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What Expansions ruined EQ1 for you?
I started EQ when Luclin expansion came out and I loved EQ. After more epansions came out, a big amount of EQ started to suck, like the LDON dungeons and at the time, hard to get LDON spells. I see a lot of people her only like Vanilla,Kunark, and Velious and a lot of people do not like POP. What expanisions and changes with the expansions made you feel that SOE ruined the game?
Comments
The announcement of Station Exchange back in 2005 ruined it for me.
Gonna go with Kunark. Yeah, thats right, the first one. Why? Because unlike the main land, Kunark and Velious were both horribly designed. Velious to a lesser degree, but god damn did I hate going to EITHER of them because the geography sucked so badly, and getting from place to place or finding a place to bind was an absolute chore. Couple that with crazy difficult mobs running around everywhere and yeah, its a pretty crappy experience. I spent some time in Velious eventually, but even with the expansion, I avoided the actual area like the plague half the time.
Bans a perma, but so are sigs in necro posts.
EAT ME MMORPG.com!
Yes velious was a pain,shortly after it released I quit e.q. Never returned. I died one time in velious and the game decided to throw my corpse several zones away. Couldnt get g.m.s to fix it so cancelled account. Was the best thing I ever did game was sucking the social life out of me.
Anything TBS and beyond. It was going bad at TSS already.
I liked the game up till DoN, everyone was grouping and having fun still. Around 2006, with more and more players and designers leaving, EQ started to be such a small game where you knew everyone and everyone started multiboxing, it became just a money making machine.
I had the most fun in original EQ and Kunark.
My only problem with PoP and Luclin were the ports. I think porting should have been left to wizards and druids. I think they should have stopped with PoP. I also disagree with the increased level caps that came along. Increashing level caps just leads to mudflation. The only thing that would get me to go back to EQ is a vanilla pre luclin server. I'd re-up in a second if they offered one. Those were some great times and i expect if they offered that they would get a decent enough population on one server to enjoy it once again. It would be even better if it was a slow progression server that stopped with Velious.
Hmmm
I would have to say somewhere after LDON ruined it for me. I liked Velious, PoP, Kunark, but after those it started to get a little meh. I bought most expacs up to 2004 and enjoyed playing the game for the most part, but I jumped on EQ2 and haven't looked back since.
The original EQ was great, Kunark was phenominal, Velious was spectacular, Luclin was bleh, and PoP wouldn't have been to bad If it didn't require tone of questing to get Keyed for the outer planes.. After about 3 months of PoP, I was forced to leave due to the headaches and stress it caused.. Also, ever since Luclin came out, many of the end game hard to get items from previous expansions became so obsolete and good items with haste and other nice abiltiies became to common. Basically all the work I've put in to acquire the end game loot always changed with each expansion after Kunark,, although it became more troublesome, tedious and less fun after Velious..
Rallithon Oakthornn
(Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
i'd say Kunark. the game was always so teeming with life until the landmass started growing by leaps and bounds. every expansion was one more nail in the coffin. making all lower level zones seem so lifeless.
not at all unique to EQ1 tho. happened with pretty much any other MMO that started releasing expansion packs.
nobody seems to pay any mind to the simple idea of trying to keep a good ratio of players per square mile.
expansion packs should generally (unless the world started out too small or is getting overcrowded) add more content, more mobs, spells, abilities, quests, graphics, sounds, but WITHOUT increasing the size of the world. there are so many old areas that could be fleshed out much better with more content. extra graphical details, extra buildings, POIs, lore, mobs, npcs, whatever. also the bottom %20 or so of the worst content could be upgraded. that is the worst models, textures and landscapes could be redone or greatly improved. adding dungeons and other smaller areas (maybe interiors of buildings that were originally not explorable) is fine in my book.
you DON'T need to add more square mileage to the world.
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Corpus Callosum
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EQ was one of the best games ever created, the game rocked my socks untill Luclin came out which was the expansion past Ruin of Kunark. Luclin and the nexus made it hard for alot of the vets to continue the game not just because the high graphical requirements for some of the zones, but it also killed the Wizard and Druid classes for transportation income with the stupid books allowing you to get to specific zones faster. I actually liked looking for a druid or wiz or even running to my location through different zones, made it feel more of a real/large world.
EQ came out with way too many expansions that ruined the game and it sucks because it was soooooo gooooooood.
Gates of Discord.
It was released around the time when some serious MMO competition (WoW and EQ2) were in beta, so maintaining a regular guild roster was harder than it had ever been, and it was an incredibly rushed expansion. I was in a hardcore raiding guild at the time enjoying EQ to its full, but GoD was a real strain.
The content was incredibly difficult for all guilds, even the ones in full Plane of Time / LDoN gear. For more casual or up-and-coming players, not having that gear, made the content perhaps the hardest it had ever been in EQ. There were some easier zones, but the rewards were awful.
Instances like Ikkinz and Tacvi were, at first, incredibly frustrating. They were improved and rebalanced later, but for those of us at the cutting edge of content, it felt like work. I suppose we have ourselves to blame for pushing so hard, but the game had been catering to this kind of playstyle since Kunark, and it was something we enjoyed... GoD was just too damn hard.
Now that I think back, with rose-tinted spectacles, seeing the beefiest tanks get 2-shot by trash mobs was pretty cool now that I think about it. At the time it felt like SOE had sapped all of the fun out of the game. But like I said, there were shiny distractions around the corner and they turned out to be more fun.
Still waiting for your Holy Grail MMORPG? Interesting...
Luclin.
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I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave.
Original SUCKED
Kunark-good
Velious-AWESOME
Luclin-Meh
PoP-the end, thanks for screwing us with no kiss SoE SUCKS
If you have any questions please ask. I have moved on to WoW from eq and no longer have any desire to play a dead game. Thank you. (posted by another selling his account in EQ1)
Planes of Power ended it for me.
I could deal with nexus Scions, but once we had world wide travel via PoP books, the game world lost its "bigness" to me.
_____________________________
"Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit"
Luclin started going downhill. Pop ruined it, but I held on till just after GoD.
It was mostly my elitist raiding guild that eventually turned me off for good.
Yeah this was where I had thought the game really went downhill.....I remember when they were beta testing GoD the only people they had testing it (from my server anyway) were only the guilds that were PoTime flagged.......The reason why it was so hard is that many of the testers were time geared where most of us had very poor gear in comparison.........I was fine with PoP and Luclin.......... The next expansion (OoW) after GoD really cemented the deal and completely destroyed the economy........ I stayed a week or two after it released but at that time you could see what was happening and it was time to go.
One expansion. It's called PoP.
Not that I was a strong fan of either Luclin or Velious. Luclin probably is the expansion with the most completely wasted zones. Whoever went to Twilight Sea or Scarlet Desert? (other than maybe for the VT key)
Luclin killed alot of things and the major thing was the market in east commons tunnel , i started hating eq since that .
Also i may be mad but i liked the old avatars better :P ,
Luclin killed it for me
Until that point, EQ, Kunark and Velious were pure bliss.
Shadows of Luclin was the expansion that ruined the game for me. The game was such a wonderful coherent fantasy world untill the moon was introduced where cats lived.
What drugs were the developers smoking when coming up with that one. PoP finished of the game for me with the books. That ruined the cohesive world EQ felt like. I will list some major things that killed the game for me in these two expansions.
1. The Lore being ruined with Cats on a moon, aliens.
2. Luclin Spires
3. Beastlord Class
4. The Bazaar
5. The new graphic update to player models
6. The Books (Planes of Power)
7. Killing of the Gods (Planes of Power)
Anyhow I wish there was a trilogy server up to Velious I could play on for many years to come. It is a nice dream that maybe one day will come to past.
EQ was good up until Planes of Poop
Original release - Awesome
First 3 Planes added via free patching - Horrible. I hate raiding and the gear was no-trade which is the standard way of forcing players to raid or become second class citizens.
Kunark - Good
Various free zones patched - OK except The Warrens which introduced trivial loot code, an artificial mechanic which prevented higher level players from gaining drops that were considered beneath their needs. Such mechanics have no place in MMOGS.
Velious - Great
Luclin - Ok
Planes of Power - Horrible. This raiding expansion was the first expansion to be released after Brad McQuaid left SOE. It alienated soloers and small group players who were crafters by adding an upper tier of crafting items that only raiders would have access to the ingredients needed. It also signaled the new direction SOE and Smedley wanted for Everquest which was forced grouping, specifically raiding.
Legacy of Ykesha - Ok
Lost Dungeona of Norrath - Horrible. This expansion introduced instancing and more forced grouping to Everquest since soloers could not enter any of the dungeons which required a minimum of 2 persons to enter.
I started right around when Luclin was launched and I think it should have been the last expansion pack. The Nexus was a good transportation system that made for a very good socializing area. I remember chatting with the other people waiting for the port to activate. With PoK now, it's just run to port, click, poof, you're there.
The Bazaar was a nice feature too when it was added (I know about the EC tunnel, but I think the Bazaar added a useful function that didn't take away too much from the game).
If they created a server that was a slow progression to luclin, I would definitely resubscribe. Even just a slow progression to Velious would be fine.
I would hve to say that it was the Luclin expansion that ended my EQ fun.
Luclin and every expansion after are complete garbage.
Really, it wasn't just adding new zones to EQ that ruined things; higher level players need somewhere to go. What hurt the game was them getting rid of any reason to go to old zones.
Part of the beauty of EQ was its world, and there is nothing sadder in the game than to see places like Qeynos, Halas, and Freeport EMPTY. They should have kept those places as hubs for trading, training, selling, and other stuff. WOW does this (although I am not praising WOW); WOW keeps Stormwind and Ironforge alive.
To sum it up, TWO things ruined EQ:
1) POK
2) Those darn teleportation stones.