You're absolutely right. The game tries to cater to different playing styles.

LDoN was an attempt to accomodate both single groups and raid forces. Some people seem to be missing that point.

As I said before, there is abundant content for solo players in this game. LDoN is not.

"I need to start a game at the beginning of its life cycle rather then halfway near death."

This is the start of your "EQ is dying" premise. The problem is that you never actually explain yourself, and describe WHY EQ will die. You suggest that plat does not leave the economy and prices will drop. Yep, I certainly see that happening.

You also describe that UO had the same phenomenon and it died. Yep, I'm with you so far.

I was waiting for you to draw a line between those two... oh well.

"The slow death of EQ began with the over uberness of PoP and Sony's efforts to maintain a strong high end game."

Sony had been doing this since day one. The "epics" were the start of it. Before epics, you did not NEED a guild for just about anything.

In Velios huge high-end time-sinks were added.

In Luclin, high-end guilds had to work for six months to get into Vex Thal.

In PoP, the teired planes were the ultimate expression of that progression... so far.

What PoP did do definitively, which is unique, is to move the high-end players into areas that people of the same level, but outside of the uber-guilds cannot get to at all. In Luclin only Vex Thal was that way. PoP created, in essense, another game that you could get to from EQ.

This has been beneficial for those of us who raid less often and see the game as a social event rather than a numbers-farming exercise (not that the latter is bad, it's just another way of playing). Now, we don't compete with those guilds much at all if ever.

LDON was a stop-gap. It tacked on a few high-end raids when it became clear that PoTime guilds were going to beat Quarm before the post-LDON expansion was out.

This is all in line with the ebb and flow of EQ, and people have been predicting its death since LONG before you started playing.

"The high end game dishes out more plat, more uber items, higher lvl characters."

Well yes, yes and no. Characters don't really progress a whole lot past the first 65 levels and 100AA. Yes, you get better, but at a much more incremental pace than you did before. Equipment is what it's all about in the high-end game.

"The characters distribute their wealth to the economy via the Bazaar."

No. They do not. Most items from the elemental plains and EVERYTHING from PoTime are nodrop, so that process takes quite a while. If by "high-end game" you mean post-50, then yes. But see below for my analysis of why post-50 isn't what it used to be, and why that's good.

"The result is the new player doesn't need to quest for items at their level. It becomes more economical to purchase items from other players."

You're sing a change in the way EQ stratifies. That's good for the long-term, not bad.

"LDON is the finishing nail. LDON is very fun, but in global game terms it will accelerate everyone to the 50+ range in no time flat. More of the popular zones will begin to vacate as more and more people venture to the higher zones."

Ok, here is where you start to lose me.

I've been playing the game for a long time, and I've seen people level from 1 to 50 in a few weeks since Luclin and probably before. It's all a matter of how much time you want to put into it. What HAS changed is what "50" means.

You say that the game will suffer when people leave "lower level zones".... have you counted up the number of post-50 zones in EQ? It's a staggering number. What's more, let's look at what being level 50 means:

It means that in one more level you can start doing AA.

It means that you have 15 levels ahead of you that require more time and effort than the 49 that came before.

It means that you can start to use some of the equipment that costs a lot of plat now (yes, the Wurmy is now junk, but at 50 you start to get into the "new mid-level" gear, which is NOT junk and which IS maintaining a fairly constant price range).

In terms of overall advancement, the space between 50 and 65+100AA+flags+all spells+equipment is so huge that you might as well have just started two new level-1 characters with the intent to level them to 50 each. Throw on top of that class-defining quests like epics (that people still want to do, even as their acutal value in-game wanes); trade skills (the grand-daddy of all time-sinks); faction work; and helping out friends and guild mates with all of the above... you're talking about a game that will continue to give you "things to do" for at least 2-4 years after you hit 50, which is plenty of time for Sony to add even more content to the game!

"LDON also generates lots and lots of plat. UO began to die when everyone had 10 million gold in their bank account."

Why? What connects those two events? In EQ plat is worthless beyond a certain point. You simply cannot advance past a certain level in terms of gear, using plat. Why does the availability of plat cause a problem?

"Ldon creates a lot of money"

It creates a situation where people have an added incentive to farm the money, but it actually has no more money than say, a very active Sebilis-clearing. In the same 90 minutes+ that I spend in LDON I can actually get MORE plat in Sebilis or PoG or BoT or a large number of other zones that have good cash drops and/or good bazaar-fodder.

"If everyone has 10k of Plat and high end armor"

10k plat won't buy you the SHOES for high-end armor. But again, that depends on how you define high-end.

"Theres more to the game then becoming Time enabled"

Yes! A *lot* more. I wonder if you realize how much time and effort is spent getting from 50 to Time-ready. Even if you have some god-like PC power-leveling you, it's not a quick process. There are levels, AA, flagging to be done. It's work and time, and for most of us, that work and time is the fun part, not the "you have been flagged for uberzone 27" message.

I, for one, have played this game since just after Velios came out, and I see no changes recently that make me want to stop.

Um, that never would have worked. Sense heading was always lvl based, you could only get 5 points per lvl. I hate the fact that they are getting rid of it and I have no idea why they even bothered to leave the hotkey in the game at this point.