How to design a TLP server idea.

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by Skuz, Feb 9, 2021.

  1. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Everyone has an idea for a TLP ruleset, even if they don't post it.
    When they do those ideas are often critiqued, sometimes constructively, often what happens is most just jump onto the post to give their own personal TLP idea rather than analyse & respond directly the OP's one.

    Many players who have been around a while will know enough about the company, the infrastructure, the tech etc that they understand what is possible & what would require major expensive changes or is simply not possible with the way the game is coded or structured.

    They aren't usually putting down TLP ideas out of malice, though some do, they are usually trying to manage expectations so their fellow players' pie in the sky ideas are given a reality check on what is actually possible about their ruleset idea and what is simply not going to be possible.


    Here in this post I will try and break down some common "unrealistic feature" players have asked for (sometimes multiple times) while also giving some guidance on how to framework your concepts.
    This is something that will 99% be ignored but it might help a few people to understand the limitations & parameters they should consider & work with for their TLP ruleset idea & maybe in doing so help players come up with more workable ideas that stand a more realistic chance of success.

    Here's my rough & ready guide:

    1. Think about how many players want feature X - are there even enough of them to make a server with that feature viable?

    example: PvP - The devs would absolutely love to make a PvP TLP, but the problem is there are so few players who actually want this that there is just not enough of them to make this a viable server type for a TLP - if a big enough PvP population shows up let them know where & when you will show up on Zek maybe & they can take a look at your numbers - think many hundreds of real players would be needing to show up rather than 20 zealots + their boxes.

    example: Era-Locked - Devs made Agnarr so this shows there is scope, but there were a TON of posters asking for this, also there was the EQ MAC server AlKabor community to consider for this idea, so it mostly worked out Agnarr still has players on it. But for any other era unlock you are going to need to rally a lot of support for it, there are a few posters who ask for era-locks beyond pop over the years but if you put them all together in the same room you would not even have 20 posters so if you truly think there are enough players to make a era-locked server you are probably wrong and if you want that idea to work you will need to find a lot of players to support it, set up a Facebook group or a Discord for that concept & try and rally support for it and then get them to post in the forum in support of your idea - the problem here is getting all those who want a post-PoP era-lock to agree on which expansion to lock it at & then getting enough who agree on the same expansion to lock it at - GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

    2. Think about how cost intensive feature X would be to implement - features that are going to be costly to create or are going to be costly to maintain stand a very poor chance of being included.

    example: Free Trade Loot - the cost to administrate all of the additional tickets that Free Trade creates is exorbitant, Firiona Vie has the highest cost in Customer Service hours & largest volume of Petition Tickets of any server, the devs have therefore ruled out having a TLP - which would likely have a vastly larger active population than Firiona Vie has and would therefore more than double the demand on the CS team - maybe even more than that. Free Trade Loot TLP has quite a lot of popularity but in this case that actually works against it - its an indicator to the team of just how big a problem that server could become to service properly and the cost on CS staff required to maintain a FTL server would be too high.

    3. Think about the infrastructure limitations that the game has - some ideas will not be workable if the way the game works cannot support it.

    example: Feeder Servers - this is the concept of a series of servers that are locked at each major "milestone" expansion, so you could have a Classic server, Kunark Server, Velious Server, Luclin Server, Planes of Power Server etc.
    The reason this falls down is manifold, firstly there is a headroom limit on the number of named servers EQ can work with, this was elaborated on prior to the release of Aradune & Rizlona - teh team could not launch any further TLP servers until after they had merged some of the existing ones, so Fippy, Trakanon & Brekt got merges & the team had to get the server merge system/software working before they could do that. In order to release 2 TLP in 2021 the team will need to merge at least 1 more server - likely to be Selo.
    Therefore the concept is clever, might prove to be popular even at least to begin with, and may well work for the early eras but the infrastructure of the game won't allow it anyway because it can't support a large rollout of that many servers even if they were only rolled out one every 3 months or whatever the "unlock schedule" was to be.
    The other problem with that idea is that the earlier servers would become wastelands with a handful of players on them as most move onto the next expansion server. it actually works better in practise to have a whole bunch of players together than stretching them out across multiple expansion servers nearly empty of players except the most recent one. Look at love servers - vast majority of players are at the max level, a handful just behind catching up while the rest of the game is almost, but not quite, deserted. TLP servers have seen the exact same pattern repeated. TLP servers work when you build up a "reservoir" of players over the year between TLP then open the floodgates so they can all play together, the feeder server would just see a trickle of unhappy players with few others to play with all chasing after the most recent server that had a solid population - across potentially dozens of servers that are barely populated - you would in essence have created a hardware representation of an entire live server population level-spread but across multiple physical servers.

    4. Understand that the dev team have reinforced the belief that certain classes should remain tied to their expansions. That there is a hard limit of 16 for how many classes EQ can even have, and also a hard limit of 16 for how many races it can have - to increase those hard limits would not only be very expensive, it is very difficult to do & would risk breaking so many systems that are tied into those hard limits that the game would be likely to take many years and a lot of developer time to fix everything those 2 seemingly small changes would break, it might even mean no expansions for a few years while everything was fixed.

    example 1: new races, new classes - not gonna happen, hard limited already have 16 of each. Best thing we could get is more race class combinations but there are limitations on those too due to either the race having no robe graphic option in its file or due to class specific animations being absent from the race's animation file - those files are all but inaccessible as the animation files on the development servers/libraries are gone, lost so they can't change them & upload them into the game as newly modified version, to change them they would have to completely recreate all of the animations for that race - something only worth doing if the art & animation teams are ever given the green light to work on a full set of new player models -which I know they would love to do but once again - cost comes into it.

    example 2: Beastlord & Berserker available in the classic era prior to their introduction in the original EQ timeline. The dev team while not having explicitly ever said they are against having Beastlord & Berserker "in" for classic-start TLP servers have made changes that pretty much cement this into fact, all of the itemisation that existed in Plane of Fear for Beastlords & Berserkers (it was put into the game at some point long after their introduction) was removed & will only now appear there when their respective expansions unlock - this looks like the dev team at one time had a plan to have Beastlord & Berserkers available in classic on TLP but then later decided to walk that back.
    Therefore with the current team it is unlikely we will ever see Beastlord & Berserker "in" for a classic start TLP that has a standard ruleset & a standard unlock schedule, the only way we will see them in the game that early is as part of some "special ruleset" server - so if you want a server with them in at the start your idea will need to have both the Luclin & Gates of Discord expansions unlocked. There have been 2 proposed new server rulesets that allow this, for example the GoD-Mode TLP idea I proposed & the LLP Server (level-locked progression) that many posters have suggested and which I more fully fleshed out as a concept later on having collated their feedback.

    5. When considering features for your server idea consider that some features are pretty much tied to the unlock schedule of a TLP/LLP server - you also need to consider the additional rules that are going to be needed to support the unlock schedule you want to work.

    example: Selo had a fast-Progression 30 day unlock schedule for each & every expansion - therefore it needed to have other aspects of the game accelerated to make such a fast unlock schedule viable - halved raid timer lockouts, doubled factions, faster named respawns, higher level XP rate, higher AA xp rate. If you want higher XP on your server you must have a strong justification for it, such as a fast unlock schedule.
    Something many players ask for is "double loot" on faster unlock servers, the reason why halved unlocks were done for Selo instead of double loot is simple - in order to double the loot for an entire expansion of raids a developer has to spend a lot of time researching, checking & confirming all of the item codes & loot tables for every single event in that expansion - this has only been done one retroactively - for Underfoot on TLP servers. It was a concept the dev team felt had merit though so they adopted it for live and rolled it out in-era when developing ToV & CoV so that once live servers hit 6 months of those expansions being active they increase the drops by a factor of 2.0.
    Similar to the double loot issue is the Raid currency system, this however is far easier on the dev time to alter, on TLP servers the community called for a increase to the currency rates & again this concept was viewed by the devs as having merit in being applied to live servers so TLP servers get an increase in currency rates & so do live servers when the live expansion has been active 6 months - older expansions gain further currency increases - all those measures mean that any guild not at the cutting edge of content will have a far easier time of gearing up their members, even if they can only raid older expansions or on a much lower frequency.

    6. When you write up your idea, consider if you are looking at creating a FULL ruleset or whether you are just looking to add one specific feature to a general TLP idea that already exists.
    If you are only writing about one feature you like, would desire, keep it short & concise write up one line about what that feature is & then underneath it maybe give a more elaborate reason why that would be a good rule or explain your thinking on why that idea has merit & why you would like to see it on a TLP.
    When writing a FULL ruleset consider if this is something for either a "standard" TLP or a "special ruleset" TLP. Then you need to think about all the points above & how they all relate to each other, think about the unlock schedule & what ties into that, what is needed to support that.

    examples of full-ruleset server ideas - click here for my outline of two concepts for special ruleset servers.
    Ulrin, topple, minimind and 1 other person like this.
  2. WaitingforMoreEQ WaitingforTBC

    They should just make a PvP server. It's the best TLP idea.
  3. Tweakfour17 Augur


    It would be interesting to see the actual stats on CS tickets, I'd be surprised if FV generates more than Aradune with all the petitions about suspected 3+ boxing / warping / afk farming, etc. People saw "GM Enforced" and went nuts with petition quest.

    Also I think the reason given for not making a FV TLP is a smokescreen, personally I think there is 2 reasons they don't want to do it.

    1. Philosophically the devs believe you should earn your loot, being able to buy hand me downs makes the game too Pay-To-Win in their minds.

    2. Financially they want their TLPs to be popular so people re-roll and buy bags and pots, if a FV TLP came out it would be TOO popular and that hurts future TLPs. You kill the old ones, no one bats an eye, you threaten the future ones? Corporate's not gonna let that happen.
  4. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    I'm indifferent on Free Trade, I have no skin in the game only interested in dissecting fact from fiction, I had characters on Brekt & FV that I played sometimes but there was zero EU population on either so it was no fun.

    I think that most of the folks who stretch into conspiracy-theory style thinking about why the rule is not wanted by devs are hugely biased in favour of it. I think when the team say that FV has more CS tickets that it isn't some grand smokescreen conspiracy just a blunt truth people do not want to accept because it kills their favoured idea stone dead & people hate that.
    Rather than accept a stark reality people often come up with these often convoluted conspiratorial justifications, with absolute zero supporting evidence I might add, I have not seen one with a single shred of factual evidence that might support them, happens in many other areas of life all the time too.

    Besides, I've seen & heard from multiple folks who have worked in EQ CS who basically confirm the truth of this and no I'm not going to go digging up the disparate sources of that for you.
    Sometimes the simple facts really are just simple facts, as boring and unsexy as that can be.

    Your point about the dev philosophy had merit, since Prathun said words to the effect that the Free Trade Rule subverts the primary game loop, meaning the beating of events to get loot. Either way Free Trade will stay on FV & is unlikely to ever be used for a TLP.
    Tweakfour17 likes this.
  5. Tweakfour17 Augur


    Oh, I'm sure FV has more CS tickets than a normal server, I just think if the devs really wanted to do it and there was a financial interest then they would.

    They had to know the ruleset for Aradune would be a CS nightmare but there was enough people asking for something along those lines and it won't have a direct impact on future TLPs so they went for it.

    I don't think its a convoluted conspiracy, maybe it is and I'm just blind to it, but I think a FV TLP would retain people alot easier/longer than the traditional TLPs do since you could take an expac or 2 off and come back and get hand me down gear from old friends/guildies etc. Gear up a 2nd/3rd box with your old raid gear. You start peeling away from the TLP re-roller crowd and the krono lords and thats bad for business if your business plan includes launching new TLPs every year.
  6. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Aradune ruleset, in particular the 2-box limit & dedicated GM support for a set time was an experiment and DarkPaw will have learned from that, what that means for future TLP will eventually become apparent with the new TLP rulesets though the forum users are not going to have any real insight into whether that was cost-effective or not.


    I think Free Trade is a "one off" idea that doesn't bear repeating for solid game-design reasons, no matter how popular it might be in theory it doesn't sit well with designers & if you want it then there is already a server for the niche community that wants that badly enough already.
    FV has a solid population for a bunch of reasons, Free Trade is just one among many - a bigger reason is arguably just that its popular for being popular, like the Kardashian sisters are famous for being famous, doesn't mean it's all that desirable (or talented) really.
    Brekt was a super niche tiny community so Free Trade rule by itself is clearly not as big a draw as people claim or it would have had a far bigger population.
    And if you took just Xegony & Bristlebane their population combined is much larger than FV has already so regular rules vs Free Trade are also way more popular even before you look at all the other live servers in that equation. Free Trade merit is heavily over-played.

    As far as gear for alts, having been a raider on Ragefire in early eras & on Phinigel all the way to TBL so far alt loot is not as big a deal as believed either, at least not on a Truebox server where alt options are limited by your ownership of enough PC hardware, my boxes on Phinigel have had multiple gear items from raids over time and the group & crafted gear options for boxes are good after PoP, exceptionally good from SoD onwards.
  7. Dune Friendly New Member

    The most popular server is just lucky? It coulda been any server!

    No... lucky would be why the non FV servers are # 2 # 3 # 4 etc. Those servers are lucky they are the best of the "non FV" servers. Everyone knows why FV is the top. It's got something unique to it and people, including myself, enjoy hopping on there randomly and seeing what a krono can buy for a low lvl twink.

    Let's not start trying to say the top server could be any server and FV is just lucky and stumbled upon being the most popular. That doesn't work when there is a giant difference in rulesets.

    The argument about Aradune is that this company is trying to tell us that FV TLP would be a customer service nightmare... They then proceed to release a 2 box server, dedicate GMs for 6 months, and they still ask us to report 3+ boxers, while they knowingly allow people to box 60 toons in sirens grotto... chardok... amongst others now. There is not a chance that an FV TLP server would be doing anything close to Aradune in terms of customer support tickets.

    I don't even really understand why all tradeable loot somehow increases the tickets... It makes things like multiquesting and loot rights safer... It would reduce petitions on that stuff because you can't get ripped off if everything is tradeable.
  8. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    I didn't say lucky, at any point, nor did I imply that, you made an enormous assumption.
    I don't think it is luck, I gave a couple of reasons but I didn't elaborate further though I could have, double XP for example, the fact that once you are there you cannot transfer off, the fact that it was at one time a hotbed of Roleplaying guilds so it attracted an additional audience beyond those who were interested in the faster XP & trade rules and the regular EQ audience.

    FV is only high pop on a FV v 1 other server basis.
    My point was if you wanted a sum total of the EQ players then people who play on a non FV rules server outnumber players who play on the FV rules server by way more than 2:1 and by that measure the popularity of FV it put into a much clearer context.

    There are something close to 68k subscribers & 82k active users of EQ - FV population is a tiny faction of that total, FV rules therefore to be considered as popular as many claim would require that the FV server was full to overflowing of players.

    Oh I understand the argument proposed by you here & many others elsewhere, I just don't agree that the situations are comparable.
    You may see what you think is a boxer, you may even be right, but the CS team have to follow a set procedure to evaluate that & document their interactions, now without an actual inside track on what's going on there neither you or I can accurately say what has been going on, were those suspected boxers actually boxers? some definitely are but if they found some way to convince a GM they aren't then they won't be disciplined, the GM may simply have never gotten round to them from a huge backlog of minor petitions many of which may have been breaking the rule many wouldn't have been but they looked like they were, they are seemingly no longer active & they were only intended to be active for a trial period anyhow, maybe it was simply not cost effective & the future TLP will never again repeat the kind of "limited boxing" rule they tried on Aradune.

    Have you been living under a rock for 21 years?
    RMT?
    Third party websites?
    EBAY?

    You can't expect me to take that comment seriously.
    People have been getting scammed on FV for 2 decades, often they petition for help because some website they did a deal with failed to honour their end of the bargain, or they sold a character or gear to one & never got any money, there are a whole bunch of reasons specifically tied to being able to free trade items that are normally not tradeable.
    Safer? Laughable.
    And that's before we get into players scamming each other there.

    I am not going to respond to any further posts about Free Trade in this thread, that one specific rule was not the sole topic of my OP and I don't want it to be either.
  9. FranktheBank Augur

    Didn't they say BB is actually the most populated server?
  10. Zinth Augur

    there is a limit to "named servers" how many servers are there right now? 20ish? there used to be like 44 or so at the peak... there should be plenty room for that then
  11. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Not any more, they used to host the servers themselves when they had that 44ish server list, since moving to having the servers being hosted by an outside company they have a limit on the number that is lower, that's why they had to delay the launch of Aradune & Rizlona until after Fippy, Trakanon & Brekt had completed their respective mergers.

    Right now they have 1-2 "server slots" spare & probably need to complete Selo's Merge with Povar prior to launching a new round of TLP servers in 2021. So consequently any new TLP are a few months away from even being announced.
  12. FranktheBank Augur


    I think they should be fine to launch the TLP right? Because before launch of aradune/rizlona they merged like 5? servers. Assuming the math holds, they shouldnt be restricted for the new TLPs.
  13. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Yeah but they have to "roadmap" TLP servers so that they are able to launch TLP in future while the current crop of TLP are "maturing" and each year the "standard TLP" have a little-bit longer maturation cycle.

    Phinigel will have taken from December 2015 to May 2021 to mature, 5 years & 3 months to reach the point when it unlocks CoV (#27) the "current expansion".

    But every year the game adds another expansion, so the "standard TLP" will increasingly take longer to reach live

    Mangler will have taken from March 2019 to Feb 2025 to mature, 6 years & 1 month to reach the point when it unlocks ??? (#31) the "current" expansion, it will have had 4 more expansions than Phinigel had during its TLP lifecycle.

    Aradune & Rizlona will in turn have a bit longer maturation cycle than Mangler will have..
  14. Tweakfour17 Augur

    This brings up an interesting question, we can assume they intend to launch 1-2 new TLPs a year, if your math holds up and they need to wait for Selo and possible Phinny to hit live before launching 2021s, what will 2022 bring? Miragul will hit live somewhere in there so I guess that frees up 1 slot. Coirnav should pass Ragefire sometime this year but it is not scheduled to hit live until Nov 2023 (I think?) so then what? Will they prematurely merge TLPs? Or merge some Live servers to free up the hardware? Invest in MORE hardware?
  15. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    We can speculate at best on what their roadmap might be and be way off, but there are plenty of options on the table if they remain fixed at the number of servers they wish to maintain.

    1. They can reduce the frequency of TLP launches.
    2. They can go to a 1 TLP a year launch rather than remaining at 2, or alternate (have 2 servers launch one year & only 1 the following year)
    3. They can look to enact more mergers of low population live servers to free up server slots.
    4. They can look at TLP unlock schedules & give them shorter maturation cycles.*
    5. Think about a seasonal TLP server so they have 1 TLP being recycled / re-used alongside a 1 other TLP a year launch.

    Point 4 above is quite relevant to the ongoing discussion about a Selo successor.

    Selo showed that there is an audience for a very fast progression though it wasn't huge, some kind of mid-point between Selo's "Monthly" unlock fast progression and Phinigel's "12week/8week" unlock speed seems to have come out as being something current/former players would like for DarkPaw to explore on a future TLP.
    Given how the standard TLP are going to grow in terms of maturation cycles then this conversation is only going to get stronger over the long term and it helps make the fast-er progression TLP server more likely to happen than not.

    In addition to the above there is possibly going to need to be some conversation about where the standard TLP life-cycle can be given some further compression.
    Reducing the amount of time given to the early era expansions, so instead of classic being 12 weeks making it 8 or less for example or perhaps even starting future "Standard TLP" in Luclin will not so much be a choice but almost become a necessity in the next ten years, and I think a lot of TLP players could embrace that.
    Along with that the often asked for compression of the "level 70 era" of OoW, DoN, DoDH & PoR is another area I think players would embrace, and probably even more happily than they would do so for the early era compression, I'd even suggest that is the first place for DarkPaw to look if they wish to make reductions to the life cycle of future standard TLPs since they will have more expansions to work through each year.

    If they do merge more live servers & continue to merge TLP servers to live servers then I think the team at DarkPaw should really start looking at AoC in a new light, rather than just as a solution to content access problems on TLP but also as a community favoured QoL feature, adding AoC to live servers I think would be very popular among the live audience but also would mean TLP players being transferred from TLP to live servers after having had the AoC feature for years by the time that happens are going to continue to have access to a popular part of the TLP experience they enjoyed.
  16. Neuro Elder

    I *do* think they need to keep changing the rulesets, as people need something different to keep coming back.

    My personal idea would be to open a server at Kunark level, but level cap it at 50 for the first six weeks, then unlock it to 60 for the next six weeks, then you are on a normal schedule. The advantage would be more areas for people to level up in from the beginning, which means the servers might not buckle under the strain from day one.

    I can't think of any significant issues with this, coding in a level cap should be easy. And imagine the challenge of trying to do Seb with all 50s.
  17. Tweakfour17 Augur

    As long as they continue to make money hand over fist on launches 1 and 2 seem unlikely.

    3 is probable assuming they continue to have low pop live servers, no clue how many of the live servers would qualify or if merging 2 med-low servers would cause too much server instability.

    4. With the amount of people who only like Classic-Luclin/PoP I can't really see them abandoning the 3 months every expac in those as it lines up nicely with yearly releases. I suppose one of the servers in 2021 (or some later year) could be an experiment and see if there is appetite for something like this as far as player retention vs bag/pot sales. Compressing some of the lvl 70s would make sense OoW+DoN and DoDH+PoR would make sense but that only shaves 4 months off the life cycle, could dump LDoN straight into PoP to shave another 3 months off I suppose but if they continue to launch a new expac a year those gains will be rapidly eaten up.

    5. This idea has good potential and allows them to try more risky ideas that may actually prove popular. Seasonal TLP that dumps into Agnarr? Maybe finally put a real nail in the pvp tlp idea. Some kind of race to finish xxx Expac. Have expansions unlock immediately after previous boss is downed. Lots of neat ideas they could toy with and not be bound to half a decade+ of a dead server.
  18. Neuro Elder

    Well, lets look at it from an economic side then.

    What is EQ's primary source of revenue generation?

    I would guess the two main sources of revenue are the monthly subs, and the various consumables like XP pots and 40 slot bags. I'm going to go out of a limb here and guess that these consumables are sold at a flat rate, based on leveling time. The more time it takes to level up, the more they sell, but it's capped because eventually they reach max level for whichever xpac they are in. It doesn't matter if the next xpac opens up in 3 weeks or 3 months, the same number of pots will be sold regardless.

    Therefore, the subs are the only variable. Whether they are paid with Krono or real money, those represent income to Darkpaw. Krono, by their nature, are front loaded, so it really depends on internal stats which we aren't privy to. I would like to assume that Darkpaw has done their research and has the data on things like player retention, spending habits in the long run, etc. Maybe the current setup is the most optimal for income generation, but I have to think that the lion's share of income is earned in the first months of a new TLP. How steep is the dropoff, however? And is the dropoff based solely on expansion, or is aggregate time also a factor? Like, where do you lose most players? If it's strictly because a new TLP opens, then it shouldn't matter what era they are in, and accelerating the xpac release wouldn't matter. However, if (for example) the opening of Luclin caused a 50% drop in subs, then it would make sense to not get to Luclin quicker, as that would just mean less subs for less time.

    Also, factor in things like player interest. Aradune was a massively popular TLP, probably because of the new ruleset (limited Truebox). I'm guessing that corresponded to a similar increase in revenue, as classic is almost certainly where they make the most money. If the ruleset were different, and the release timetable different, would that increase in population (and therefore in income) be enough to offset the accelerated release shedule?

    There's a lot we don't know that goes into these things, but I guarantee, this cycle of releasing a TLP every year will have diminishing returns if no other changes are made. If Darkpaw wants it to remain viable, they have to change it up a bit.
  19. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    For TLP yes, for live servers the Expansions are a big chunk.