Would love specifics before I invest more time. So far most criticism seems to be people who specifically have an issue with Kegz (which doesn't affect me) or they don't like the fact that there are some definite ways it isn't classic Velious.
Please tell me specifics if there are other good reasons to avoid it. I was hesitant to play to begin with but I can't seem to find anyone who can give me details as to why it's a waste of time. I'd rather find out now than after I have weeks invested.
I'm bored on a bus so I'll indulge you. To understand the scope of this, it should be noted that Kegz = Toop, a notoriously retarded former player of P99 who was banned for showeq and vowed to make a better server that would put P99 out of business. He then embarked on two years of development, most of which I didn't pay any attention to. When I did find out, it was in the last few months of beta, and I decided to do some beta testing just to see what was up.
It was... grim. It seemed to be a stock PEQ repack with the expansions beyond Velious disabled. Some effort had been made to restore stuff like Temple of Cazic-Thule to its classic state, but for the most part, the server was absolutely inundated with bugs, unclassic features and improvised fixes that were wildly inaccurate. I had started off my beta testing sessions compiling a list of bugs, but it quickly got out of control as I would add 10+ entries per hour.
After a few days, I decided to post a trimmed-down version of that list with only the more glaring bugs. We're talking about things like every mob above level 40 having about three times as much hp as it should, just to give you an idea of the magnitude of these bugs. Pretty much every mob on the entire server had wrong loot, wrong pathing, wrong spawn cycles, or wrong stats/spells, but it wouldn't even be possible to list them all so I quickly realized I'd have to start with the most egregious errors.
Kegz' response to that post was... confusing. He seemed annoyed at being presented with bugs. During beta. In the bug report forum. He then proceeded to quote each and every entry with one of two responses: "this is fixed on the test port" or "this is working as intended." In either case, total bullshit -- once the server opened, I found that none of his supposed test port fixes were real, he'd just say that to get people to think development was progressing. He would also go into hilariously ill-informed arguments about how things weren't bugs because he remembered it being the way it was on the server.
I gave up on beta testing pretty quickly and decided to just come back to check it out at launch a couple of months later. So I did, and quite a lot of people were there for the server's opening, but the first week or two were plagued by a bizarre issue with experience gains; namely, people were getting maybe a quarter of the experience they should. It was taking people an entire day to reach level 6, for instance. You had to kill 100+ mobs to get from level 3 to 4. Kegz tried to fix this over the course of the next few days, but I think it was over a week before the exp felt anything like classic.
It was just as much of a big-riddled mess as the beta was, too. I don't think I noticed any fixes between my first attempt at testing and the server's launch, except I believe they took care of most of the instances of mobs having triple hp. Most quests didn't work, most named mobs dropped nothing, mobs had crazy pathing, one zone (I think Everfrost) would crash every fifteen minutes, and so on. It was extremely bad.
As people started to report more and more issues to the epicemu.com forum, Kegz got increasingly passive-aggresive. He would get visibly angry at the fact that people were revealing the server's problems. He even started to surreptitiously edit people's posts to make them sound less dissatisfied -- no joke, he would literally manipulate people's posts so they would seem like the poster didn't think the bugs were a big deal, and that the server was great. It was some North Korea level bullshit.
Now, during the entire development process, Kegz had had his Sleeper thread on here. Up until launch, nobody gave a flying fuck about it, and it just consisted of Kegz copy-pasting his server advertisement every month or so. He'd boast of creating an amazing, flawless server with hitherto unheard-of quality development, including a hilariously overrated "holy grail" of classic info consisting of a binder with printouts of the entire Allakhazam website anno 2002 or something. Judging by the quality of the server, he'd taken the comment sections as scientific evidence, because who doesn't know that early Allakhazam comments were the place to find indisputable truths about Everquest?
Once the server launched, however, this thread started to see some traffic. This traffic consisted mainly of an increasing number of people pointing out how unbelievably awful the server was. Kegz would try to perform damage control, but being a sufferer of at least three different personality disorders, his damage control consisted of ferociously insulting every critic, and straight up lying about them in order to discredit their complaints (he thought). Like he would claim that someone was a hacker he'd banned and now they were trolling him by shit-talking his server, or he'd insist that we were all just one guy on alt accounts.
Then mysterious posters with very low post counts would start posting stuff like "Hey Kegz ignore the trolls, your server is amazing, love you!" complete with the same wording he had been using in his own posts -- he was particularly fond of the 'rustled jimmies' gem of wit, and every fake poster would claim to be 'having a blast', those exact words, which is the same phrase he'd been using earlier. A moderator eventually put a stop to his split personality disorder, and the thread was rickshawed (the first time around).
I quit playing around this time and gave my characters to Friday so I only have second-hand information about how the server itself turned out afterwards, but as far as I remember, players left in droves until it was pretty much a ghost town. On here, he somehow got a moderater to un-rickshaw his thread, but it just picked up where it left off with people taking the piss out of his server and him having an epic meltdown. It culminated in him literally spamming the thread with copy-pasted nonsense until it got permanently rickshawed (and I think he got banned, too).
This wasn't the end, though. I can't remember in which exact order the following happened, but the server was closed to the public and became some sort of invite-only thing or something. I dunno. Also, around this time, EQMac closed and Kegz tried to get their playerbase to come to The Sleeper. I don't know how succesful this was. Then P99 was hit by a series of DDoS attacks which Rogean traced back to Kegz' domain, and although he denied any responsibility for this, he soon vanished from the public eye and - I believe - handed the server to somebody else. Now it seems to be back under his caring guidance, which can only end well.
