Which TLP would you play on?

Back to the days of no AoCs and 7 day respawn OW mobs? Better buy the rights to the rotation calendar now mabbu.

On a serious note, if I had any influence on a new TLP I'd suggest the following:

1) Put spell focus effects back on gear in classic.
2) Hire someone who actually knows how EQ works and give them the proper tools to analyze and enforce anti cheating. The entire customer service department is so out of touch with reality it's embarrassing.
3) Lighten the enchanter and wizard bottlenecks for epics - everyone else has it so easy at this point.
4) Make the AA autogrant 2 expansions back opposed to 4.
5) Buff rogues in classic somehow. Yes, it's that bad.
6) Monks....
7) Give us aggro meters in classic, why not. We already have extended target window/click from bags/40 slots+ 100% wr bags.
8) Let em roll zerks and beastlords in classic. There's nothing overpowered about either, infact I'd be willing to bet zerkers are BARELY above rogues in classic.
9) 60 days max per expansion up to PoP.
10) Fix Naggy and Vox to AE when their main target is out of LoS but in melee range.

I'd never play a "hardcore" server. Who has time for that nonsense anymore?

Hardcore server already been done tbh...look at lockjaw and ragefire.

Do that & MoTM will never be removed.
Removing MoTM is 100% dependent on focus effects staying out of the game until Luclin, but also on reverting the spell data back to being closer to what it was originally on live.
And I personally hope MoTM is eventually removed & will be quite happy to see the changes required for that to happen.

No matter how much money & talented people you throw at that problem you are in an arms race with a group who are better motivated & resourced. The cheating folks have a loosely affiliated army of code moneys who are unfortunately very good at sharing knowledge & skills & tacking all sorts of hurdles & puzzles the employed person or even team could concoct to defeat their nefarious activities.
First step to tackling the cheating is first understanding why they do it, what design aspects of the game would need to be changed to alter their behaviour & whether the changes required are going to be able to coexist within the creative direction of the game & remain entertaining to the players who don't cheat.
Truth is that some forms of unintended play are going to have to be tolerated to some extent whole others are focused on, this already happens to some extent, but players also need to recognise you can't make an MMO that has no cheating.
I wish it was as simple and easy as allocating a few talented & knowledgeable people to the task but it really is not, it's a much broader problem than it appears when you really start digging into all the things needed to make impactful improvements.

I'm opposed to arbitrary bottlenecks, excessive time sinks are not a good player experience, sure epics should be an epic experience & involve some considerable effort, being forced to wait for a spawn only to watch someone leapfrog you & depop the NPC is not the way to do that.
So I am in agreement with you in spirit, Wizard & Enchanter are not the only classes with bottlenecks, Shadowknight still has at least one pretty unpleasant bottleneck to contend with (Lhranc).

Not for all era's no, really not needed in the earlier expansions with AA, but later on yeah there's so many AA involved and catching up on such a large number does I think warrant some change. After EoK unlocks would be where I say this should happen.

Yes, ideally this would be by way of some small disc changes & some Rogue only weapon changes, the early weapons were kept terrible due to how the backstab mod was not separated from weapon damage, that got fixed far later on but the retroactive retune on weapons was not a sensible thing to do prior to the existence of TLP servers, that said itemisation changes would amount to a LOT of extra work and perhaps better would be some disc changes that bridge the gap and require a smaller amount of dev time.

Monks are seriously too good on TLP servers until very late in the expansions, no other melee even got competitive with them until VoA/RoF. The reason Monks are so good vs the other melee is also connected to why Rogues compare to the other melee so poorly early on TLP, because Monks are very much stronger dual wielders & get great itemisation on weapons they benefitted more from changes to the live game than any other melee class.
Rogues who rely heavily on an ability unaffected or affected to a far lesser degree by those live changes for the bulk of their damage they gained far less, consequently Rogues appear much worse on TLP than they should, they still do more damage than they did originally in the early era but it has slipped compared to the gains other DPS made.

Not averse to that.

Beastlords & Berserkers are only going to be available day one of a TLP if that TLP is started with everything up to Gates of Discord unlocked, hell the devs even went and removed the Plane of Fear itemisation for them which overtly reinforces the devs wanting to keep Beastlords tied to The Shadows of Luclin & Berserkers tied to Gates of Discord and do not wish to have them available on a server that only has classic unlocked.

I don't think the unlock schedule should be fixated on a set rotation myself but the devs have said they want the unlock to be predictable & reliably similar across expansions.
I would argue there are definitely expansions that warrant a full 12 weeks and some that do not even warrant 8 weeks. And the expansions themselves were not consistent in the amount of content they contained so why force an arbitrarily fixed schedule upon them, all that does is create expansions that are way more boring on TLP than they need to be or far more rushed than they need to be.
Content is king & how fast a majority of a server's guilds progress through any one expansion should be the better & more dynamic indicator of unlock schedule, they should have the metrics & data for at least some of that and if not there are plenty of progression websites set up by players that have reasonable indicators they could analyze.

Yes.

I'd love to see MOTM removed as well, it's not going to happen.

That post of 'We wouldn't consider removing MOTM until Focus Effects were removed pre Luclin' was just a developer kicking the can down the road. I don't think we're any closer to it happening now than we were before. I think they could stand to tweak the aggro transfer part of it so mages in particular aren't hit so hard

Wrong.

It was a developer (Prathun) trying to elaborate on how the game without MoTM needed to work to counter years of power creep that completely trivialises the early era content.

Prathun is no longer on the EQ team. They're not ever going to balance classic to PoP with the goal of removing MOTM. Bring spell focus back.

No.

I suspect you have ulterior motives with your opposition to spell focus, but let's pretend for argument sake that you legitimately believe in and want MOTM to be removed from the game. As Librarian pointed out - that was a vague statement by a no longer employed dev as to why MOTM wont come off. Additionally, melee passive damage increase would have to be removed, damage bonus to weapons would have to be removed, and potentially spells being reverted back to classic levels. I don't see you lobbying for those changes. These changes are all global. It ... wont ... happen. As we discussed previously, spell focus being removed from gear was a gimmick for Mangler that was a global change with no consequences at the time considering Selo's which launched at the same time as mangler, opened in luclin and all other TLPs were past luclin. At the time it only affected MANGLER and was never reverted.

One word replies hardly demonstrate your ability to convey a valid argument as well.

You wouldn't have twice the population with no instances. It turns out if given a choice between competing for content by waking up at 3 am, or not having to compete for content but getting to experience it anyway, a lot more people choose the latter.

After going to lengths on most of the points of your earlier post you then repeated a point after I had already argued against, so this is a very weak comeback. A reiteration of my earlier comment was not required, a no was sufficient rebuttal at that point.

hardcore players want faster progression not slower, nobody wants to batphone naggy every day for 6 mos then bp trak everyday for 6 mos etc, 3 is already too long

closest thing we had to a hardcore server was selo

and leveling is just a means to an end, nobody wants to do it 5x longer

No it was not a vague statement by Prathun, as short as it was it contained all the important details.
Yes I did lobby for melee changes & have done so previously.
In this post I reiterated that - see below quote:

It was implicit in that highlighted part, but if that's not enough clarification for you then yes I would want to see some melee changes reverted also to allow for MoTM removal, there was a disparity between melee & caster power during the early era however so not ALL the changes should be walked back, simply because casters were a lot stronger than melee back then. Caster spell tables being reverted to classic levels was a specific point Prathun mentioned as necessary too.

Won't? It's undecided at this moment in time, but could it happen? Yes, absolutely it could.
I would argue that the first step to removing MoTM was removing spell foci prior to Luclin and has been taken for that reason, the fact that it first appeared as a feature of Mangler's original "hardcore" concept is not proof it was solely designed for that hardcore ruleset, I posit that it was simply coincidental and that spell foci were left off from Aradune & Rizlona and neither of these were touted as having any hardcore features supports that the feature being on "Hardcore Mangler" was coincidental, a point I made previously in another thread that covered that.

It was a single, short statement by a single dev that is definitely open to interpretation. He may well have just been spitballing--talking off the cuff about what other changes might be needed before removing motm. Or he may have been revealing the outlines of a carefully prepared plan. If it was the latter, they are doing a terrible job of implementing it, with even further increases in dps since that point. I took it for spitballing when he made it, and nothing they've done since then has given me any reason to believe it was anything other than that.

Either way, Prathun is gone and if there was a plan it's likely gone with him.

Again I disagree, generally the things the developers air, particularly when done so from a senior position, are views the whole team share, in this case I believe that the whole team would share Prathun's view on this topic, it remains to be seen if any confirmation of that emerges so it is currently an open question given Prathun's departure whether those changes are ever implemented.

I just cannot see the team thinking that it would be okay to remove MoTM without what Prathun outlined as being the required changes to do so however, anyone who has been playing EQ long enough & knows enough about the way changes to live affected TLP is acutely aware of the way that those changes trivialised the early game, even after MoTM is removed later on the game is definitely easier on TLP than it was on Live & that affect slowly decreases the farther into the expansions a TLP reaches.

Power creep is real, and MoTM was the band-aid solution to effects it created, it really is an either or deal, a super trivial early era EQ would just not be fun it would be a boring cake walk.

Note I am not advocating for a super trivial early era EQ. I argued for motm before it even existed, because without it we would have had naggy and vox easily one groupable.

I just don't think Prathun was laying out a roadmap to remove motm. Just explaining to people who wanted it removed a few of the things that would have to happen before devs would even consider it. He was responding in that thread, not initiating.

They should be. Those are the people you want to come back for a time, and spend money on the game. The people who are already playing are already spending money so it does not boost revenue.

5x slower XP and 6 month expansion unlocks? LOL. And I thought we had long seen the worst possible TLP set up already.