Can Mercs be moved to an earlier expansion?

What about people that are flat out quitting? I know you were active on Selo and cater to a casual player. I can't imagine you didn't see a fair chunk of players that just get tired of not being able to get groups, get something started, and just walk away from EQ altogether.

Or they could remove Truebox at a set expansion threshold which would likely increase the number of subscribing accounts.

And you wonder why people box.

Oof....

Reality hits ya hard bro.

So yea, in a situation like this, the post-PoP era coupled with the inevitable "fresh" tlp coming out, mercs just help people who don't want to move to another server but don't want to give up EQ either.

Someone mentioned the only legitimate downside might be that they are too powerful, and I don't know. I did use the premium merc to level up to 75 on FV, and the tank was definitely ridiculous for the majority of that. But the counter to that could possibly be to release the weaker mercs and let them scale.

But the big truth is, nobody cares if other people are rushing through level 50 content. Quite frankly, once you hit Gates of Discord, Everquest is an endgame sorta deal. So if someone joins a mature server or starts a new character, they aren't smelling the roses anyway. They want to get through that content that is very hard to group at.

I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with your OP. I was just throwing something out there that you and I don't have the data or enough info to know. There could be a specific money reason not to more Mercs earlier in progression.

And sure, there is a lot of turnover on Selo, just as there was on Agnarr. It's the nature of all the TLPs based on posts and discussions with many people. There are still quite a few active guilds on Selo but that number dwindles slowly over time. We've merged two guilds into Major over the last few months but you still lose people here and there and have to keep recruiting all the time. Eventually, there won't be but a few guilds left - one or two for each "type" of player probably. Your idea might help keep the population higher for some of those types of players. I don't know that you'll ever get the chance to see, though.

You know it does really sound as easy as all that but its not.

Tried that, time and time again. Last night I was out at Dulack soloing. My message was. "42 Shaman LFG or I am soloing out at Dulack, come join me" 3 hours, not one taker. Solo'ed two levels, probably could have gotten at least 2 more if even one single player would have took me up on the offer to join me.

The other night there were 5 people in the zone my level, despite repeated /ooc of LFG and/or specifically mentioning we should group together for a faster pace, not one taker.

Getting a guild doesn't really help either. I am in a guild and last night they were raiding. Virtually zero guild members available. Even when they aren't raiding, they are all playing their level 70 toons progressing through DoDH, working to get flagged for something or another or grinding AAs. Rarely do you see anyone in /who guild all, that are under level 65, on at any time.

I am not saying this is always the case, sometimes I do manage to snag a partner or get an invite to a group, but more often than not, this is not the case. I have honestly resigned myself to expecting when I log in that no groups or even partners will be available and I will have to solo.

So as I remarked to the other post, if the qualifying scenario for mercs being unlocked is the inability for lower level players to reliable get a group in order to progress, then that qualification already exists on Selo.

Having done this quite a bit, I'd guess that the problem isn't that no one is grouping. It's that no one wants to group with YOU. The way you have presented yourself on the forums over the past few days, well, if your LFG messages are anything similar, I can see why you don't get groups. The sense of entitlement and the assumption that you will make other players' experience better is pretty offputting.

This is not meant as a flame, just maybe something to help you understand the situation.

Wow here I am on topic, talking about the early introduction of mercs into the game and agreeing with the OP because in my personal experience is it is hard to get a group on Selo and suddenly the issue is my personality. Oh and on top of that, it seems like your wanting to take a disagreement from another thread and move it over to this one so you can continue it here as well.

And you talk about my conduct on the forums? Pot calling Kettle black much?

Back on topic

I want to agree with HoodShuklak, I think there are quite a few people who come back to the game to play on TLP's for the Classic experience and then unfortunately find out that unless the happen to start on day one of a TLP and have the ability to keep up with the pace, your going to be soloing much of the time. If you happen to pick a class that can solo well and are willing to invest in some Krono, you might have decent time of it because lets face it, not too many people are going to pay for two accounts in order to box. If not, your probably not going to stick around very long. The game is designed to group, at least in the early expansions, not being able to rely on a group puts you at a severe disadvantage as far as leveling to catch up. It is pretty obvious, that this will cause a significant percentage of people to quit and never return. Getting access to Mercs early could likely stem the tide at least to some degree.

Pretty much you hit the nail on the head.

Mercs earlier keeps the population higher. EverQuest devs back in the day realized that groups are harder to come by. And maybe it took them time to code it, or maybe it was just something they hadn't thought of, but if they could have, wouldn't they have made mercs earlier as well?

One thing I know for certain, TLP populations fall every expansion, but there remains a cohort of players that genuinely want to stick around, only to walk away because their ability to group up and get stuff done outside of raids just keeps getting worse... and worse...

After living through PoR and the slog that is level 70 I can safely say that adding mercs earlier may be essential to maintaining a semblance of a casual population on truebox servers.

Manglerites would be wise to make their voices heard before this time period comes. I'm just not sure how other tlps fared through level 70, but even 4 week expansions was too slow. It seems like boxers fared far, far better than soloists.

While I like the idea you are proposing, this is not the unanimous opinion. Nor is it remotely accurate. There has been very little dip in population on any server after POP. People repeat it a lot but it just isn't true. It isn't til much later that population begins to decline sharply.

I'd say DoDh was when I noticed the start of the decline on Phinny. There is a noticable increase in both group and raid difficulty, along withe lv 70 stagnation.

It looks to me that it really accelerated during and after TBS on Phinny.

PoP --> DoDH was 21 guilds to 17 guilds, only a 20% loss in ~11 months
DoDH to TBS is 17 guilds to 14 guilds, again about the same % loss in about 8 months
TBS to Underfoot is 14 guilds to 7 guilds, 50% loss in about 7 months. That's where it ramps up significantly. Even TBS to SOF is 14-->11, the biggest single expansion drop in Phinny history up to that point.

I think TBS itself is a problem. People focus on level 70 but level 75 is in some ways worse. Although TSS is great, and Solteris is nice, at the point you reach TBS you've had one level increase in five expansions and no new aa's for three of those five.

Interestingly enough, it's also in that stretch that mercs appear, which makes me suspect they wouldn't do as much to stop attrition as people think. (Although I'm still in favor of the OP.)

oh hi!

On the other hand, Coirnav peaked during Velious with 19 guilds, had 17 during PoP and is down to 7 in OoW. So Phinny had a ~20% loss across 6 Expacs (PoP,LDoN,GoD,OoW,DoN and DoDH) Whereas Coirnav lost almost 60% across 4 (PoP, LDoN, GoD, OoW). Maybe thats because Phinny was the first of its style, maybe because Coirnav xp rate sucks. Maybe its due to the double wammy Selo/Mangler. I dunno, regardless I think having access to mercs earlier would be a nice QoL on servers where it gets harder and harder to round out groups.

My sense is that Coirnav will be fairly unique among the TLP's. It's the only one that was followed immediately by an objectively more popular ruleset (faster xp on Mangler). And, most of the players on Coirnav had already restarted once at least, sometimes two or three times, making them more apt to restart again when something better came along.

I think your first point is entirely valid, but I think the release of a new TLP is the biggest factor in recent TLP servers losing players, I saw this on Ragefire when Phinigel launched & on Phinigel to some degree when later TLP opened up.

Making Mercenaries available earlier than SoD I could see having some merit on TLP servers with lower populations for sure.

Making them usable in raids I am gonna say has caveats, only usable in raids which are 4/5+ expansions behind the current I maybe could get on board with (stuff you could 1 group anyway), but for current expansions no way in hell.

There is some merit. Having the mercs released earlier than SoD is feasible, but I doubt they will take the resources to make such a change, no matter how small of work it requires. Making them available for raids is absolutely never going to happen. That is hard coded into the game, and no content was made with mercenaries in mind, no matter how ineffectual they would be in raid content.

The biggest hurdle for introducing mercs early is balance. At 66+ they aren't TOO out of balanced, but anything level 65 or earlier and the mercs would completely trivialize content. I think 75/TSS would be a reasonable place to introduce them without rebalancing. I think there is zero chance they would ever rebalance them to make them appropriate for earlier content, because it would impact live in a severe way (live players would scream, and rightfully so, if mercs were suddenly much weaker level 1-65.)

Reasonable argument & I also think mercs earlier than TSS would trivialise the game too much.

TSS is right after one of the longest & arguably weakest eras of EverQuest, at least in my view & most of the players I know, but I think it depends on server population somewhat too, if a future TLP still has a high pop moving through the 70 era into TSS then mercs could arguably wait until later still.

I'd still argue that DoDH & PoR should unlock together on future TLP even with mercs being available once TSS opens.