How To Make Old Zones Attractive

DB needs to revitalize the older areas by adding nodes that contain a variety of rewards that are useful regardless of level, such as housing items, research potions, rare collectibles, Potions of Vitality, Charms of Escape, Wands of Forgiveness, etc.

The nodes could be rocks, bushes, etc., that are slightly set off from surrounding graphics by a blue haze or something similar. It wouldn't be obvious from flying over, but would be visible enough running through a zone. The haze (or whatever is used to mark the node) would need to be visible to people who are color blind.

I used to spend a great deal of time in older zones, hunting shinies, until DB drastically cut back on them in older zones. Now it simply isn't worth the time to revisit a zone looking for shinies unless there is another reason to be there.

DB is financially supporting servers for older zones. Why not make these zones more enticing to players by adding node with rewards suitable for any level of player?

This would be way beyond developer time to be worth it imo.

Realistically majority of players played these zones when relevant and now don't really want to spend much time in them. The time would be better invested in fixing issues in BoL, and TLE.

Lots of zones also totally shut down if nobody is using them.

I understand what you are saying, Errorr, but I imagine they have people working on new content that are separate from those working on fixing bugs and other problems with current content. As for the servers, I understand most companies rent servers, though that may not be the case with DB. Still, servers have maintenance costs so it is sad not to see them fully utilized.

The team is very very few people. They don't have a bunch of people working on new content, and some on current stuff. It's why when it reaches May time, we start seeing no new content and they whole team goes into expac mode.

I think what you expect the team to be, is a lot larger than what it really is.

The best way to revitalize old zones is to make level 120 fabled versions of those zones such as what they did with Kael Drakel. I would love to go back to New Tunaria or any of the EoF era zones.

Love playing in older zones, it’s almost exclusively what I play in on those rare times I do log in. To me that’s what Everquest 2 is. Past kunark/TSO/SF it’s just lost it’s original feel anymore.

I'm currently doing old Heritage quests. I spent yesterday in Nek Castle which I still think is a work of art.
I'm now waiting for Chomper to spawn and remembering how hard he was when I was little for realz.

Panda quest gave a reason to revisit a number of older zones to collect 'souvenirs'.
Perhaps some more quests of this style.

Give the zone some limited drops / faction but require you to mentor to the appropriate level range.
(Problem with this is the whacked effect overpowered equipment has when mentored).

Putting some sort of fun or chase items in zones as a low chance drop
Weapon/armour, mercenary illusion, pet illusion items
'Thingies' of convenience but not balance effecting such as mana stone, water breathing, wings etc

House items:
Get a pet or plushie as an achievement killing mobs in zone - get a plushie/pet of that mob
Build up faction with specific NPC's in the zone - obtain an Interactive House Actors of that NPC (I have Captain Varlos and Ingrid and couple of others for example)

Things of actual value
Adornments (even weak ones) that will actually fit in mercenary equipment

NPC's / Forges / Brew Barrels etc that will convert valuable items like Essence of Chaos (sarcasm in case you didn't get it) into something people actually want such as Empyral Mana

I like the general idea.

And they're not totally against the idea, since they updated the Potions of Marr to be % power heal. I take that as a sign that this idea has occurred to them.

Similarly, they're creating a problem by not giving us tempting items to use Loyalty Points on. It's going to be like Dungeon Marks, everyone will have thousands and they'll have to remove it because anything they put there will be a total giveaway.

I really like many of the older zones and will make a new character every so often to play in them and often have a higher character (who has missed some of them) mentor them. It is especially fun to do old group or raid zones to gear up the new character nicely. My absolute favorite are the panda quest line in Stonebrunt and the Court Quest lines in Maj Dul. They are so well written and often funny. The princess of truth is in love with the prince of blades and he ???? you have to read the quest lines.....

I stopped playing on my current region (almost all toons between 110-120) because it was tedious and no longer fun and I didn't want to buy anymore character slots. Started over on a new region and I'm actually enjoying the game again. The old zones are fun, well thought out and an absolute joy to play. I plan on running Nek castle today on one of my toons (only have 3 so far but that will increase. I am running each one through different zones/dungeons to level and doing HQ's. At least I've found something worth playing in the game and there is so much more old content I still have to revisit and a choice of zones in most level ranges.

I agree that it is lots of fun to play in the older zones which is how I have ended up with so many characters. I don't have to spend more time shifting stuff around, trying to figure out stats, find suitable armor, etc., then I do actually adventuring or crafting.

But making so many characters causes other problems as it becomes harder to keep track of what my characters have and need. It also makes it harder to participate in time-limited events. And that's what led me to thinking about how to make the older areas more attractive to all levels of players without it being forced down their throats like KA did.

There are a lot of veteran items I wish my newly-made characters had, but didn't get because I couldn't remember the account names of my older EQ/EQ2 accounts (My family had 11 accounts at one point). While they are leveling alright without these items, they certainly were nice to have such as the elemental mounts and Mistmoore Crags Estate. While it is possible to get them through loyalty points, it would take years just to get these two items via points, and there are lots of other goodies competing for loyalty points such as the Treasure Hoards.

So adding these, and other goodies, to older zones would certainly make the older zones even more attractive to me and other players who don't have veteran accounts plus they would appeal to people who want something fun to do between major fights or decorating binges. It would also give players something to do while waiting for groups to form up for raids which can often take up a good deal of time.

It just seems to me like this would be a low-cost way of making older zones more attractive and breathing new life into them. Throw in a few advanced versions of older dungeons and there would be something in others areas for everyone to enjoy.

I spend time in older zones to level up my characters.

Providing other items would be great. It doesn't have to be done all at once. One to three new types items in a 0-9 zone with each new xpac. Or once every 6 months.

I never tire of Lesser Faydark even though 90% of the quests were removed and the poor Brownies and Satyrs have nothing to do any longer. I also love to spend time in New Tunaria even though its quests have mostly been dismantled as well. The same with Castle Mistmoore and Mistmoore Catacombs.

I will go to Lesser Faydark and New Tunaria just for the artwork. Its a shame that they wont restore these zones to the original versions of them with all the quests they used to have and throw chasers in to get players to actually visit them. Maybe make a festival celebrating Greater/Lesser Faydark, not just Kelethin.

There are ways that don't involve a ton of developer time. I don't know if the EQ2 community would go for them though (I mean, I did see more than a few complaints about having to go back and do things in old zones for the epic 2s).

Evolving items that require achievements be completed. Achievements like 'visit every zone'. Achievements like 'finish the sig line in X expansion.' or 'Kill all the named in X zone.' The achievements are already in game, items already have the coding necessary to increase in power when certain achievements have been completed, so create an item that ends up being near best in slot after evolving ten times and link each evolved level to some achievement from the past.

So what was the reason for removing/dismantling the old quests? It's been so long that I don't remember what I have forgotten, lol. Personally I never really liked LFay, I was always getting lost in that zone, had such a hard time getting from point A to point B but I did complete the quest series back in the day on a least 2 toons and then swore I'd never go back.
Edit: I agree with you that the artwork was awesome

I second the LFay love. I had a harder time enjoying Sinking Sands, so when I discovered the alternative was LFay, I never looked back and have leveled alts there ever since. I thought I noticed some quests missing. But I thought maybe I hadn't done the pre-requisites. Something's up too, because I stopped by last week to do Obelisk of Blight and only one quest was there in the crossroads. I thought there were like, IDK, three, four? One was about the ghosts in the grove and another was to find a doll or toy or something. Then I thought there were two inside OoB. The Blight Minion armor pieces fetch a few plats too, since they're bright purple.

The zone has a lot of depth and character... each "lobe" has its own personality, from the Fae Court, to the Thexians, to the Monks, to the Nybright family. With lots of nature creatures. There's just so much! Unicorns satyrs, and fae drakes oh my! Hidden caves. Emerald Halls.... now there's a place where crafting and adventuring intersected in a very cool way. I feel like LFay could spin off as its own game, with each lobe being an expansion.

Automatic downscaling of player's level and attributes depending on which zone they were in could have been great had it been implemented in the game. Another very successful mmo does that where you could be max level with raid gear and still get rolled over by a level 10 mob in the beginner zone.

This could've avoided having to re-do fabled versions of the zone and keep the original zones as relevant today as they were on day 1 but i digress, the game compeletely got shifted to another mind set somewhere around post DoV (where most of the current TLE problems lie as well). Itemisation, bloated stats etc making even current active content trivial let alone the old feeble stuff that gets destroyed by an auto attack damage proc.

As someone mentioned. Too late to salvage old content, rather they should be concentrating on what I strongly believe to be the worst expansion in eq2 history even surpassing Kunark Ascending (thought that was impossible but I was wrong). The content overall is broken, itemisation is all over the place and the ever increasing RNG element is at its worst.

Little to no communication about all this is bad enough, i doubt they are even looking at older content except for the purpose of adding new content later in the expansion cycle to save development time as they do every year.

From what I understand, the quests are still in the code, they just have to be hooked back up to the NPCs that offered them. The code has not been removed or destroyed, just unlinked and usually because someone complained that they had to wait for X mob to spawn which is ridiculous. It would take no time at all for someone to go back into the old zone codes and relink the quests. I would prefer someone spend say 4-8 hours per week doing this rather than breaking something else.

If they salted old heroics and raid zones with current xpac items like the merc, mount & spell trainers, recipes etc... people would be all over those zones. Maybe make them part of the overland bosses as well.

And only avail to full groups who are properly chrono'd for the those zones and have the current xpac?