Speculation: EQ1 to open a F2P serverFollow

With the news that EQ2 is opening a free to play server next month, it seems to me that the same concept could easily be utilized for both EQ1 and Vanguard. Sony states that the idea is "to grow the gaming community through new players. The free adventure service allows new players to experience more quality content and increased participation than the previously offered 14-day trial."

Basically the free server would allow you to level up in the older content but deny you free access to certain races, classes, and newer content without either switching to a subscription model or paying a la carte for those features.

If SOE has the resources to implement this for EQ2, the only thing stopping them from doing this with EQ or VG is the time and money to code the F2P server's different ruleset. I think that this would be an outstanding way to bring new people into all of these games and hope that they have plans to expand this idea to (all of) their other titles.

We know that they mentioned adding a new server after the recent server merges... might it be a Free server?

Problem is, we don't have to inform the EQ community about the Game.
We need to inform the new, never played a MMORPG game or the player who has evolved form a hand controller to a computer keyboard.
So what is SoE's plan to do about Marketing the game?
Free is never good. Shows something to be worthless.
We already have word of mouth advertisement. That is what has kept the game going for so long now. I have started a couple of post regarding solutions. One would be to put 99 cent disk on display or counter top, in stores, to entice people to impulse buy. There is NO market presence for EQ 1 in the general public.
Mayong was a bad idea, what they needed to do is make Mayong a beginning server. 1-50 so all the new players or people creating a new character would start up in a group friendly, highly populated server. Then let guilds or servers recruit players to their side from that server. Sort of like a rookie camp, and of coarse Guild's would have to have scouts in there....hey maybe creating new game play. What a concept. When a player reached level 51 he or she would have one Free transfer to a higher play server.
Still would allow players to join any server at a low level but we all know the population for new players is spread so thin between all the servers. I think a lot is lost by players being Power leveled in a weekend, loosing all the concept of the lower, skill building, game knowledge play that some of the "Old World EQ" gave and is still there.

links to population posts:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=1&mid=1228771497304713574&page=2&howmany=50#msg12373175295223103
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=1&mid=1248986809312368167#msg124908859319617656

Actually when you look at other games that have gone this way, like Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO), their monthly subscription base doubled after going F2P. Sure there are mini-transactions you can buy to open up other parts of the game, but you DON'T HAVE TO. They have implemented a system where, through missions/adventures, you can earn the in-game currency to make more purchases.

I can attest to the success of their formula as I was playing DDO on f2p, my son was, and my brother was. Now my son and my brother both have monthly subscriptions

So, in speculation: it could work. But the real question is whether Sony can implement a model to make enough interest in the "free" game to garner added interest in the "subscription" game. They have successful models to emulate. Of course they already have some experience in this market with FreeRealms, but it would take a lot of work to make EQ1 f2p.