Well, technically I suppose this is day two, or even day three for me. Day one was taken up with the server issues that Daybreak ran into, which included level 50s being created right from the get-go. After that, it was issues with login servers being strained by the mass of players trying to get in. For my specific case, I came across a new issue. I decided to create a gnome enchanter named Stargrace. Ak’anon was absolutely packed with players. Over 100 in the zone. I slowly made my way to Steamfont, and was met with another 100 plus players in that instance.
Now, Daybreak added a new function to starter zones that allowed multiple instances of the same zone up at once, and players could use /pick to travel between those instances every 5 minutes. This appeared to have worked for all starter zones – except steamfont. I didn’t know this at the time, and figured they had just disabled it for everyone instead. Channels like general were also being hammered, so they appeared broken on my gnome and I didn’t have access to anything except the enchanter channel.
Still, I put my LFG tag on and headed to the pit which was swamped with skeleton, rats, drake, and every other imaginable gnome class possible. I turned off grass particles since I could barely see and tried to tag a mob here and there.
The thing about the classic server is that even though we’re all trying to ‘re-live’ days gone by – a majority of players still want to do so on their own terms, which means solo. I saw perhaps one or two groups looking for more, but for the most part players ran around on their own competing with everyone else. The years of playing MMOs on our own have cultivated this notion that grouping is bad or not necessary. Thing is, this is EverQuest, and grouping is absolutely always the best way to go. You get a bonus for being in a group, mobs die faster in a group, and it’s just plain more fun.
I randomly sent tells and invited people to my group since so many seemed reluctant on getting one started. Really, that’s all it takes. No one wants to take the reigns so if you want to get something done you’re best off doing it yourself. Experience was still slow but that was because of a lack of mobs to defeat, especially with no /pick to make use of. Still, our rag tag team of gnomes got a few levels, and I left the first day at level 3. I decided to take a bit of a break to see if things died down any before making another attempt (note: no, they did not die down at all).