I remember playing EQ2 up to Kingdom Of Sky and quitting before Echoes of Faydwer. I remember the game being pretty much an improved version of the launch game all the way through to Kingdom of Sky. However I was a big crafter and I quit because of a tradeskill revamp that at the time I thought dumbed down tradeskills. I cannot remember when this was, but the only thing I can find is "Live Update 24: The Fallen Dynasty", though I'm not totally positive if there were any revamps before or after that. I just remember at the time lots of us were quitting because ofthe update, it was very much like SWG's CU update, where they totally borked crafters.

For me that would be when classic died and I do remember trying Echoes of Faydwer years later, but it really felt like they were just trying to make WoW. Everything was easy and soloable and I remember voice acting not being much of a thing in the new content. That really sucked for me as the NPCs calling out to you was really amazing, but now all of a sudden we have a map that tells you everything and icons above everyone's head.

So it has to be at least between those two expansions right?

However it doesn't mean I want classic back, because the game did have a lot wrong with it that still hasn't been improved to this day. The animations are poor, the combat is poor, the character models are still ugly... But oddly enough in the alpha, the character models looked much better. I remember being in beta as well and the models were ugly at that point as the human models had been totally changed. They patched the females to look like they had drugged out eyes and gave many races this weird buble skin. So it is weird how they made it worse :/ Also though, I always hated how they got rid of the boats and put in bells, because the boats would always glitch out and drop you into the ocean. Those bells always ruined my immersion and having loading screens via clicking on doors between CL and Nek or in all the zones of the cities was depressing.

So there is a lot I'd change about classic, which is sad because I feel like the perfect game would never exist. I really wish SOE spent their time on the failings of the game, rather than chasing WoW and adding more and more zones without fixing the existing stuff. I know they changed the class system, which was great as the classic game's archetype linear system sucked. Everyone would get to level 20 to find out they hated their class and couldn't be bothered to reroll. But I would take classic EQ2 and add bits onto it, rather than staying true to classic. Though the number one change would be disabling auto targetting as it was the number one thing that made combat so bad and clunky, along with the global cooldown stuff.

Technically the DoF client we are using is just before classic's end (January 26 2006). The Kingdom of Sky client (February 2006) introduced the new character creation where you pick your class at character select, not in game through the various classes.

The eq2emulator/eq2emu project is not about deciding an emulator servers direction.

EQ2emu/zeklabs (code) is about providing a source code that works with respective clients, right now DoF and AoM. There is consideration for a Kunark client also (or perhaps some other from around the same era). Eq2emulator (content) is about providing working spawns, npcs, quests, so on from any era, although they are looking more towards classic era right now. There are still more "modern" quests available after that era.

I have to say I approve of picking your character from the start as the system they had before was terrible. I remember when the game came out and the number one issue everyone I knew had, was it took 20 levels to get to the class you wanted to play. Then you'd find out you didn't like it and have to reroll to spend 20 levels getting to another class you wanted to try out and you didn't like that either. A much better system having you play the class from the start, but it was too late as the game was dead by then.

Also I was shocked as I logged into EQ2 recently and there was only one server and I couldn't find a single player. It said the server was "medium" despite only having one :/ But I ran around several zones and a few cities and no one was about. I then tried asking people what was going on and I was told people don't go in the world any more, they all play instances and you do not need to group apart from certain dungeons at end level. Like this isn't an MMO then is it?

I found the people really rude as well, like they hear the complaint all the time and they like the game how it is..... But there is no one playing! Like the modern World of Warcraft where people just use the dungeon or battleground tool and never go into the world. Only this is much worse because at least there are people playing WoW so you will see people levelling up.

It doesn't help voice acting is gone either and the changes to the old zones all feel really low quality. I noticed this about SOE games back in the day, post launch content is always really bad quality. It'll often just be empty rooms with a few boxes and random NPCs standing there.