motivation to be the best. When everyone is the best, no one is. And the game is less fun for it.

Agnarr didn't bleed out after PoP (in fact it seems to be getting busier.) Agnarr didn't bleed out after Coirnav. I'm not too worried about Mangler or Selos.

Check out Phoenix Ascendent. We will only raid 3 days a week 1 of which will be nbg. There is no attendance requirements. We welcome pure casual players with no desire to raid as well.

The game (EQ that is), is structured in such a way that if you raid little as a guild (1 or 2 times a week), you might get one item a month per player, and more like zero for recruits. That's pretty depressing.

EQ was never a casual game, it has always been unbelievably grindy and slow. I think most players come to TLP to have their dosage of nostalgia and then quit the game a few days later. The drop on TLP during the first week, in terms of population, is pretty spectacular.

Top raid guilds on TLPs have so much loot after the first month of an expansion that even apps and alts start getting gear. You can easily raid just a couple nights a week and still get far more than 1 item a month.

Everquest is designed such that you can get only couple top items in an expansion and be just fine and geared for the next. In fact you can get literally zero BIS and be fine. The BIS you do get may end up lasting you several of them. If your guild only raids a couple times a week and it means you only get a couple items in a month... that's fine. Guilds in live EQ at the time didn't have maxed out BIS either. People that were in top guilds with a monopoly on plane of time got criticized for having several quarm items as loot taking away from their mates.

All that talk about challenge and feeling of accomplishment? Removing the multiple-month expansion grind that has everyone overpowered before the next one even hits so you aren't totally ignoring half the expansion because none of the early content is even relevant compared to BIS from the last seems like a move in that direction. Longer unlocks make subsequent eras easier.

Actually my experience has not been this.I been in a guild that used RA to judge if you can even loot and can't recall how many times i seen the word "grats rot" and item just left there or destroyed.

Just from the tinkering I have done with my server, I can tell you that things like what class has which spells and abilities as well as what those spells and abilities do is not contained in the client executable. While there are some text files you have to modify on the client side to make the abilities match up with what is on the server, the vast majority of what we refer to as "game rules" are contained on the server side.

What that means is that it is completely possible to have a ranger that casts necromancer spells, uses plate armor, can feign death, and has a beastlord pet.

The possibilities are pretty much endless, and that's from ONLY being able to modify the server side of the game. Imagine what would be possible if you worked at DBG and had full access to the game client as well.

Think of the game client as a piece of software that does a few things, creates a "secure" connection with a server, relays information back and forth related to the game, interprets that data and relays it on the screen in some way to the user, and gathers information from the user (inputs) that it sends back to the server for processing.

All of the spells, abilities, race/class combos, monsters, npcs, quests, collections, tasks/missions, etc all live on the server. There are a finite number of things on the client that are not determined by the server such as which classes have a mana pool. You can't add a mana pool to a warrior (that I know of). Adding dual wielding can be added to a Shadow Knight for some game clients, but it causes newer versions of the game client to crash.

The point is, DBG has the game client already (aka the EverQuest game client that installs on your computer) to be able to make an infinite number of different games. What it takes to do it is creating new servers with a modified database and server code changes to accommodate the new game.

If I ran the franchise, I would be capitalizing on that potential revenue by creating various different versions of the EverQuest world, and selling them as purchasable games to add to your subscription. Those that were purchased and appeared to be popular with the customers would get expansions. Those that flop, would be discontinued at some point.

^^^ THIS! Exactly this!

I've gone back to Live many times, and the reality is that the equipment on the live servers have a crap ton of stats on them, and there are an insane number of activate-able abilities for each class.

The last time I went back to my 105 Warrior on Live, I literally made a spreadsheet JUST TO FIGURE OUT which activate-able AAs and combat abilities to use and when.

The mudflation of stats on the equipment is just insane. It's like reading a book when you open one piece of gear up to see what's on it. Then there's the augments. Tons of augments, but on top of that, the augments are of various slot types, so you also have to figure out which augs for which type you need to go with which piece of gear of which you already have some 10 to 20 stats listed on each piece of gear that you have to compare with what the augment will add to that from the dozen stats the augment has on it... and.... just... holy... crap batman! WTF!

My hat is off to the people playing on the Live servers that actually put up with all of this crap just to play the game at the level they play it.

A lot of people leave because they want vanilla, not a butchered classic server with easier mobs, faster leveling, and krono farmers.
EQ should really look at what WoW is doing in making a true classic server. Kind of like a relic of the pass. Revert everything to the original state, aside for maybe some minor tweaking in terms of stupid bottlenecks, like VP key, and upgrade the graphics, or give the option to. Have up to Luclin max and do each expansion on a year release. No matter what any hardcore poopsocker says make the time lock a year. I would also change the raid bosses to encounter locking, rather than just open world, but basically something as close to vanilla as possible with some obvious improvements to the design of bottlenecks and content blocking and you will have a pretty sold server.