Just a copy and paste, my goodbye is on EQ Forums WoTLK Gold, but Hadn’t seen anyone post this yet, and he had impacted WoW and MMOs in their entirety. So in case folks weren’t aware.

Brad Mcquaid, former producer and lead designer of EverQuest unexpectedly passed away last night. It was announced on the official Facebook page of Pantheon:Rise of the Fallen.

“It is with deep regret and profound sadness that we share that Brad McQuaid, Chief Creative Officer of Visionary Realms passed away in his home last night.

Brad was a visionary, a mentor, an artist, a trailblazer, a friend, a husband, a father. He touched thousands of lives with his dreams and concepts. He changed the landscape of video games forever. He will be deeply missed and forever remembered in life and in Pantheon.

I really feel like the current iterations of retail destroyed class fantasy. That was such an important thing to me that it overshadows every other detail in Retail. There were some changes in Retail that were quite good, but I felt like I lost my character in Legion, and essentially lost my reason to play. With Classic, I feel like I finally have my characters back. They are Vanilla classes, and I think classes didn’t really come into their own until BC or Wrath, but Vanilla is more analogous to class fantasy than Legion or later.

There was one more benefit to Classic for me. It was the ability to play alts. With all the focus in recent years on how often people log in, it seems like running alts has become very difficult (esp if you’re OCD like me). Grinding endless resources is absolutely no fun for me, and it leaves a knot kn my stomach when I think about it. It’s nice that I can play alts again (without the knot).

It’s been a few months since Classic came out. I’m really curious if anybody has any stats for server population growth/decay over the past few months. I’m hoping it is growing, because I intend to stay on the Classic servers for a long time - much the the dismay of my buy WoTLK Classic Gold new wife who never saw me play WoW before (haha).
All of us at Visionary Realms offer our deepest condolences to Brad’s family and during this most difficult time, we kindly ask that you respect the privacy of Brad’s family.”