How come Everquest has so many....

I used to love grouping, but then all the groups got boring. Instead of looking around at a place I'd never seen as a solo player, I was frequently stuck with people who skipped everything but the big bosses. It got kinda depressing, to tell the truth. I'm all, "Oooh! Aaaah! look at this place!" and most of the other players were on a sick kind of autopilot, "We're not going there, there's nothing good down that way, the next boss is over here. Just skip those guys on the ground and fly over them."
That's why I stopped grouping, and raids were pointless, because I never got to roll on anything. I didn't have enough DKP, so nothing I did would change that. It really sucked.

Aren't there any real adventurers left? I mean, come on! There's a TON of cool real estate to cover, and everybody just searches out the next big boss, big weapon, or cool piece of armor. What happened to the bragging rights you got for taking down a godmob with skill, grit, and determination instead of the shiniest gear?

I used to be an adventurer like you... then I took an arrow in the knee. *giggles hatefully*

I'm in the same boat. Reading the quest text and when finished, the group is allready fighting in the next room, kind of worse in other games with cut scenes :-(

kk this is wrong on a few points. not sure if you played eq1.

I played eq1. we had tons of quests. the lower levels were hard but fun. we could group with one player and two mercs and do just about anything.

eq1 is more hard-core- requiring groups to accomplish anything. the higher you got, the harder it was. however, there were several things that made it fun. like if you were doing a task with a group, and wanted to let other people enjoy the rewards, you could task add. they didn't have to be in the zone and got none of the loot, but they got the xp and the credit for finishing the task which helped with progression.

if you were planning to group later, you could set your toon in the guild lobby and get a bunch of high level buffs- which meant that your low level toon could pretty much do anything in the low level zones. the buffs were a must for higher levels. the buffs didn't wear off in the guild lobby or in housing.

pok was the center of everything. once you got there, you could go to almost any zone. any zones that didn't have a pok book in them could be gotten to by the nexus, or druid spells or wiz spells.

you could dye your armor- that was fun. we made the dyes. the crafting was simple but fun and we could craft all of the major crafting on one toon. there were some crafts that were class specific- like alchemy for shaman and poison-making for rogues, and one was race specific- tinkering for gnomes. but you needed all of the others for your cloak quest. and it was nice that you could do them all. there was also a marketplace potion- drought of the craftsman- which kept you from losing your combines. the crafted items were equivalent to tier 2 and could be auged with class-specific crafted symbols. both armor -which has special looks to them - and weapons. all weapons and shields could be placed in your house.

the mage was special. she could conjure up weapons that could be given to any pets- chanter, mage, shadowknight, and necro the sk pet was almost as much fun as the necro pet. we used to conjure up bags of weapons and drop them on the floor of the guild hall for people to pick up. it was also fun to go into pok or tutorial zones and drop bags and packages on the floor for people to pick up. it was just as much fun to find those.

you could trade off boxes and bags full of stuff- you had ten trade slots and if someone had room in their inventory, you could give them 6 bags full of items. made trading a lot easier. it was also fun to load someone down with coin before they removed the weight of coins.

you could lose levels by dying. we often sacrificed toons so they could go kill vox and naggy since you couldn't kill them if you were above 53. the sacrifice made rez tokens for the necro. a necro could just about rule a zone. they could also pull your body from any part of the zone to them.

you could levitate at level one if someone gave you lev. we couldn't fly, but lev was one of the fun parts of the game.

even if you went to zones where the mobs were gray, they would still attack you and could kill you if there were too many. and they still dropped nice stuff. we used to camp mobs in lower level zones for certain weapons they dropped because some buffs could not be gotten in the game otherwise. the most coveted dropped item was the pegasus cloak- which the mages needed for their epics but which also gave everyone lev - even if their class didn't have a spell. later a ball of cotton could be bought cheaply on the marketplace to give you lev.

the quests were fun and engaging. we camped long hours to finish them. they gave awesome rewards. the epics were especially fun. if wasn't unusual to go camping the lizard queen for the ranger belt and have your voice marco set to go off when the emote came in the chat to let you know she was up. then you hopped out of bed and hoped everyone else heard their macro too.

as we got to the higher levels, it became tedious. it was harder and if you weren't geared properly, you couldn't really do most of the zones. at that point- about 103 - i quit actively playing. however, i still sometimes grab my toons and go looking for specific armor or weapons and enjoy the lower zones, reliving memories of the dragon breath quests and other things we did as a guild when eq1 was the hottest game going.

and that is what draws people back to the progressive servers. they can relive the glory days when it was hard but not impossible and you could group and have fun.

in eq2 they didn't do the progressive servers like they had in eq1. but i find eq2 engaging and fun. but easier.

oh and you didn't really need a raid force to finish your epic weapons in eq1 until you got to the 2.0. and the raid was easy to put together because there were usually plenty of people ready to go. we weren't limited by how many people could join the raid either. all in all, i would say the most fun i ever had was when eq1 was young and fresh and had lots of people.

no there was a hack that took us down for several weeks. i was around and lived through it. so it did happen

yikes- i hate mergers in eq1. i always have so much to do before and after one.

Suka, yes I play EQ, but not often now. I got my IC for my SK and more. I had found few quests to do, but I had fun exploring and working with people to do dungeons for drops. Most quests I found out about from Zam and then I started them. I still like EQ enough (as well as EQ2) to pay to play, even if I'm burned out on questing and overland stuff solo for now. I would rather pay DBG and not log on much than pay Blizzard and never log on.

eq DOES have housing, and decorating - it is not as elaborate, but it gives itself over to self expression quite well. the only problem was getting evicted when you didn't play that particular toon for 90 days. i often went off to play other toons and forgot to bring in my entire horde of toons so i got evicted a lot. i quit grouping in eq1 mainly because of loot hogs and control freaks. but i did like the /drag corpse and /hide corpse commands.

i liked being able to do all of the tradeskills on one toon- in fact i have about 5 toons who are maxed in all of them. and have their coldain cloaks. it is the difficulty in eq1 that made me stop playing,. i like being able to solo most mobs. and i like being able to box. i hated having to try to look for groups and getting used to one group and then someone quit so we had to start over rebuilding the groups. i didn't like it when people put their toons on follow and went afk either. better to have an extra merc than an afk player. there were a number of things people did in group that were major turnoffs to me. but when i could no longer take on a zone with a triple box, it was time to step back and reevaluate whether i still enjoyed the game enough to continue playing. so i came to eq2

one of my guild mates still can not run the game on their old computer and another one just told me he had gotten a new computer and could finally play again. a lot of people have older computers that are simply not compatible with eq2. however, eq1 can be played on almost any computer- you might need to tone down your graphics a bit but you can play it

I think EQ2 had a run of bad luck. The time mentioned by previous posters about hacking. The fiasco with messing up with the overseas players, giving the oversight to some company that wasn't SOE alienated a lot of European players who were very active before then. Then leadership that started changing things drastically willy nilly and rapidly that put some people off playing. I know I stayed away close to a year when they took the starter isles away and then the suburbs away to turn them into a few quests. I came back after I got over my annoyance because I basically like the game but people getting annoyed and then leaving don't necessarily come back.

I also think the free to play wasn't well thought out. I talked my brother into coming back (he had played EQ from the beginning and then EQ2 for many years) and he logged in and all his armor popped off and he couldn't reequip it. He said a few words that don't bear repeating and logged out and hasn't been back.

All in all it is a fun game, I love the variety of quest types and other activities, love the housing and decorating, and lots of other things. I really wish more folks would play.

What server are you on? Maybe we could team up and find other people like ourselves to quest with.

I was thinking about writing a wall of text, but then I shortened it massively:

With every little issue that cropped up in EQ2 SoE decided to either ignore it or throw the baby out with the bathwater.

My guild on EQ is still raiding strong, I retired from eq1 about a year ago, EQ1 raids require 54 people and my guild have 60+ show up daily. EQ1 is strong because, well, its EQ1.

I'm on Skyfire server, so if anyone is looking for grouping, look me up. Our guild is the Knights of Goodness, and I'd love to add a real adventurer or ten to the mix, so if anyone writing here is on that server, look me up. Ask for Skeiael.

The number of servers is not interesting. The number of active users is much more interesting.
I don't think that it is wise to make comparison between two games based on number of servers.

I also don't understand those people who are constantly mentioning SOE, "fiasco", Microsoft, European players, US laws and what not... Are they working as supervisors in MMO industry to make such high-level judgments? I don't think so.

You would have to be a fool to not make these judgements, if you've been around long enough to know how those 'fiasco's' have affected the game over the past decade. It doesn't take a genius to realize that a LOT of mistakes have been made by those running the show, and that has led to the state of the game as it is today.

And what is the status of the game? Unlike many other MMO's EQ2 is still alive and still strong to attract people.

You are saying the glass is half-empty, I say it is half-full.

Yep, I was here too. When was the hack that had the game down for TWO MONTHS per the quote I responded to? The exact downtime was 12 days we now know per Feldon's fancy footwork. Suka, I'd appreciate if you would provide the link for the one that lasted for 2 months although I still suspect that may be difficult since, as I noted previously and you seem to feel I'm wrong about, it never happened. I'm not disputing that a hack/downtime took place. What I took exception to was "two months" as had been stated. Pretty huge difference there.

Stormhold

I see a lot of lost potential. Instead of the glass being half full, it could be three quarters full, or even full, had the powers that be made better decisions.

They are only as human as you or I, though, and we all make mistakes. Even if you or I were running the show we may have made some decisions that would have affected the outcome of how things have turned out, for better or worse, and I understand that...just pointing out that if you've been following things for the past decade, you would have to be a fool to not see that many mistakes have been made along the way, and some of those mistakes have been made repeatably. You don't have to be an mmo guru to recognize this. The fact that SOE ended up sunsetting many of it's games should be proof enough, alone, that they did something wrong somewhere along the way. It's not just EQ2 that was affected by these mistakes.

What's done is done and there is nothing we can do to go back and change it. What can be done, however, is new and better decisions made that may bring back a revival of the game. As I've said many times in the past, this game still has a lot of potential and I'd really like to see the staff do what they can to promote it rather than see the game die out.

Worse things could have happened, resulting in the game being sunsetted, and better things could have happened that would have resulted in a much larger player base today...but the fact remains that is not the case either way, and therefore those are moot points. The most important thing is to learn from those past mistakes and try not to continue repeating them, while doing what they can to encourage new growth.