Currently playing on Tunare and noticing a decrease in population throughout. Most of the raiding guilds are currently actively recruiting which has not happened in a long time. Are other servers having these problems? Just trying to work out if players are just moving servers or just not logging in. Are there any servers with a large Euro player base and raiding guilds ?
Antonius Bayle is the best populated Euro server as far as i know. So check that one if you want to raid / group / play at those times.
The pools to fish experienced good raiders from, on big servers is drying up. Farm guilds are kind of non existent now as people fall off to real life changes and there are just not that many middle of the road guilds. Its either end game guilds or family casual guilds. New players are not going to be able to just start raiding the latest expansions. Until server merges happen you will see more of that from end game guilds...Next step will be creating boot camp guilds with people mass training and flagging the general population on the bigger servers.
I can't remember a time when the top raiding guilds on Tunare were not actively recruiting. I mean back in the day people didn't use the chat channels to advertise the stuff, but then the general channels didn't exist back then either; instead they used open raid groups to do progression to actively recruit the best people and flag them in the process. But every year for the last 10, I have seen the raiding guilds actively recruiting. The population hasn't actually dropped that much, people are just playing with people outside their clique less and less; or they are doing older content (for achievements) that they skipped or missed when it was new and are going to places people don't want to go so they don't ask. There are people who have moved servers and others who don't log in as often. I have heard of at least one regular who apparently moved servers, but I doubt that has as much to do with it. As far as not logging in as often, I personally have spurts where I might not log in for more than an hour or two some months, while other months I easily rack up 20-40 hours. It all depends on work, life, and what is going on with both. I am also guessing that some of the second gen EQ players are reaching the age where they have less time to play due to school and work interfering as well. There are always people who just up and vanish too.
Players are leaving the game faster then they are being replaced on the main servers. TLP servers do bring some players in, but a lot of players on the TLP servers come from the main servers. Having TLP servers is akin to shifting the chairs on the Titanic, to attempt keep it from sinking. The other cyclical issue within EQ is what I call the summer slow down. Starting around Easter the player population tend to start dipping, and bounces back a bit around Labor Day. Each bounce back is nice, but never back to the level it was prior to Easter. If guilds are having an issue recruiting right now, and short on raiders, it will only continue to get worst for the next 6-7 months. What is currently being done, is not working well enough for the long term health of the game. The long term fix, is to better market the game, and draw in more players then are leaving the game.
Driving people away has been a time-honored tradition since ... what were those OP Kael Drakkel pants called that caused uber monks to tank as well as a warrior? The solution, of course, was to nerf the entire monk class rather than fixing the pants. I believe it's referred to as death by a thousand cuts.
