EQ Population: we can make a differenceFollow

I was over at a friend's house and mentioned to his wife and him (whom used to be guilded with me back in the day) what was going on with the game since the last time we had played together --seriously about 4 years ago and casually a bit since then, but not in a while (so lobby and corpse summoning wasn't new to them for example):

-no corpse runs for your gear since you repop dressed, or no need to lobby summon if you aren't worried about xp (this dropped their jaws)

-mercenaries (something he had been ranting for since LDoN)

-the 51/50 server (they said about time about the starting at level 51 thing. The 50 AAs are a nice carrot but nothing special. The gear set is compelling --who doesn't want to be max-statted?. But the thing that got them most excited was the skills/spells all being up to cap for level 51)

Needless to say they popped in the Old EQ disks and renewed their subs. Imagine if they hadn't played since GoD how long that list could be.

I can't promise they (or I) will stay around for the next 5 years, but we might.

Alot of posts in various forums complain about SOE not marketing EQ. For example Warhammer spam emails me once a month and I quit that shortly after its launch. Many current EQ players know former EQ players in real life. Many old guilds could email out to the old membership roster, and so on.

My point being, instead of being upset at the lack of marketing for what is possibly the second golden age of EQ, take it viral. If the players that care about EQ bring more players into the game, even if every active sub only brought back one friend... oh wait, that would be huge.

I brought back 2, and I know you all can beat me at this.

I've only met one person in my area that played EQ and it was 02 or something. The manager at EB Games is like you still play that old game, like the age of the game has anything to do with the quality.

I hate to say it but it is ALL Marketing. Old players, people who never heard or seen EQ. Whole generations of players that their parents played do not know the game exist anymore. Nothing on a store shelf. Nothing in gaming mags. A recent post here asking where to buy a gaming card? Hard to find in a store (antique). Point I am saying is the game started by word of mouth in beta. Took off like a rocket. And a lot of new games are based on the knowledge EQ set as the inventor. But things have changed. Kids do not go out a play baseball anymore. They play Wii, Their adventure is Wow...in my opinion took the place of Saturday cartoons I enjoyed as a kid. EQ just has to let the world know it is out there. To last this long means they are doing something right. All I want them to do is publicly brag a little.

It's true that an awful lot of game info is unavailable or very hard to find. For example, just TRY to find what the new potions like Spider's Bite actually DO. Even on this site! Try to find a complete, current and accurate source on class aa's... and I mean complete. Many pages on this topic on the web are so dated they don't go post-70, or they still harken back to a time when you had to spend so many AA's on the first set before you could buy higher aa's.

I've seen spell guides on major sites that still list spells coming every 5th level, like it used to be, what, 5 years ago??

It's definitely gotta be frustrating for a truly new player to make their way through the huge "thicket" that is the EQ "knowledge bank" these days. And this isn't like in the old days where a lot of this stuff was NOT known and part of the challenge was to discover it. Because that affected EVERYBODY, not just noobs. Now it's like some kind of initiation "rite of passage" to join some strange secret society; problem is sush societies are exclusive and selective by nature where presumably we all WANT new people to start playing EQ!