An honest review from a new player who gave Chainbreaker a try. I'm not familiar with Secrets or his previous work (though I take it as read that he's well known and highly regarded in the community).
The server has good bones. A great setup. You aren't confined to a class but you're under no obligation to reincarnate. There's a definite sweatiness and hardcore aspect -- folks grinding out epics x 10 -- but you're not required to adopt that behavior yourself. The sky really is the limit. And it has a lot of personality to it.
Perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY, they've put a lot of work into taking the acrimony out of EverQuest (imagine that). Kill some rare NPC in a group and you at least tagged it? Everyone gets THEIR OWN loot. THERE IS NO NEED TO COMPETE. EVERYONE WINS.
Unfortunately, this latter aspect hasn't been driven home or is outright ignored. When I first logged in there was an argument occurring on OOC about training. Personally, in less a week, I was trained for an insignificant camp (pointless because I can just immediately return to the area), had people trying to sneak or run past me fighting my way to four different LGUK camps so they could snag it (while we were having an OOC conversation about the pointlessness of this behavior) -- each time me moving away to go somewhere else to respect their camp of an area, just for them to follow me to the next one, and one cat sent me heated tells that they had been "camping" some arbitrary NPC (that had been up for a while when I got there and the person was nowhere to be seen). Explaining the server rules and the pointlessness of competing fell on deaf ears each time. It's like folks can't help themselves.
It's a good server with a fantastic design populated by an unchecked or uninformed demographic (existing players would claim that these are "newer players" but I had to remind a couple of advanced players as well) that doesn't want to embrace that design. Like old, latent EQ traumas, a need to compete (even pointlessly) or troll other players holds sway, and they haven't found an appropriate rule to promulgate or mindset to promote. Maybe in time.
If you can take that in stride, this server is worth your time. Single toon experiences are rare. Good ones doubly-so.
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