And there will be a level cap increase with this expansion. So, those numbers are likely expected to increase.
VoA Raiding is pretty good. VoA group zones are all pretty good except Sepulcher. Sepulcher is quite possibly the worst designed group zone in game. Mix of undead/see invis/live mobs everywhere. The zone has extremely high mob density and assist radii. The quests in the zone are awful, the Mercenary lines are normal and about half of the partisan lines are normal. But there 2 Partisan tasks, one which requires you collect 500 shards and one which requires you do the form and you collect 50 essences of 8 different God’s. Problem is in order to get these shards and essences you have to do group quests which have hour lockouts and each rewards about 10 shards or 3-5 essences each. So you have to farm the same quests for weeks on end to finish these two overarching quests which are required for unlocking the group missions or requesting raids. Just a big grind fest in a zone that is not friendly unless you box a full group.
I haven't enjoyed playing on live since they started doing zone revamps to increase the resolution to make the game look "better". I think they started doing that crap somewhere around Depths of Darkhollow or Sands of Ro. The new Freeport was and is awful. Combining the desert zones and the Commonlands zones outside Freeport was also something I didn't like. To make it worse, there was no reason for any of it. If they want to make new expansions look better then fine, but there is no reason to mess around with the classic zones. They didn't even bother to finish the graphical upgrades across the whole game, either. It's disturbing to zone out of an untouched classic zone into one that has had the graphics revamped and then into another untouched classic zone. I wish they would just put everything classic back the way it was. I also was luke warm on the adventurer camps. It's nice to have instanced zones all to yourself where you don't have to worry about players outside your group or guild entering and KS'ing or ninja looting or causing a disruption by training stuff around while you're trying to take down a boss, but after a while finding groups to go into the instanced dungeons became difficult as players began to lose interest and moved on to other parts of the game. They should have allowed solo players to go in without groups. The revamp of research is also something that was completely unnecessary as was the tribute system. Sony wasted so many resources on things that players never asked for. There were so many things that did need fixing that they never did. So many broken quests, bugs, and exploits that were there since day one that are still there should have been among the first things fixed. Unfinished zones that were never opened that should have been. Things like that. The throne room under Neriak or the Unkempt Woods were two areas that I wanted to see for a long time. They also never made the keys to the firepots, that were supposed to be the evil characters main form of transportation around Norrath, available publicly but the most annoying of all was how they were never able to fix the damn boats, even to this day. The idea of being able to rent rooms in the cities to store your stuff also never came to light. Yeah, eventually separate areas off of the guild lobby were set up for that but renting a house in any of the cities would have been better. Oh, and the message boards that hung in all the taverns and inns that used to work fine until one day they didn't and nobody bothered to fix them. There was just so much crap that should have been done that wasn't. Even on some of the emulated servers with more dedicated and technically knowledgable staff they managed to fix many of the things that were broken so why couldn't Sony/Daybreak? I'm surprised live EQ didn't go down a long time ago.
Of course the small subset of people who enjoy playing on an emu server that is a snap shot from 2003 don’t particularly like a game that evolved from their preference. Live EQ is still a fun game, with a loyal player base, and more to do in-game than ever. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s still thriving.
