If you’re returning to the game or limited on time but want to relive some of Everquest, the short answer is yes, you should start over on a Random Loot Server like Mischief.
The reason you would want to play on Mischief is very simple: It’s easy to catch up and get good gear. Mischief, as well as, Thornblade are some of Everquests first experimental random loot servers. In these random loot rulesets, almost all items are tradeable which means there will be a lot of high level raid gear for sale on the Bazaar and since the ruleset also includes chances at extra drops, there will be a lot of 3rd to 10th best in slot gear for sale for extremely cheap.
Since Kronos can be purchased with real money and sold in game for platinum, you can realistically have an extremely well geared raid character (for under $100 in most cases), if you skip the big daddy very expensive best in slot items.
And if you’re cheap like me, you can just sell a single Krono and get a whole set of gear to level in and some pretty decent gear later on until your character can start farming it’s own plat and things to sell in the Bazaar.
But it’s not all butterflies and rainbows on Mischief. This is usually the case on most Everquest servers, they all have their own caveats, pros and cons.
For Mischief specifically, at this point on the server leveling from the start will most likely be extremely lonely. Mischief is in the Depths expansion and the only people that are leveling are normally people on alts, leveling up boxes, or power leveling.
You can buy power leveling services pretty easily on this server as well for Krono if you’re just looking to catch up and get to the end game.
Boxers, not just people playing a couple of characters, but people playing full groups typically get blamed for making the game lonely. However, most people boxing that many never had any intention of playing with anyone else really and are usually on their own time and schedule. Some of them have had no choice but to box because there are no groups and you may find that you have to pick up a few extra characters if not a full group as well to get your leveling and AA done.
As much as these TLP rulesets try to limit boxers by making it so a lot of VMWare gets detected and there’s a one account limit per PC, people are just buying more PCs and doing it anyways. As I wrote about in a guide on how I box 12 or more characters on a TLP, stopping boxers on a TLP is just not going to happen, in fact, Daybreak actually loosens the boxing limits and seems to encourage it later on and on other servers (more money for them).
So it may be a lonely journey to relive some of the low end content, which is also another reason to box 2-6 characters. With all of the gear available in the game you’ll never be limited by items, you’ll never really need a guild to raid for gear, and a lot of other things will be much easier. If you’re looking to experience the beginning crawl then you can simply make your own group of 3-6 characters, gear them out, and start leveling normally without any power leveling and explore all the dungeons and slowly level like the good old times.
One of the other big problems you’ll run into is if you’re a casual gamer, even though the expansions unlock at a 2-3 month rate, this is actually really really fast and it will be really really hard for a casual player to keep up. While the hardcore big daddy raiders are out of content to raid and getting bored after a month of the expansion release and waiting for a new one, the little small daddy gamers that are only playing 10 hours a week are finding it hard to keep up with the server pace.
This is why you’ll never truly get the old fashioned experience you were looking for when expansions came out once a year and you had all the time in the world to mess around in each xpac. Luckily, they still have other free private servers for these type of experiences like P99 and a bunch of others that are actually locked at various expansions.
There is also the option of joining the Planes of Power era locked server that Daybreak has. I very much like the idea of adding more expansion specific locked servers. It would actually be cool if there was one for almost every expansion with the ability to upgrade and transfer to the next expansion when you’re done messing around, but we’ll see what the future holds.
If you have any more questions about Mischief or anything to add, feel free to leave them in the comments below.