New to THF and so far love it. Tend to play on servers till I feel like I have "beaten" most of the content and can easily see myself spending some serious time here.

Our new domain and portal is live! You are welcome to check it out: www.thehiddenforest.org

Web based tools are:

• Ldon leaderboard
• Who is online?
• Achievement system
• Community portal
• Magelo
• Alla clone
• and more..

Wow I am impressed with your website! I'm going to have to stop by and play to see what your game world is like!

I have started on this server recently, and I must say I am impressed!!

This is just such a nice piece of work you guys have come up with. :)

Just a brief update!

Another "expansion" is live on THF.
- Epic Armor Set
- New quests
- New Tier 5 level raid zone - Plane of Fear

and much more.. Come, check it out!

Details at our portal.

With the release of Plane of Fear (tier 6 really, Lillu is lying ;)) we decided that we have enough content to discover by players to put new content on hold.

Instead we decided we review all existing content and fine tune/balance everything so it's more in line with what we want and to meet player's expectations.

Today was the first big round of changes. too many to list. Check us out at www.thehiddenforest.org for details!

I've played on this server since just before Christmas and I have to say it's by far the best out there.

These are the things I love about it:

Best content by a country mile. I've never enjoyed EQ as much as I do now and it's about the only game I play at present. Surprising considering how much I loathed the original game when I stopped playing it.

Support is second to none; way better than I'd ever expect with a voluntary project of this scale.

Community is excellent; by and large everyone is friendly, supportive, helpful and the sense of humour, whilst varied, is generally the right kind.

Fast Exp. Fast Exp. Fast Exp. Cannot mention this enough; the leveling curve is perfectly balanced, allowing full content exploration at a nice and quick pace. Have barely ever felt like I was grinding, even when trying to get a particularly elusive item.

Bots. Love them or loathe them, they're a big part of the server and I am personally a huge fan of them, despite their flaws.

I could go on but the list is relatively endless. Those are the best parts.

Hello,

i played for some time on the Server, and have to say awesome.

Then again, after a week i found out about this "Donor Weapons" etc. which are "and always will be" the best weapons in the game - by far.
So after thinking about it for 5 minutes i decided to stop playing there. Even thought the Server was quite fun leveling up and all, if i can't get the best Equipment the -normal- way, why bother with it at all?

Well thats my opinion, aside of that the best custom Server i seen so far.

IMHO - Simply ignore the Donator Weapons ;)
Earn the best weapon you can on your own, and pretend nothing else exists =)
After all Donator weapons only itsy-bitsy better than the best weapon otherwise.

In high end game, just having the Donator Weapon doesn't mean much, cause there are 15 other gear slot you need to fill which do not come easy ;)

I was initially offset when I learned about the donator items too, but if you think about it, the way the GM/dev team have developed THF is a mile ahead of the other custom EQ servers (IMHO) and in the real world, developing custom content and maintaining a quality server (fiber internet bandwidth, "real server" hardware, electric bill, upgrades, etc.) cost $$$. You can't really expect the GM/dev/operating team to shoulder the cost of running everything from their own pockets, especially a server with THF's quality and support. If you want a rock solid & custom server, plus a loyal & mature community, THF is the place to be.

Other EMU servers are running on old server hardware (or even laptops, or regular PCs, etc.). Being in the IT field, I shudder at the idea of leveling several toons to 65/70, building AAs, investing a lot of TIME/effort, then suddenly the server crashes and all character information/database is lost... what happens now if there are no backups and the server got completely hosed?

The point of the donator items is to motivate some of the players to share the cost of developing and operating THF. A well run server depends on the community's support. In return for your support (which is entirely voluntary), you are given powerful items, but these items doesn't make you more uber and play in god mode. At best, they are just very slightly superior to the best items obtained in the game itself. I welcome this idea now, and understand why the donation system was put in place. You can just keep your money, play for free, enjoy the custom content, and ignore the donator items (like what Chaos pointed out above).

I'm having a blast on this server, and don't mind handing out a small contribution to the effort. I box 5 accounts and would have paid $75 on live servers per month for traditional content and far less enjoyable experience.

Oh did I mention about the GM service and response time is second to none? I lost a couple of items (was auging a ring) when my computer froze, just sent a quick PM in the THF forums and bam, the items got restored sooner than I expected. I never got this kind of support from Live! :-)

Bugs and reasonable requests are also acted upon quickly. GMs implement changes on a regular basis. The direction of the server's development is also heavily influenced by the community via polls, members are asked about their opinion/ideas, etc. That in my book is how an emu server should be 8)

Lillu and the rest of the GM team really do a good job on this server. It's probably one of the most enjoyable places to play on and they do take community feedback. While not all ideas are accepted they are at least considered, and for that I give them props.

We would like to introduce a popular and fun WoW feature - the Vanity Pets, using Familiar type pets as a base.
This is a new and we belive unique eqemu feature once again, so we hope you guys will enjoy it.

Credist goes to ChaosSlayer for all his amazing work on this project! :)

as always, details at our portal: www.thehiddenforest.org

Enjoy your stay!

http://www.thehiddenforest.org/images/familiar.jpg

The Hidden Forest presents a new feature - a whole new line of Druid pets!

http://herbhealernet.web.siteprotect.../thf-cat-2.jpg

come get your killer cat :cool: