Merge Ragefire into Coirnav when they meet

A lot of assumptions are being made about the total population of the later-stage TLPs that aren't really documented anywhere. Every TLP to date which has been announced as progressing to Live has followed roughly the same pattern: big races in pre-PoP content, some server-first guild competition in PoP, and then a dropoff when the racers move to the next TLP cycle. Every TLP has guilds on it made up of players who didn't roll to race, they rolled to do the progression with a guild they liked. If there are four or more active guilds on a TLP, working through progression in-era, that should be enough to consider that server healthy, IMHO. If you expect these TLPs to preserve a population of 3000+ players and 15-20 active guilds, i.e. what was there pre-PoP, you're expecting too much, and you would likely be happier long-term playing on a Live server. Phinny is the model for how I expect the following TLPs to progress, and they've made it almost to Live without any big meltdown from not enough players.

According to Phinnyprogress.com there is 3 guilds left there. Selos stopped updating theirs in OoW so no clue where they are at but I think from reading around here it is less than 4 also. Coirnav has 4 at best? Miragul? Ragefire?
You can't say they have followed the same pattern when Phinny has about the same amount of guilds now that Coirnav has 2 years behind it.

None of that information is accurate. Not all guilds report to those sites. Some players don't raid, they only do group progression content, so there is no reason for them to join a raid guild. The only way to know population for sure is by login stats, and DPG/DBG never shares those. Crude approximations can be formed by counting heads in the General chat channels, but nobody has taken the initiative to do that recently on any server not named Aradune. Miragul is a special case since it launched as a Heroic server, so the profile I described earlier doesn't apply. Also, guild counts go down when smaller guilds merge as the raid content becomes more difficult, so you can't correlate that directly with loss of players. Ragefire has to have at least six guilds since it absorbed Lockjaw. I play on Coirnav, so I should know how many current guilds it has, but I don't. It lags big time during US prime time, so I'm not there when the raiding guilds are.

This just isn't true at all.

On Combine/Sleeper, there was a big dropoff at Gates because it was still really hard and overtuned and they couldn't actually beat it for a long while.

On Fippy, there was a big dropoff in Gates because of one particular guild's leaderhsip issues, and a bigger dropoff in PoR as most guilds faced a combination of really hard content (at the time) and really boring content with the level 70 stretch and por raids.

On Ragefire/Lockjaw, there was a big dropoff the moment Phinny was launched. But after that there was steady pop with no decline for many years.

On Phinny, there never was any dropoff at alll -- just slow steady attrition from classic to (almost) live where the server currently sits.

On all the truebox TLP's after Phinny, you had the players that had already rerolled every time a new server launched. They all predictably cratered population at PoP.

There isn't a one size fits all attrition model.

Yes, I agree I oversimplified things a little bit, but my main point still stands. There is no evidence ANY of the TLPs have become unviable due to very low population as progression has continued. The merge proposals that keep showing up here, at seemingly regular intervals, are unwarranted IMHO. The OP's proposal in this thread struck me as particularly illogical, since it appears to be motivated by a dissatisfaction with the ruleset, not the actual server pop.

Count me as down, I'd love for a Ragefire/Coirnav merge. I'm currently working on a 40 monk/shaman on Ragefire but to have my two other toons able to play with Coirnav players would be smooth if not rocking.

I think merge proposals are perfectly reasonable things to ask for when you have less than 10 active guilds on any server myself, by 5 your server feels doomed.

Grouping is long dead outside guilds fairly early on with TLP populations once the bulk of the casuals & classic recyclers have given up the nostalgia trip or gotten left too far behind.
Inside guilds it can be all but dead outside of a few cliques / buddy groups, the rest are boxing or effective soloers a handful are sporadically getting group & surviving but only just barely.

Once servers become that bare the activity even in general chat dries up, guild chat dries up, the opportunities for recruitment are zero or less than zero as you get your members poached by the other guilds as they try to survive, it's a race to see which tag gets to stick around to the bitter end when there is just 1 guild left and then that shrinks.

Left too long mergers won't help guilds to retain members and the people calling for mergers understand that. There's a "critical mass" type of effect where you need a certain number of active players for the server to not feel like a wasteland and many more to make it feel healthy. Player confidence in their guild & the server lasting into the next expansion is fickle and guild collapses when they happen are usually sudden & drastic, they can be doing fine one week & then the next week they can't even raise a raid force & people start to panic or bail out.

Server mergers, even the knowledge that one is in the pipeline can make a huge difference in retention.

Fippy did. I was one of the guild leaders of the last guild on the server, and we struggled for a year before finally being unable to progress further due to lack of population on the server. It was finally merged without ever reaching live after being stuck for two+ years.

Maybe I've done a bad job explaining this, because that is not my motivation at all. The only dissatisfaction I have with any of the rule sets is that Truebox should be removed after a certain point when its usefulness has passed. The proposed ruleset in the original post was merely me cherry picking what I felt were the better parts of the 2 servers rulesets (AoC, 3 month unlocks, no truebox) and a desire for stronger, fewer servers. There has been some negative feedback from Ragefire but I'm sure it would be 100% worse if the proposed server would continue to have Truebox since they currently don't have those handcuffs, wouldn't you agree?

My thinking is to look forward and get out ahead of existing TLPs becoming the next Fippy where there are 0 active players. While the progress charts aren't 100% accurate they do paint a rough picture of whats going on and my motivation was to get the idea out with enough time before Ragefire or Coirnav hit those points as well as give DPG enough lead time to actually fix it before its too late as they have given the impression they are quite busy and short staffed.

When was the last time you saw a group form up in general chat for group only progression on Coirnav? It's just not happening.

Having been a part of a few guilds folding / merging I would confidently say that each one resulted in a loss of at least 10% of the roster from that server. Anecdotal I know, and I'm sure someone has a story where not only did 100% of both guilds continue to play in the new merged guild but that ended up attracting more players so the 2.0 guild was actually greater than the sum of its parts. But generally speaking I think Skuz hit the nail on the head with this quote

I've said what I have to say in this thread, but you read something into my remarks I clearly didn't say. There is little PUG activity on any TLP post PoP, that I have ever seen, yes. But that's not how group progression is done. It's either (a) a non-raiding guild (which may or may not be reporting themselves to data collection sites), or (b) groups of friends who coordinate playing together, or (c) boxers, of which every TLP has a bunch. I count boxers in the playerbase the same way DPG does, as multiple paid accounts.

The overall health of the server is measured by its revenue stream, not by its guild count or by how much activity you see in General chat. They're not going to seriously consider a server merge option unless their accounting tools are telling them a server is no longer financially carrying its weight, and neither you nor I see those numbers.

I agree with all this =)

A couple of days ago, I entered general on one of my accounts to ask a question. I have the auto join server channels disabled on all 3 accounts. There were 104 people in channel. Not empty, but not exactly full. I imagine there's a lot of people like me that disable those channels to avoid spam and political flame wars.

By the way, nobody responded to my question lol. Bazaar mules not in offline mode might swell the numbers a bit.

As far as number of guilds, there might only be one that's doing fine. TFC is by far the most prolific. MIM is still kicking, but we are definitely feeling the pain of a server in it's death throes. Those are the only 2 that I see massing at the raid instances on our raid days. EC might still be a viable raid force, but they don't keep the same hours we do, so I'm not too sure of their numbers.

EoA is still rocking too from what I've seen/heard

Just gonna bump this. It's not too late DBG, pool your late expansion players together, save the hardware! Coirnav and Ragefire will be in HoT together starting June 2nd which just so happens to coincide with the new (to me) limitation that server merges can only happen in May/June/July.

Most of the later expansions require weeks to months even with increased key/flag drops. The delay is pretty insignificant up to TBS, but from SoF onward, it becomes very significant. And since say SoF-->VoA or so are big expansions with a ton to do, having the extra time at that point is nice. (It really sucks that DPG still does 2 months for non level increase expansions like Underfoot on the standard model now.)

Edit to add -- the voting period isn't insignificant either. It will add anywhere from 1-3 weeks on the end of those 90 days. So standard is more like ~110 days total for an expansion that gets beat in a week.

This is true, it would be nice if DBG bumped the keys/flags up even more, having to beat the same tier over 3-4 weeks makes sense on live, on TLP should only need to beat it once or twice to flag your entire raid IMO.