So with all the people different players who all like different xpacs and stop playing TLP servers past a certain point, usually PoP. What would everyone think of a tiered server setup. There would be one server for each xpac. Everyone starts on classic then when you hit lvl 50 you can choose to stay on classic or transfer to Kunark. At this point things can get a bit tricky setting up the requirements to xfer to the next server and ideas would have to be hammered out. I'd put it something like this: Level 55 you can xfer to Velious Level 60 you can xfer to Luclin Max Luclin aa's to transfer to PoP. Something like this continued through the expansions. You could even make it so instead of a transfer it copies your character to the next tier server(one time only) so you can still play your character with people on the previous servers, and if you xfer up a tier and find you hate it for whatever reason you can just go back to the last server you liked. I also want to point out the only server you can create a toon on would be the classic server. This will funnel people into the system and keep them moving along. Also small expansions could be rolled into larger ones like pop and ldon for example. With a setup like this everyone would play through eq at there own pace and not have to wait for the more casual players and the more casual players would not have to feel rushed to keep up. When you feel the need to restart you can just roll a new toon starting back on classic again. This setup seems to me at least like a great way to make everyone happy and do away with the TLP treadmill that we have had for years now that has to be burning people out by this point. I would love to hear some constructive criticism on what everyone thinks. Why this would or would not work.
No. The glue that holds the TLP's together is gated content. We already are too spread out with ~7 TLPs at different eras. If you had 27 TLP servers, there wouldn't be critical mass on any one of them. Guilds would be unable to progress as they wouldn't have enough players, and would have no recruiting pool. Everyone playing at their own pace sounds good, until you realize that no one has exactly the same pace that you have, which means everyone will effectively be playing on their own.
Couple thoughts As time went on the lower servers would be ghost towns. Once people are in the PoP server for example if a new player joined they would be isolated in classic, forced to reach 50 almost alone. There would be no twink gear to help either. The bazaar would be segmented as well, so people trying to work on tradeskills during DoN era wouldn't be able to buy materials from people that are xp'ing in PoP zones (and the stuff doesn't drop until DoN is unlocked) How would you account for races / classes not available at launch? If you need Gates to make a berserker, but need 65 to unlock Gates... Unless completing the requirements on any character flags the account for the server. The criteria to unlock would be a difficult line to draw. Do you make it by level? Do you need to 'max' aa, even though there are a ton of aa that you don't want? Do you lock it by progression? If a raid guild is moving as a unit through, would just completing raids count? How many servers would it take? That is a lot of hardware if you do every expansion. It is still a lot if you do it by level range, 13 by my count.
I did not consider the races and classes not available at launch that is certainly a problem that would have to be worked out. Mabey after you hit say kunark it unlocks the ability to create an iksar on the classic server. Locking and unlocking classes and races is already coded into the game it would just have to be modified. As For the crafting stuff. I would say you have to farm it yourself same as the twink gear. As far as classic becoming a ghost town I would think that everyone rolling new characters to play up would keep a relatively decent population on the classic server, at least not as bad as trying to start on any tlp thats over 2 years old is now. I think a certain amount of people would stay in classic and that would help out as well. After classic everyone would be so close in lvl on each server it would not be a problem. After PoP I honestly have no clue how it works out but worst case you can wait for people to move up to that server and progress with them. As far as the hardware they could honestly merge so many servers they have now to get hardware. I mean even if they didn't and things keep going at 2 tlp servers a year its only a matter of time till they hit that number as well. The current TLP system has its own problems. Putting a huge time investment into a character just to have that character never touched again in a year or two, and have to start all over is not going to be sustainable forever. Neither is the hardware required to run the amount of servers there going to need at a cost that makes since.
27 is a bit crazy but since most likely many of the expansions with no level increase could all be put together I think that would bring the numbers down significantly. Having to start each character on the classic server would also keep people moving into the system and starting together. The guilds not being able to recruit argument seems very flawed. Every new character that moved up to whatever xpac there on would be able to be recruited.
I guess maybe I over overestimated the number of people who play TLP servers if its only like the same 2 or 3 thousand of us playing them over and over then I guess there would not be the population to sustain this model. If it was more like 20k I think this would work out.
I don't think you overestimate. There probably are 20k active TLP accounts. There are 66k total in all eq, and the TLP's have to account for at least a third of those just looking at the server status page over time. But even so, and even if you do just one server per level increase, that's 20k people spread over ~13 servers. The most exciting, and profitable, time for the TLP's is the launch of a new server. Second behind that is the launch of a new expansion. You'd be effectively eliminating permanently both of those. 13 Agnarrs at various points of progression, each stagnant, is what you'd end up with, server never progressing and players bouncing around from place to place without ever really making ongoing connections to each other. Guilds would be virtually non existent.
No. 1. Better to have "waves" of players moving through content as a "clump" than to try and turn that into a trickle of players of likely much smaller numbers at any time. 2. You hamstring the developers on creating new & perhaps novel ruleset servers, instead you need some 13 or so homogenous servers which become more & more boring over time. 3. Guilds - how do you have a functioning guild split across multiple servers/expansions the guild cohesion would be degraded a lot on this kind of set up, this would only further incentivise the Mega-zerg guilds while destroying any real chance for smaller guilds. 4. This idea would wreck any "backward benefitting economy" - players who are further ahead selling unwanted loots is part of the ecosystem that helps those further behind to catch up more easily, rob them of that & you have an ecosystem of the now where only current items are of any value & all older items become obsoleted completely far faster.
i think era TLPs would be ok POP locked one SoD locked one I'm not sure where the next cut off would be after SoD.
