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Originally posted by Anonymous
If you have a regular group of friends who are leveling at the same rate then this game can be fun.

Hower, I played Everquest 2 until December 2004 and it was an unpleasant experience.

The game was full of bugs on both the server and your own interface. Crash to desktop was common and I finally quit when the servers went down for several days. In game customer service took hours.

I disliked the following gameplay issues:

1. Massive death penalties If you die you get an experience penalty, a temporary penalty (several days) to statistics, and armor damage that needed repairs.
2. Shared experience debt - if a party member died all the party members had an experience penalty. This resulted in people refusing to group with anyone they did not know. On one occasion I joined a group and they all died while I was running to join them. The group then disbanded. So, I had a huge experience debt and never actually got to play with the group. Most of the time, you gained experience faster by soloing.
3. Shard(corpse) recovery - In addition to the experience penalty, if you died you suffered a temporary (several days long) penalty to your statistics. The experience penalty could be cleared by running and recovering your shard at the location where you died. Runs back to shards could be long and fraught with danger as you fought your way through the mobs. Bad luck if you died at the bottom of a dungeon and you were unable to fight your way back because some of your party had to leave. It was also possible to fall and die in impossbile to reach locations. One one occasion I fell and died. After several more deaths due to falling, it became clear that you could not climb down to where you died. 24 hours after petitioning, customer service finally fixed it.
4. Healing spells failed too frequently - Healing spells would randomly fail to cast (fizzle). If you played for an hour, it was guarranteed you would have multiple fizzles in a row resulting in a party death. Party members would also abuse you for not healing when this happened.
5. Inconsistent quest interface - You had to keep a paper log of quests so you could return to the quest giver for your reward after you completed the task. Guards would sometimes tell you where a quest giver was in the zone, sometimes they could not. Some quested items would be stored in inventory, some would not be stored in inventory but you still got quest credit for them. If you destroyed the inventoried quest items, you had to get those items again.
6. Mage pets enraging swarms of mobs- Mages had summoned pets. The pets when fighting a mob would sometimes dance around the dungeon, enraging every mob in sight.
7. Mage pets fought inside walls - pets would fight a mob inside a wall where the mage could not heal the pet or cast on the mob. Pet would die, then mage would die.
8. Instant death when resurrected - On one occasion I was resurrected underwater multiple times and died instantly to drowning with no timer or warning.
9. Crafters have to get adventure levels Blizzard advertised that you could be a crafter or an adventurer. However, you could be an adventurer or a crafter/adventurer. Being just a crafter was not viable. The craft system is a "combat system" and you need hit points and power (mana) for spells. The only way to get hit points and more power was by gaining adventure levels.
10. No market for crafters Armor and weapons could be used and then passed on to another character. Items won from killing mobs or quests were as good as crafted items. As characters leveled, their old gear hit the market resulting in there being no need for new items to be crafted.
11. Insufficient bag space If you wanted to sell containers they would take up a whole bag slot and you could not use that bag for storage. Some craft quests required crafting multiple items, each of which took up an inventory slot. Never start a craft quest unless you have all the materials needed.
12 Impossible craft quests - some craft quests involved crafting items that did not have recipes. You could ask for a replacement quest but were often given the same impossble quest again and could not ask for further replacement quests.
13 Insufficient resources There were not enough resources in the low level zones for gathering/mining. In many zones, two thirds of the players were fighting over a limited number of resource spawns rather than fighting mobs.
14 Houses had no function I was disappointed in the housing. The only functional piece of furniture was the bulletin board which was required if you wanted to sell. The only items you could store in your room were furniture and pets which had no function. Paying for upgrades to the flooring and walls made little difference to the appearance. You also had to pay regular rent on the room.

The game had a lot of bugs which I would hope have been fixed by now. Bugs included:
- all servers down for several days.
- food consumed while casting but no benefit given.
- crash to desktop if you ran into architecture.
- unable to do quests because quest NPC's were invisible (above or below the world?).
- skill levels gained in gathering/mining would be lost when you gain a crafting level or adventure level.

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