tl;dr for the massive story I just finished writing. I'm running the game through WinEQ2 and can't figure out how to run it at a playable frame rate.
My first MMO was EQOA Frontiers. I've been following the revival community on and off for a few years. A few days ago, I thought I might check out the original EQ so see if it scratches the itch I have to play EQOA.
I spent last night getting the game installed, and spent about 10 minutes running around the starting city at about 10 fps and died at least twice before I gave up and went to sleep. Tonight when I launched the game, I first accidentally connected to another server which seemed to run fine until it crashed. Then when I launched the game again and connected back to the p99 blue server it was the same as last night.
I'm running it through WinEq2 based on the instructions I followed from the forums. I also found a FAQ entry about getting unplayable performance from the game, but the post it links to is dead. In my searching I also saw someone say that it's better off just running the game by launching eqgame.exe which just told me to use everquest.exe and that just opened a patcher, so I closed it out real fast.
Once I get that figured out, then I can start asking basic noob questions like, "how do I do anything" and "if I could do anything, what would I do?" and "why is a simple garden snake stronger than a grown dark elf?"