Fippy Darkpaw progression

I've started a character on Fippy Darkpaw to see how progression servers work. Near as I can make out, Fippy has advanced to the point it's indistinguishable from the regular servers. Am I missing something?

Fippy has been out a long time and is catching up to Live as you suspected. Ragefire, Lockjaw and Phinigel are all under 15 months old and are all on Velious at the moment. Rage and Lockjaw allow boxing from the same PC and have quicker xp than Phin and raid content is open world only. Phin's ruleset allows only one client at a time per PC, has a slower xp rate but instanced raids.

Citizen is still beating content on Fippy. They could catch up to live in 2017 I believe. The downside is that, to the best of my knowledge, Fippy's remaining playerbase is tiny and the only real guild is Citizen.

Yeah once POP was unlocked the population almost ended overnight.. and as each expansion opened after that the population was against reduced by 50% or more. Casuals and small guilds could not keep up with content and citizen kept most guilds locked out of progression for so long that the players just quit. Rage and Lockjaw will do the same... There has been no progression server that lasts population wise past POP in any shape or form.. that is the cut off for most people as the Progression locks out the majority of players. This is why so many call for a locked progression that never gets to pop or hits pop and never goes further.

Tharrg, can you say more about people being locked out of progression? Is it because guild sizes were too small, or because key progression mobs were non-instanced, or something else?

I never really got to raid post PoP elementals; post-poFire was a big part of why I started playing on TLP. So hopefully we can either ask for changes from the devs or try to foster cultural changes on our own...

Fippy had a massive population early on. The limited content available was the key factor which led to players quitting.

A lot of guilds cleared classic content...eventually, but only two guilds went into Veeshan's Peak. From there it only got worse, I think only a few guys got AoW/Vulak and again it was mostly the top 2 getting the lions share, Luclin was again a race between two guilds...even enforced rotation didn't do anything for Vex Thal, only two guilds really farmed VT and the second place guild was only able to at the very end of the expansion. Pop was able to support about 4-5 guilds within reason leaving the guilds not in the top 2-3 fighting tooth and nail to get enough ELE god kills to get their force time keyed and into instanced content.

From there things got easier, but by the time we got there it was too late...the general playerbase was so angry at being locked out from content for so many expansions, that they chain voted no several times on the next expansion release and the server spent a long long time withering and dying waiting for new content to finally open. By the time Omens was released Fippy was sitting at a small fraction of the population we see on Phinny today, and it only got worse. Now all you'll see is a force of about 20-25 real people playing 35-45 characters on Fippy. It may become a live server, it may not in 2017.

All I know for sure is that Phinny is retaining its population much better, and I actually wouldn't be surprised to learn that its actually grown since classic. Instances have made EQ progression a success again.

There is no question that...while Phinny may not last forever, the population should remain the healthiest out of any TLP for a much long stretch of time. I stand by that even if they decide to combined expansions together.

People put up with content blocking for a long time on Fippy, so long infact that when it happened again on Ragefire, and then again on Lockjaw...you saw people throw in the towel almost immediately. People jumped ship off those servers because they had no patience to deal with that again. As a result those two servers are on life support now.

Phinny, if handled correctly as it has been thus far, will remain a success for a long time to come.

Thanks, Mabbu. Sounds like they are open to mitigating some of the problems that Fippy and other prior TLPs saw. As an RF player, I'd like to see all three recent TLPs succeed; I imagine that DBG does as well.

This is completely inaccurate, although often repeated so people assume it's true. Population did not drop significantly until toward the end of the level 70 expansions, at least amongst the raiding population (which is the only thing we can really gauge with any accuracy.) There were roughly the same # of active raid guilds doing in era content on Fippy during Kunark, Velious, Luclin, PoP, Gates of Discord, and Omens of War, despite progressively harder content (every expansion within 8-10 active raid guilds, each killing at least some current expansion content before the next lauched.). It wasn't until DoDH and PoR that we dropped below 8 or 9 active raiding guilds.

Source bkfippy.com and fippykills.com kill lists.

At any rate Citizen is still kicking along on Fippy with new server first victories over several events in the last couple of weeks. We always have room for more, especially now players that want to play the last 2-3 live expansions and position themselves to be ready for top end live raiding when we catch up to live next year. www.citizeneq.com

Come on Mabbu, you know this isn't the whole story. By the time the first Gates vote came up, there were only two or three raid guilds on Fippy that weren't already in Plane of Time (again source bkfippy.com) and most raid guilds had been farming it for months.

A huge portion of the no votes on Gates (for both Fippy and Vulak) were players from the opposite server screwing with each other, out of a misguided sense of competition, or for some just boredom after being in PoP/LdoN for so long and having plenty of extra time to level up alts on the opposite server (I personally levelled up toons on Vulak and voted no on each of my accounts after hearing about Vulak players doing it to us on our first vote, since they had the opportunity to do so first--and I know I was just one of many.)

After a couple failures on both servers everyone came to their senses and realized both servers would both implode if everyone kept it up. And after OOW passed, there were enough new people coming to the server from live to compensate for those who quit, at least for about six months or so till we hit late DoDH. There definitely was a hit at the failed Gates votes, but it wasn't anything insurmountable for the server. The DODH and PoR content proved ultimately to be the Fippy killer.

Opening so many tlp's together and their decision to bundle GoD+OoW show that they are just making new problems that will be just as severe ultimately as anything Fippy/Vulak experienced. I'd put money down that neither RF or LJ will make it as far as Fippy has, and the only reason Phinny will is because there are no requirements to progress. By the time Phinny catches up to live there will be a dozen or more expansions that were never beaten in era on the server.

Phinigel is very special for one reason, and this one reason is also what defines Phinigel as unique.

Phinigel is the ONLY server to EVER have RAID INSTANCING for ALL CONTENT.

There is no other server that does this in EQ (except the Test server of course).

This is very important when considering the longevity of the server community. Because all raid content is instanced, that means that every guild ever created on Phinigel, including future guilds, can play through the content at their own desired pace without interruption from any other guild.

Let's say you want to start a guild from scratch and progress through raid cntent from Classic on up two years from now. You can do that on Phinigel, and you will never have to worry about raid content being down because your guild gets to request it's own instance of each raid zone one a week. You can't do that on any other server.

This is why Phinigel will continue to be the go to server for anybody wanting to start a new.

What a waste of time.

I fully agree, aside from the boxing limitations on this server I believe Phinigel can appeal to a broad audience even after the server catches up to live. I ran a progression guild on Trakanon in 2014 because it was an empty server while we waited for ragefire to open just because there was no where else to play the content where people would leave you alone.

Phinigel has much more to offer long term, and I wouldn't be surprised to see new progression guilds pop up as early as Planes of power that have level caps/requirements to keep people "in-era" while progressing through classic/kunark.

The raiding guilds were a small % of the population. The majority of the server population was the casual and small family guilds that were the bulk of the majority of the playerbase. Those are the ones that left basically dropping the server down to the raid guilds only. Raid guilds can not keep a server alive... You have to have casuals and others playing in order to keep the server alive. I played extensively... and once the server moved past POP the population ended... you could not find any groups unless you were member of a raid guild. This is why everyone says population ends on progression servers after POP.. its not a lie ... its not an exaggeration.. thats what happens to the majority of players.

it only took a handful of hours with hotzone xp, RAF accounts etc--you only needed to get to level 45 I think it was, I forget. And, we had little else to do after finishing all the PoP/LDoN stuff. But, I tend to agree in hindsight. Still, there were a lot of people wasting their time doing it on both servers. I'd see multiple box crews all the time in PC, burning woods etc during those ~2-4 weeks, on both servers.

A lot of you are delusional. Fippy has been one of the most successful TLPs and its not finished with yet, as we continue to progress on Fippy. Yes there was a lot of drama in the earlier years at the start of Fippy until really GoD/OoW. But as many point out, regardless of past history much of the player base just are not interested in any expansions past PoP. As things progressed in Fippy the player base slowly declined and a lot of has to do with content and play styles. Having fewer people also makes it more difficult to do anything at any time (ie pick up groups). Basically I would say from PoR onward Fippy was mostly just raid with a few casuals sticking around. Darkblood was probably the last real semi casual guild but even they did everything in era raid wise until UF.

Underfoot was the real knife in the chest of Fippy. The loss of player base and the difficulty of the content lead to a really long time spent on that one expansion. Also Moving into House of Thule a lot of the competitive anti citizen raiders left because anger over tactics (who really cares about who finishes content first?, I guess EoE did)

here we are now. one guild raiding but still trying to hold on. new players are always welcome and helped as much as possible. its a very quiet server and pretty much live server minus 2 expansions. Hopefully once we get to live status we can get transfers into Fippy to make it more enjoyable.

If they follow the pattern of what they did with Combine/Sleeper, Fippy will be merged with a live server, not left as a stand alone one once it catches up.

I'm still surprised they have not done anything with Vulak, I mean they say they will keep the progression servers open until they catch up or cannot progress anymore, which is certainly the case of Vulak.

I guess it just shows you it must just cost peanuts to keep an EQ server up and running, you would think if they were actually loosing money keeping it open it have been gone back in the great purge when Daybreak took over.

This is also why I do not understand the reluctance for them to release a locked server that never reaches POP or that stops at POP and never goes further. Its very clear that once it goes past POP the population decline begins to increase to the point that unless there is a dedicated raid guild that is boxing to unlock.. the server will stall and die. This is the future of Rage and LJ server as well. Its been steady decline the closer the servers come to POP.. once POP is released that will be the last expansion of the majority of the player base before they stop playing. Its a pattern that repeats so much It blows my mind that the Devs are not listening on what the player base really do want. Heck we even voted this time for the slowest unlock speeds possible and that still didnt convince them that other than the Raid groups that flooded to unlock and max out faster.. the majority logged in to just have fun and play slow.

Its unlikely they will combine/merge servers. It is rumored that the days of merging are over. From what I have heard, the servers basically run virtual meaning it costs nothing to keep vulak open. for them to merge a server means they lose any opportunity to have players either pay to transfer on or off the server. DBG probably doesn't care if server get to a low population. Once Fippy catches up into live status, then it should no longer be a "gold membership" only server, which may increase player base with free to play or new or returning players. Some people actually prefer a low population server when new expansions get released (less drama) and don't forget about people who actually enjoy boxing.

All in all I and the rest of Citizen are trying our best right now to keep the train moving and progress it to live status and hope that people will want to populate it.

they just merged a bunch of EQ2 servers, and Holly stated on one of the live streams that EQ server merges were on the table once they get finished with all the back end updates we are going through right now (the 24 hour shutdowns on the live servers).