Hmm good observations. That "state of the game" 2003 eq with always playing catch up sounds like hell. I'm glad I was saved from experiencing that. Well I kind of did in a mobile MMO. That is exactly the opposite of what I want to achieve, the size of my release game will never change. Mabye new parallel content zones will be added if population exceeds like 3000 lol. But ya as far as the solo mentality, it is really hard to avoid that. Unless you only want to log in with your friends and never on your own, everyone is going to end up different levels. This is how the mmo differs from DnD. The way the mmo gets around this is large amounts of players so there are always other people your level even if they aren't your original friends. This is obvious but I think it is valuable to think of it like that.
If there is one thing to learn from P99 it is the key to success is advertising, advertising, advertising. The amount of youtube videos and articles with "Project 1999" in the title are astounding.
Another way around this is to scrap levels entirely or make them much less consequential so everyone can play with everyone. Solo friendly leveling and focusing on endgame is another way to achieve this so everyone plays together once they reach endgame. The original game that inspired mmo's was ultima underworld, the "endgame" was when you finally left the dungeon but then the game was over.
So anyway I don't really know the right way forward but for now I think what EQ did best was the journey so my server will be all about that journey but when I make actual games in the future (from scratch using a commercial engine) I may do things a little differently and make it so a "max level" character is twice as strong as a lvl 1 so they can play together from the beginning and focus more on parallel content rather than vertical progression.
To make a popping EQ server focused on the journey requires a large playerbase and thus requires lots of advertising.
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