Frostreaver, Lethar And You - EverQuest Goes To The Polls

Yesterday, Wilhelm tipped me to a very interesting development over at EverQuest that I might otherwise have missed. I don't really keep up with the news on the original game any more and Darkpaw's PR Dept. doesn't seem to like sending out emails every time someone changes a comma in a quest dialog, the way some of them do. 

What's happening is that they're running a poll to decide the format of the next Time Locked Progression server, which isn't even due to launch until May 2026. That's quite some lead time to start discussing how it's going to work but this isn't some box-ticking exercise designed to make it look as though players have some agency when really they don't.

For a start, there's not just one poll. There are three. And if you click through you'll find there are more than twenty questions to answer in all! The categories are Expansion Unlocks, Special Rules and Bonuses and they cover everything from what should be available right from the start to whether there should be open PvP. 

The tally on that last one is closer than I would have expected:  22% For and 78% Against. The polls have only been open for a day or so, though, and they don't close until 15 January, so there's plenty of time for that ratio to change. 

In fact, there's time for everything to change because another unusual aspect of the process is that you can change your vote as often as you want. It's an ongoing evaluation and people are encouraged to debate the details in the separate forum threads that accompany every question in the polls and thereby change hearts and minds. And votes. 

I remember ArenaNet running a very similar, albeit not as well-structured, discussion process in Guild Wars 2 concerning the never-ending, grindingly slow revamp of World vs World. They had the conversation first, as I recall, and then there was a vote at the end. It was a long drawn-out waste of everyone's time, not least because almost all the developers who were working on it either left or got moved to other areas of responsibility long before anything was decided, only no-one at ANet thought to mention it until years later.

 

This seems far more focused and purposeful, with timescales and dates that everyone knows will be kept. Whatever the conclusion, there will be a fresh TLP server next year, just in time for Summer. Actually, there are going to be two of them but I'll get to that in a minute.

After more than twenty-five years, it's no surprise that the core audience for EQ consists of hardened veterans, most of them competitive raiders. For them, the game is more like an eSport than an MMORPG and both the tone and nature of the commentary in the threads seems to substantiate that perspective. As a complete outsider to that way of looking at the game, I found it very instructive to hear people explaining, quite cogently, what they were looking for and what they wanted to avoid.

Even in 2025 I think EverQuest retains something of its reputation as a difficult, slow, unforgiving game in which grind and repetition are necessary to progress. This is very clearly not what most of the people who've taken the trouble to vote and comment in these polls so far believe. 

About the only thing they seem to find too slow is the speed at which they can get to the next expansion. Multiple commenters make the observation that the game isn't difficult now and probably never was. It's just much too slow. 

They also think the reason most, if not all, TLP servers lose their populations after a few months has nothing to do with people not liking the later expansions. Instead it's all about having to slog through artificially long periods before they can get to the next unlock and the next raid tier, thanks to the pre-set times always being far too long.

Perhaps the oddest thing to me was the way everyone seemed to want to get past the Classic/Kunark/Velious eras as fast as conceivably possible, many wishing to skip them entirely. Far from the base game and its first two expansions being revered as possibly the best opening salvo of any MMORPG, the first couple of years of EQ's life are now seen as not much more than an annoying speed-bump on the way to the good stuff.

There was a lot of support for starting at Planes of Power,  itself seen as merely an aperitif before the real Golden Age of Norrath, which now appears to begin with the opening of the Gates of Discord. To quote one commenter "So tired of early content, the game doesn't even start to be fun until Gates."

 

GoD was, of course, the expansion that did its absolute best to send most of Norrath's population scurrying for cover in Azeroth the moment World of Warcraft arrived. Its sequel, Omens of War has always been popular but it's fascinating to observe the complete rehabilitation of the once-despised Gates of Discord.

Lost Dungeons of Norrath, however, always very close to the top of any list of my own favorite expansions and certainly my peak for social gameplay, appears to be widely dismissed and occasionally derided. I'm fairly sure that's because it held little interest for raiders even at the time. It was a superb expansion for introducing diffident outdoor and solo players to the joys of dungeons and full groups, building their confidence and teaching them the techniques required to succeed. But of course no-one has the slightest need for any of that now.

When Wilhelm told me all of this was happening, he wondered if it might be a response to the success of The Heroes' Journey, the pirate server whose owners Daybreak is currently taking to court. I don't think that can be the case, given the options being polled. Even though most respondents are broadly in favor of everything happening a lot faster, what they want to speed up is the time between expansion unlocks, not the xp rate itself. 

Most seem to feel leveling is so fast already it's trivial. Their problems never revolve around the journey to the cap, only what to do when they get there. The constant complaint is that all the options being polled are too long and people will leave because they'll have weeks in the endgame of each expansion with nothing left to achieve there.

Having scanned the options and taken the temperature, I very much doubt I'll bother voting at all. I was quite keen on the idea of a THJ-style server with accelerated xp and enhanced soloability but that's very far from what's being suggested here. Frostreaver (The name's already set - no voting on that, this time.) is just another raid-centric server with no particular appeal for anyone else.

But then there's Lethar.

In August, Darkpaw plans on launching a second TLP server and they're not taking votes or inviting feedback on this one. Well, not yet, anyway. Maybe that will come although the announcement suggests otherwise. 

This other new server, Lethar, is coming in August. It will have as its USP a brand new ruleset called called Personal Loot, about which nothing more is yet known.

Lethar will also start with The Serpent's Spine and previous content unlocked, all seven years and eleven expansions of it. TSS was Sony Online Entertainment's partially successful attempt to reboot the game by adding a complete, new leveling path from creation to cap, alongside - as opposed to instead of - all the others. 

It was generally reckoned to be a good expansion and it did appear to attract quite an influx of new players for a while. My guess is that if Darkpaw is planning on mopping up any disaffected Heroes' Journey players still willing to give them the time of day, Lethar and its mysterious Personal Loot Ruleset might be the bait.

I'll await further news with interest. The notion of a fast track through old Norrath with no group required does have its appeal. That said, it has to be remembered just what "fast" means in this context. I suspect even if Darkpaw went the SWtoR route and tacked on a truly massive multiplier, progress would still feel lethargic by modern standards. 

Not to mention there are now thirty-two expansions, which is why, even at what's been the most accelerated pace seen so far, it still takes about seven years to get from one end to the other. I don't imagine ever giving even one full year to an MMORPG again, let alone more than half a dozen and if I ever did, it surely wouldn't be one I've played for many years already.

I think it's time to acknowledge publicly that my time in EverQuest, as anything other than an occasional tourist, is over. I hope these new servers do well and I wouldn't rule out dropping in on one or other to see how things go but the chances of my ever settling down on either of them is so small as to be functionally non-existent.

Unless the Personal Loot ruleset is truly revolutionary, of course. But what are the chances of that?