I have been in RPG since, well let me not say but its been decades. From what i read it is starting to sound like all the promises that the old game UO (Ultima Online) made and never delivered. Think about this for a sec and i am only going to predict what will happen on one topic mentioned in the article,
*** "PC's will be able to buy plots of land and build a simple, upgradeable structure on it. Invite friends to locate nearby and reach a minimum level to become a community with a guard tower and NPC guards patrolling your community which now can support community stuctures eventually resulting in playhouses providing entertainment as in weddings, plays, tournaments and so forth."***
If this is true then what will happen is people will use this plot of land, home, or Tower or even Castle to store their items instead of the bank for unlimited space and convineince causing lag in certain zones. How many plots of land are going to be available for building? And what will happen when all those plots are full and there are non around? Are we going to have ANOTHER Realestate price war on E-bay for these homes like in UO? I remeber those days far to clearly and if that is the case I AM NOT INTERESTED IN EQ2. I owned a Mages Tower really close to Skara Brae and had to worry about thieves and PK'er (which may not be a problem in this case) every freaking time i would open the door. Well there is my 2cp on that subject matter of Land. There are other factors mentioned that also emulate the things UO did but if have played the game you will see them as well and touch base on the other subjects for me. I wont add the other subject comparisons now because it will be to darn long to type it and dont have the time right now.

Keuamen B'Hunter
Realm of Xegony
Guild of the Phantom Dragons

apart from anything else, the plot changes sounds crap, like the paladins moving out of freeport and the rogues out of freeport. and they wont take down eq-they'll say "oh no, we'll leave it up ofr those players who do not wish to upgrade" but they will never update it. why the hell are they ******* this game up? the bugs in the original arnt even fixed!

Personally, I will buy EQ2, and since it doesn't come out until 2003, that should be plenty of time to make sure my system is up to par for it...

But... If EQ2 is as good as they think it is going to be (i.e. better than EQ1) which it probably will... I am already beginning to lose interest in playing EQ1... I mean, why keep playing the first one if I just have to start over in a year?

This definitely will affect the amount of time I play EQ1 ...

They should find some way to give benefits to people who have been playing EQ1 for years. Not necessarily a character transfer, but maybe advantages like starting with an uber item, or having an easy way to raise skill levels... ... even some sort of thing to personalize my character so that everyone knows that I'm an old timer would be nice.

It is a bit irritating to me, but such is the way of things. And I love EQ ... it is just gonna be the transition that sucks. They aught to make sure that EQ2 is ultra flexible so that they don't have to release an EQ3, because I don't know if I would be able to put up with this a second time...

Edited, Wed Apr 24 10:33:03 2002

if i wanted daoc id play daoc the game we know and love is everquest if they make these changes they can take my 13.00 dollars a month and stick it up their ***

I have been playing this game virtually since it came out. My first thought when they announced EQ2 was of Myth the game I played before it. Even after the second game came out more people played were still on the old servers for the first game. I think Verant has seriously underestimated the level of addiction that EQ has on its players. Not just that after a long time of playing you start to identify with your char, and it seems very difficult to simply stop paying your dues and let your char disapear. So for me to move on to the new game it would cost at least the cost of the game, and 26$ a month to keep both accounts. I like EQ Ive made a lot of friends on this game, and even though it really sucks sometimes I generally enjoy playing. I know Im not going to be moving on to a EQ2, and I know most of my friends wont either. I honestly think that Verant/Sony should look at the market their trying to sell this game to, and see if it is really ready to move on. Maybe in 2-3 years after PoP this will be a good idea, but right now I think the more cost effective and financially sound idea is perfecting this game and maintaining the customer base you have.

Personally, I've loved the fact that EQ1 has remained intact for sooo long, just continually improving... I would much rather them just keep adding to EQ1 then creating a whole new EQ2. They are changing sooo many of the systems, and from the text given by Allakhazam, it appears more like DAoC. Which is HORRID compared to EQ. EQ is such a great freaking system, why are they fixing something that's not broken? Why are they making another game when the original is the best ever? Just continually evolve EQ1 and you'll always be competitive. But what this means is, EQ2 will come out, EQ1 will basically spiral downhill because they'll never upgrade it, and EQ2 will end up being pathetic like diablo2.

After recovering from the initial shock, I began to see things in a different perspective:

1. After spending two years with the same few characters, it probably isn't going to hurt to let them go. It's just a game after all. I don't mourn for my defunct top-level Diablo characters, or my champion SSX skater....

2. HALLELUJAH!!! I can start EQ2 at the very beginning with everyone else. No twinks! Everyone on equal footing! Everything is a challenge, and no one knows quite what's going on! That sounds awesome.

3. It sounds like EQ2 has taken a decidedly consumerist turn. It makes sense for items to degrade over time, but only if they are used. My question is - can you be a warrior/caster/hybrid and practice a tradeskill? Or do you have to pick one at the expense of the other? I don't want only to tailor for a living in the game, but I do want the freedom to tailor, from apprenticeship to mastery.

4. Why get rid of Kunark and Velious? Why not just redesign them and keep them in? How can one "explain away" two continents? Aren't they just going to "explain them back in" for an upgrade?

5. It sounds stupidly dangerous to a) make dying less traumatic and b) basically randomize NPC guard locations (through community creation) and let MOBS chase across zones. What WOULD prevent an butt-head from leading a dozen level 40 monsters into a low level zone? Nothing! Even if my bind point is five minutes away, it would still be aggravating. I don't want to lose one of my few low-level items and be "experience indebted" because of someone else's malicious amusement.

Here's hoping they are learning from the mistakes of previous games, and not merely trying to copy bits from each.

Call me crazy, but I've always been a big fan of the change from rags to riches; always believed you don't deserve/can't appreciate the top if you've never been on the bottom.

If they immediately pull EQ1 out from under everyone, I might boycott EQ2 on principle's sake. Let the fans of god killing, powerful guilds, and uber-twinking stay where they are. The least Sony could do is gradually phase it out, perhaps one server at a time when the population drops too much.

I found this hidden on one of the pages on the EQ website. This is pretty cool. http://www.ruinsofbefallen.com/

Wow... I don't know about the rest of you but I really don't like the idea of starting over... I have a feeling all those that are for EQ2 and the whole resetting of the game probably haven't put many hours into EQ1... In the end EQ is about as good as it gets... I don't know about the rest of you but once you pass that Lvl 50 mark your pretty much set... but then again then it really gets boring... Kill blue, get 1/2 a pixel exp... kill blue get 1/2 pixel exp etc etc.. If anything fix that! Kill white get 1/2 pixel exp MY *** wtf is up with that.. the whole exp past 50 is the only thing that bothers me at ALL -- Well that and the lack of intrest to see zones i've not been in before... what's that saying? out of sight out of mind? hmm i think even though i've probably have 300+ levels involved with my chars on my account, i've probably only visited 10% of the zones... why? because i find no need.. thus the game gets boring... hey make each zone special.. with special things worthwhile to visit/kill --- don't kill the game, i've already canceled 2 other accounts that my cousins play off/on on WHY? because i guess Verant/Sony doesn't check pricewatch.com to see that Electronic Equipment and such kinda decline over time and not up (higher rates) don't give us BS explainations just tell us the truth, like "Hey we screwed up and not many bought luclin, oh and uh yah we had to raise the price because no one joined the Legends Server, ooooh yah and I guess we kinda needed to make up the money lost due to all the EQ players that had windows95 not playing anymore too" Come on, we're addicts... not stupid


*** Shout outs to all old Warcraft2 playas! watch out for warcraft3!!! Realm of Shadows 4 life!!! ***

I think it but a greedy attempt to once again ***** us out of time and money. Even with no hell levels a person would spend at LEAST a month of steady playing to reach a level that truly allows them to begain to explore norrath. Why bother getting screwed into EQ2 when DAoC gives you ALL expansions for free and is CHEAPER!! I love playin EQ but if this is true I (along with many others) will just stop playing and probably financially benefit from the extra income and money saved from no longer feeding your greedy pockets. So I really hope this is a hoax.
a concerned customer :(

Interesting features, but all I am interested in is DOWNTIME! Is there any? Every game that came out since EQ (AC, AO and DAOC) have had their own nice way of cutting severely on downtime (up to zero downtime) yet EQ requires you to sit on your butt still. I understand that they could not introduce mana potions (as in Anarchy Online with the nano-packs)in old EQ, ******** over the old memberbase that "worked" for their levels(i.e. sweated out the downtime), but surely in this new one? Current knowledge about re-spawning monsters surely must make this mmorpg-feature obsolete by now?

Simple: if there's downtime, I won't buy it. Too many alternatives are coming our way (and are here already).

Downtime= a derelict mmorpg-feature.

Cheers!

Treesong.

Come on people. First of all, according to what I've heard of the article, the game is well over a year away still (and that'll probably be pushed back at least 6 months) and only scant details have been released about it. Many of you are complaining that they should fix EQ before working on this, well, as I understand it, there are many different teams working on it, one (or more) are still working to "fix" EQ. As for losing all your old characters when EQ2 comes out, if you don't want that to happen, no one is making you buy EQ2 and quit playing EQ. How many people griped about Final Fantasy X coming out because they didn't want to have to start all over? One... maybe two.

The pure incompetence of many people just baffles me. Of course everyone loves to gripe and moan that "I pay 10-15$ per month so they should take care of me." Well, they do take care of you. Most of the monthly fee goes towards server maintenance. Yes, they make enough to pay customer service. Yes, sometimes the GMs cop attitudes and don't help when they should. All in all though, you're paying $13 a month for an everchanging game. I rarely find a static game that will last me more than a month (notable exception the XXXCraft games by Blizzard and the Ogre Battle series by Quest) so spending $13 a month vs. $50 for a new game sounds like a deal to me. This has been brought up many times in the past, just re-emphasizing.

Another thing I notice is many people are actually complaining that they're using ideas that other games have used... THAT WORKED. This, above all boggles me. If five other companies have done something similar, and it turned out to be great, then Sony would disappoint us all tremendously if they didn't follow suit. Of course, some people just like to complain. I'm sorry, I hate rants like these, I'm just tired of seeing people complain... so of course I complain too.

--Roz

I am sorry to say but needing a better pc to run the new game is yet another example of LAZY Coding. It used to be you could get fantastic graphics and effects for pc game by tight coding rather than use as much memory as you like coding. I really do wish they would start coding things neatly again rather than just demanding you buy more memory.

Why dont you crybabys just quit now and get out of us eq'ers hair for once and for all perhaps with all the pharming twinkers gone the people that really live this world can get some of our quests / gear collecting done.
I personally dont see changing to eq2 I've yet to make in west of sirens grotto and a couple high level zones in kunark I have keys for but havent been. EQ is a world to live in not a battleground for RLifers get outta our world and play a shooter or something for godz sakes.

Mwahahahaha
Whatshisname
High Shaman (luminary)
ain't gonna let ya flame personal so **** off hehe