What was the most popular TLP?

They did merge Fippy and Vulak, about two years ago (well after all population was gone.) It went terribly -- many characters lost, weeks of manual corrections. It isn't that they won't, it's that they can't. At least not right now. They don't have working software to do it currently.

If I had to guess:

Phinny --> Mangler --> Rage/Lock --> Agnarr --> Coirnav --> Selo --> ... --> Fippy/Vulak? --> Miragul.

Pickzones and AoCs definitely artificially inflate the numbers and help retain players.

Phinny likely had the highest as it was yuuugely anticipated and the first with Truebox and AoCs.

Mangler had a massive influx, but seeing as it was nearly the same ruleset as Phinny and occurred after Phinny, it didn't pull all of those players. Additionally, it was released the same time as Selos, which pulled like 11 people away.

Ragefire and Lockjaw were the first real popular TLPs, in my opinion. Huge crowds...lack of AoCs and mage bot armies killed these.

Agnarr had a decent stream of players from P1999, but it turns out that people didn't really love the "locked at PoP" idea.

Coirnav and below were all relative flops. Fippy / Vulak were likely popular for their time, but I honestly never played there, so hard to tell.

Miragul is a place to blow a krono and futz around with every character at L85...and enact revenge on Classic - Velious mobs.

I'm not sure I buy the argument that Fippy was #1, but it was definitely higher than you are placing it. Population was HUGE there until the SoE hack fiasco.

Edit to add -- it's pretty absurd to try to rank servers on which you never played.

Hence the "guess", the question mark, and the further admission of uncertainty below that...what's absurd is your need to scrutinize every post as if you are the arbitor of subjective EQ conversations.

Apologies if I offended your beloved Fippy Darkpaw server.

I counted over 700 in picks last night in SSRA on Mangler. At the same time there were multiple server messages about raid mobs being killed. I'd say it is still pretty healthy.

They are generally all very popular up to a point. Phini has remained with a decent population longer than any of the others I've played on.

personally I loved Combine/sleeper the most out of all of them, also had way more time back then so the race was more appealing.

RF > Mangler > Phinny > Agnaar / LJ > all others here

Even I hate to admit RF had the most folks.
I believe Phinny had the most going into late expansions.

Only time will tell what happens to Mangler.

Unless they come out with a good exp rate / FV free trade server with a good rule set.
That would destroy every other TLP in a heartbeat.

Coirnav was definitely more populated in Velious than Mangler. I remember auction channel sometimes exceeding 300 on Friday evenings / Sundays during Coirnav. Mangler’s auction channel hasn’t been more than 200 since Kunark.

There were significant hardware upgrades for Phinigel after their Ragefire experience. Despite that Phin still had wait times for awhile. Based on that, I'd say it's likely that Phin had more concurrent players online at once than Rage ever did, albeit I suspect there were more alt accounts at Phin launch than for Ragefire. I've never been on Mangler, but I suspect that using guilds isn't a great metric - it's likely by this stage that most TLP players have played a past TLP or five, and I have a feeling that those experiences drastically inflate the # of players in guild as a % of pop vs. past TLPs - so while it's somewhat useful as a metric, I'd definitely not rely on it.

It's impossible to know for sure but it seems to me this was already true by the point Phinny launched. Virtually everyone was in a guild that raided on Phinny--I hardly ever saw players with no guild tags or with guild tags that weren't on the kill boards (and I spent a lot of time looking, since i was running the phinny progress site in the early expansions and was constantly trying to find new guilds to include.) Far more free agents on Fippy, Vulak, and Ragefire/Lockjaw. I don't know how it's been post-Phinny as I haven't played most of them.

I've played on every TLP since Fippy, and i still think its Mangler and not particularly close.purely anecdotal of course.

True, Ragefire had alot more free agents than Phin I'd agree.

Agnarr is still there and still PoP locked right? So if people are asking for a new Agnarr, it proves that the first and foremost draw of a server is the part where everyone starts over with everyone else on the server. The other aspects of the ruleset are important, but even giving people what they want (i.e. in this case, Pop-locked), eventually a fresh start is desired.

What I wonder is, is there a way to continually provide that experience on the same server, such that no one has to ask for a new server? For example, a version of Agnarr that completely resets and wipes everyone after a certain time period (a year, 18 months, whatever), and the process automated so that no one has to beg Daybreak for a new server. Questions like, would people get a bonus to their exp gain after getting their level reset would have to be answered.

I am just wondering if it would work, personally I wouldn't play on such a server, I have no interest in the Classic to PoP era anymore (I could bear it for a month on a Selo 2.0 server that starts in PoP but no more than that).

IMO this is the correct order as well.

Remember Ragefire/Lockjaw and all servers before that were pre "mega" servers. If ya'll remember they created Phinny as the first "mega" server that could hold up to 5k (I believe is what they said) players at a time. I believe RF/LJ and prior servers held a max of 2500-3k was the estimate.

Overall, I definitely think Phinny overall had the most players on it for the longest period of time. No server will probably match it just because the base has become so spread out over so many TLP's. Phinny hit gold because of it being the Mega server, first with AOC's, and it launched by itself.

Mangler and Agnarr are probably the next closest followed by RF/LJ and then probably Fippy > Coirnav.

Then Selo and WAY down there is Miragul.

Fippy

Coverage was great. Eqplayers functioned somewhat, and it captured the core population of those seeking a blend between p99 and agnarr.

But was rampant. After that server, everything has been more and more jaded and a rush to zerg box trivial encounters. And dbg has left defiant gear in vanilla, or the focus effects at launch or now the ext target window is here but the buy now button doesn't function in the baz window...

nerf choices while mage armies zerg and cheese named encounters.


They're all a ghost town regardless of how many players are online...its just become more antisocial with each release


More time LFG than anything....and raiding is 2/3 of really bad boxers dragging their stupid box toons slowly and dangerously through the raid. Ugh...

Dammit I love this game