I remember when many of the TLPs had a server-wide vote to unlock the next expansion. Why did this system fall out of favor? Seems like its tough to nail down exactly how long an expansion should run. A vote seems good in theory, why isn't it used anymore?
When it was just on its own as a TLP it was for the most part a failure, but honestly I could see it doing pretty good with a Selo style server now; where certain conditions need to be met then vote come up on whether to unlock the next Xpac in a couple of weeks. Would help address some of the concerns in the later Xpacs that the server was just going through way too fast to be able to get things done.
Other servers troll voted to give those servers the opposite of what they wanted...pretty obvious it was going to fail. They didn't learn anything from the Ranger bow vote apparently.
yea people would vote to block expansions that no longer play on the servers, causing the server to get stuck in an expansion for a longer than normal period of time, causing mass exodus of the servers.
I will say I just restarted on Ragefire and having a blast. Mercs help catch up pretty quick and there are a few good active guilds. Definitely a boxers server to get stuff done, but thats refreshing coming from truebox lol
When the first TLPs that had voting launched (Fippy and Vulak), there wasn't a PoP-locked server (Agnarr). A significant portion of the TLP community wanted a server where you would stay in old expansions for a long time, and never wanted to advance to GoD. There were also players who wanted to advance through expansions quickly. TLPs have always had this uneven split of players wanting to blast through all the content, and others wanting to stop and smell the flowers for a while. The voting ruleset was a compromise between the two - just unlock the next expansion when enough people vote for it. It sounds perfect as an idea, but in practice there were problems. The voting system in EQ didn't have a lot of clarity as to how it works. Voting periods started every other Monday at midnight PST, 60 days after the previous expansion's content had been cleared. You can read more about it here on Allakhazam. This means if you wanted to figure out when Velious unlocks, you had to be online to see the serverwide emote, or know from other players when Phara Dar was defeated and all epic 1.0s were complete. Figure out when 60 days from that is, and figure out when voting would begin based on the 2 week vote blocks from the server launch. If the expansion was unlocked in the first week of a voting period, it should count and open the vote in the same period (60 days after Phara Dar's death), but it might skip to the next voting period instead. You also couldn't tell how the vote was going or whether the expansion was going to unlock or not. They would just unlock at midnight at the end of the voting period, or nothing would happen, and players would be confused and wonder if there was a bug that caused the expansion to not unlock, or if it got voted down. One time, the expansion launched without a vote (DoN), and it was also bugged (there were rocks blocking the entrance to Broodlands). Another time, the server reset itself to classic EQ (level 50 cap, most of our items didn't work). Each time there was confusion about the voting time period, or whether an expansion should unlock (and when, because people take time off for expansion launches), I am guessing players also bothered the devs about it and they had to spend a bunch of time looking at it, when the idea was to let players vote and let things happen naturally. This is probably part of why TLPs now have scheduled unlocks (and now we have an in-game calendar) which makes this much easier for everyone for planning purposes. I'm sure its also why they unlock at 2pm instead of midnight. On Fippy, the only vote I was there for that didn't pass was the GoD unlock vote, which failed 3 times. Although you'd think the biggest drop in players is when GoD launches (it probably is), back then there wasn't a new TLP for everyone to move to. But, when the vote failed repeatedly, there was a significant drop in players who had been looking forward to the next expansion. IMO had Agnarr existed already, and Agents of Change, the voting system would have been less bad. If it had been set up differently, i.e. voting started when an expansion launched instead of when it was cleared, and when the vote ended, you got a 1 week warning before the next expansion would launch (let's be real, this probably still wouldn't work, I can already imagine the "I need more time to schedule PTO" posts). The voting system encouraged people to finish content ASAP to then spend a looong time farming, followed by the uncertainty about when the next expansion would actually launch.
By many you mean just two. Ragefire & Lockjaw. Voting is too easy for the A-Holes to manipulate, logging onto a server they didn't even play on just to mess with the vote. So, blame the A-Holes.
For the umteenth time, it wasn't. About the only players that left when God launched on Fippy were the TL officers. Server population overall hardly dropped at all. Just a steady decline not much different from any of the 3-4 previous expansions. The big drop for Fippy was around DoDH/PoR.
The reason this vote failed was twofold. First- There are obviously a group of players that wanted the server to stay in PoP. The second- A lot of the guilds that were pushing to get into time/ele planes (that werent TL or Citizen) were basically tired of those guilds blocking targets to keep other guilds out of the elemental plains. (RZ was a big one). It was basically a lot of the smaller guilds making a stand that if they wanted GoD to open they would have to start playing nice. The leadership of those guilds got together and basically agreed to vote down GoD until they started letting other guilds into ele/time. It didnt work the first time around, and a handful of the members of those guilds basically killed every single raid target they could, from ToV, to kael, to PoP mobs they didnt even care about. So it failed a second time, they basically realized they needed to stand down, and began letting the other guilds kill lesser PoP targets and get into elemental planes. However, they still would perma lockdown the ele gods to keep those guilds out of time. So it failed a third time, at this point whether from players in those guilds quitting from nothing to do, or they finally got the point, the basically stood down and let the other guilds into time. Fourth time the vote passed, and iirc every vote after that did as well. Memory might be a tad fuzzy, but that was the jist of what happened. Also note this was before DZ's.
You aren't remembering right. After the second no vote we had a huge decrease in players in TL as well as server wide.
There was only about a 10% dip in guilds that completed Gates compared to Pop. No different than the dip in guilds that completed Pop compared to Luclin. I know it seemed like a big deal to the players in TL, but for most of the server, things bounced back just fine after Gates finally passed. Maybe there was a drop in casual unguilded players, I don't know--I suspect not much though, as they were the ones voting no for the most part. And general chat pop didn't significantly drop. Nor did ldon participation, which was an easy way to track how active the pop was at the time. If there was a massive departure of players, I'm not sure how basically all the empirical numbers showed only ~10% loss of players and how at the same time just about every raid guild on the server was able to press on unphased. I posted actual numbers on all of the above a few years back. I've yet to see anyone make any argument against it other than anecdotal "I was there and it was massive!"
