I played EQ2 for about 3 months and just left. Mostly MMO's for me are just not there - MMO requires you to dedicate all your game time too them. So with that I left EQ2 just like WoW and all the rest.

However, out of the MMO's I have tried or played I must admit EQ2 gave the best bang for the buck! I tried EQ2 at launch and was very turned off by the forced grouping. Now three years later it is a very different game and has probably the most content of any MMO right now.

I may play WoW again, but I've done two stints and I got really bored really fast during the second stint (BC). Probably need to transfer back to my original server (Mal'Ganis) if I decide to play again.

Maybe EQ2 will be just a flash in the pan for me? So far in the last year I've played six different MMOs including one beta (WoW, LoTRO, AO, EQ2, GW, TR [beta]). While waiting for EQ2-RoK to release I almost loaded up EQ1 when I saw I had a free three weeks on my account. Sadly I'm also wanting to try AoC and WAR.

A.O.C.

If its not there, then I'm just considering this genre dead and dying. I kinda think that's what this whole thing needs, which is a reboot and restart. Kind of what Baldur's Gate and NWN did for fantasy that hadn't been able to really crack Gold Box game-style play and just sweeping away the stagnant ideas.

On thread though, if I had to return to an MMORPG at the moment because someone had a gun to my head, I'd choose EQII as my drug of choice as well. The slow levelling progression is for the 'hardcore.' I assume that no one really uses it and it is just a feature that is included so that it can pay homage to EQI -- I assume the reason it is listed in PROs is because its optional... how do you include something optional in the CON section?

I went back and played EQ2 for a about a week. My impresssion is I couldn't get over the bland combat and horrible animations. Even if the animations were good looking they would suck because they lag so bad. For instance every time I pulled a monster with my bow it would start running at me before the bow animation went off. There are several other little annoyances like this, for instance when you ride a griffon the feet don't move at all which makes it look like your riding some mechanical ride instead of a living animal. Characters often get stuck in previous animations when they should transition to a new one.

Beyond that you get way too many freaking skills. By level 12 I had 20+ skills that in no way repeated so I had to open a third quick action bar to house them. Do I really need 3 different taunt skills at level 10? That combined with the combat lag makes combat horrid. Basically you press all your skill buttons then press them again when their timers run out. This may be fun if they had some kind of tactical use but that's negated by the lag which gives you no connection with what animation the button you just hit is supposed to correspond to. Needless to say this made my interupting taunt skill all but useless for interupting anyone.

These problems may have been overlooked when the original EQ came out, but in the post WoW world I just can't play a game this raw, especially since it's been out now for over two years. I will say this though it is cool that SOE gave me a free ten days of play on my old account and didn't even require I give them a credit card or anything, so if you are interested in the game and played it previously you can pretty much go play for ten days with no strings attached.

I am a peep who plays EQ2. However, I'm also a n00b who has a deathly fear of grouping. Soloing has been quite rewarding for me (my main is lvl 41 now) but I've derived much of my enjoyment in-game from crafting.

Up until the most recent expansion, crafting was a reasonably fun, reasonably challenging way to make stuff that occasionally other players could use. By "reasonably challenging," I mean that one used to have to keep an eye on the item's durability, using one's personal "power" to create an item at its highest level.

Since the release of the new expansion, though, there seems to be little challenge to crafting. I never dip below 90% power and items are virtually guaranteed to be created at highest quality without my even trying. With such little effort needed, the forums are now full of crafters describing how they can craft while eating dinner, watching TV, playing another game, etc. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but when I'm playing a game, I have no desire to make it interesting by doing something ELSE during it. Personally, crafting is much less engaging now, with the lesser challenge. No challenge=no interest.

Also with the pretty impressive increase in quest reward item quality in the new zones (very much like Burning Crusade rendered many of the "old world" zones obsolete), virtually no items below crafter level 30 sell on the broker, even at a loss. So that means that a player hoping to to level a crafter has to fully subsidize her/his crafting with adventuring for almost half the character's life.

I don't doubt that crafting will be optimized again soon enough and some of the challenge/interest will return. From all accounts, the person in charge of crafting at SOE is, in-game, an actual crafter. She's made great strides in keeping crafting alive, lucrative, and so on.

Having people gank you in Vangaurd was the absolute worst.

Hehe i was on the FFA server and was expecting that. What i wasn't expecting was trying to craft something in EQII and when it failed it killed me.

This was at launch so i think it's changed now. If i remember they retooled their crafting system back when they redid their graphics.