Never too early to talk about next year's TLPs

This is the real dream.

You are assuming that 72 people will actually play on Vaniki which seems pretty questionable at this point.

Since we're asking for opinions... yeah, I would love that. I don't care if it will remove RMT from the game, if it makes it harder, and less of an obnoxious pain in the butt. Krono didn't fix the RMT issue, no, it just made an official channel for it, so everyone's doing RMT instead of a few goobs. Plus, krono completely alters the way the economy functions at a fundamental level.

FWIW I would also like to bring back hell levels

Interesting Idea

The Unlock schedule is a ton faster than I suggested, my original idea had an unlock cadence much closer to the Standard TLP, & only used level locking up to 65, but the devs clearly felt a challenge server with this ruleset could work.

The devs took the relatively minor mention of tacking content above your level I had proposed in the pre-65 level unlocking stage & basically expanded that to the entire unlock schedule.

I think it will be fun for those who play there but I am under no illusions that it will have a huge audience, because it will not.

I think it's going to have a good audience to start. But I think once the reality of pacing sets in the server is going to implode fairly quick. But I think that's most TLPs players either can't keep up with the content, play through what they like, or just burn out. It'll be accelerated with Vaniki, imo.

Luckily the server has a less than 2 year run to live, not like a standard TLP which takes 5+ years so even if it fizzles out quickly, they'll reclaim the hardware way sooner.

They could just run that one on the old Pentium 4 in Dave's garage, the one with 4gb RAM. Probably could recycle it for the PvP TLP after, could handle the traffic no problem.

You may be right. The sad thing is that despite the back-and-forth from players here (including myself) about a GoD start or LLP, Vaniki isn't really going to do the conversation any favors. On the surface it might seem like a win for those interested, but it has the potential to flame out so quickly that either players or the devs may falsely determine every aspect of it is to blame. If Vaniki fails hard, it may irreparably damage any future consideration for those features.

It also may not, but it's not the true field test of those ideas that those interested were asking for.

Are there any other significant new changes on Vinaki aside from the LLP and GoD start? I feel like they should be able to still pull a ton of metrics off the server. Knowing how many roll non classic race/class combos from the start should tell them the popularity of GoD start. The attrition rates per level lock should also tell them how the LLP concept does.

It's really only those two dynamics that are new, right?

Relatively fast unlocks, changes to spell resists and level requirements, coupled with always being capped at 10 levels below the current content. Rather than offering a standard TLP experience starting from GoD, Vaniki will feel wholly different, but if it's a major turn-off to a significant number of players and flatlines faster than traditional TLPs, the entire experiment could get lumped together when considering any of these features again. If it takes a nose dive in record time, it may be difficult to distinguish exactly which part was the root cause, since they have so many moving parts going at the same time.

My point put more simply: I hope the tweaks that create a non-traditional challenge don't stain the idea of a GoD start or LLP, for those that wanted that. They should have separated the two - doing either a level-based challenge server with new achievements or a GoD start.