Devs you are killing this game for new players

Lets not kid our self either, its not like EQ2 has a steady flow of new players that has to do EVERYTHING. There might be some snowflakes here and there, but its not significant enough for DBG to care about them.

So you did all this in 24hrs that is mighty impressive.

• The first quest Finding Dolas requires:
  • To start the Quest you:
    • Must be a level 100 Scout.
    • Must be level 5 of one Ascension class
    • Must have completed the City Timeline
      • The City of Qeynos Timeline (Good) including Scout line up to Kaedrin's Fate
      • The City of Freeport Timeline (Evil) including Scout line up to Your Eternal Reward
    • Must have your Fabled Class Epic Weapon 1.0 Quest completed - NOT Epic Repercussions

Kunark Ascending Signature quest line.. (Was omitted before)

• • At some point of the first quest you will also need:
    • You must be a level 100 Artisan to craft a combine
    • Completed the following quests:
      • Shattered Seas Timeline (aka Altar of Malice Timeline)
      • Cobalt Scar Timeline (Through High Tide)
      • The Means to an End (Dark Mail Gauntlets) and 50k status with The Circle of the Unseen Hand (Faction))
      • The Order of Rime Timeline to 50k natural faction (Without Illusion)
      • Kurn's Tower Access Timeline

How about adding the Guise of Pursuit to the marketplace to help people not have to do the eye burning faction grinds needed for the Epic 2.0.
Still have the requirements of doing the timeline quest because well this game is call Everquest, but some relief from the grind of last years expansion would be a good step in helping any new players, returning players or someone that may have a second dormant account they have thought about playing.
Question is does anyone other than the community relations people of DBG read these forums?

It comes down to the context in which said content is played. In both scenarios the goal for most is to play what's "current" on that server. On live, going back and doing those prereqs feels like an impediment to being able to experience current content. You start experiencing the same issue even on a TLE server when you have to make the run to Nagafen on your 12th alt to learn draconic, though not nearly to the degree you feel it on live.

Experiencing content on a TLE server that's current to your level, balanced to be an appropriate challenge for a group, and yields rewards that are of immediate relevance is different from back-questing the same content when it's grey on a live server. On live it's a hoop you have to jump through to get to where you want to be. On TLE is IS where you want to be.

A complete refactoring of the database that runs Everquest 2 was done to move from Oracle to Enterprise DB and Save like half a million per year in Oracle fees. The other reason to do it was to allow a cross server dungeon finder. Some work was done on an improvement of the dungeon finder but in testing this code didn't meet expectations. At some point a developer decision was made to move on to other things and not mount another effort to fix it. I personally believe that eq2 would have a lot more subscribers today if the hurdle for getting into a group wasn't so high. The few people who have no trouble finding groups are always quick to tell the rest of us that were imagining this problem.

"Crit mit" took people ending their subs and not buying the expacs to make it go away. Perhaps that will work here? They did eventually figure out that it was bad.

The "real question" is if you are currently behind do you 'believe' that you will eventually 'catch up' enough to really play? For me the answer is currently 'not a chance'.

For once I actually agree with something you've said. Perception is very important. If someone looks at it and feels that completely overwhelmed that they feel it's either not worth it or that it'll never happen, then they're likely to just move on to something else. . If people come in feeling like no matter how much effort they put in that they won't succeed in catching up, or that it'll take them a year to catch up, they're gonna say screw it and do something else. This isn't good for the overall health of the game.