Holly Longdale / Blizzard

Announce "progression servers" today at blizzcon, stating their current classic servers will be renamed to "progression servers" and if people want to keep their characters in classic they can pay for a "cloning" service that they can use to have their character on both "classic" and "progression" servers. They are also adding a 1 time boost option for new players during TBC launch so people can catch up to current content.

I bring this up because some of us have always said eq needs "era" servers where you can freely move up through the expansions when you want to but that idea never gained any traction with the devs and it seems like this is the route blizzard is taking with their progression realms.

Agnarr is an era server and you can now transfer off it to other TLPs. Everyone now and then someone will suggest a 2nd era but there is no real consensus on what that era should be. OoW, SoD, TSS? Personally I don't think EQ has the playerbase to support numerous era locked servers.

I'm talking about instead of TLPs you have a "classic" "kunark" "velious" server etc etc, that you can switch too freely depending on when your done with the content on your own terms and that's how blizzard intends to do it going forward. They are progressing their current classic servers and making new "classic" holding servers where you can either transfer your original toon to or clone your character.

What an interesting idea, if they could have had the forethought to do that with EQ.

April 2020

Jan 2021

.

But instead we'll wait and see how many patches, and how many things removed, before the game is in a playable state for raiders again.

yeah and every time you transfer its going to be paid. character boosts are paid . it just looks like a micro transcation fest.

I mean the boost sounds destructive for there classic servers. Paid Boost

• There will be a level 58 boost
• One per account
• Level 40 mount
• Geared in Blues
• Unavailable to new races

Not really. I understand why people hate it but its a catch up mechanic for people who want to play the newest content which is something EQ TLP servers have needed for awhile now but that's a discussion for another time.

Shocking, a company would go from making money to exploring other ways to make more money. At least in comparison to some companies.

See below,

(I was gonna edit this image to take a playful jab at you Dark Paw employee forum lurkers, but I think this picture alone is enough).

Classic was something people were begging for but TBC classic is NOT in the same ballpark in terms of interest. Blizzard is just reskinning everything and even for long-term wow players it is getting old. My guess is they are going to ride out this New Expansion/Classic Expansion until the end of Classic MoP where Mythic raids ended all "classic" era's. So Shadowlands/classic TBC/Unnamed expansion/Classic Wrath/Unnamed expansion/Classic Cata/Unanamed expansion/Classic MoP/unnamed expansion ...Then and only then will we finally get a "new" MMO and it will either be World of Starcraft/Diablo MMO and a very slim chance of a WoW2.

I am done giving money to remakes named anything other then EQ.

A remaster of Diablo 2. Take my money now! I'll pay for Diablo 4 as well.

Good for Holly, glad her and Prathun are with a big company that can pump plenty of money into their games.

The potential problem with EQ is that it would need 28 servers to have 1 per expansion.

In EQ's case I think a mid-way solution might be best, clustering by level or "era" so like:

L50 - Classic
L60 - RoK, SoV, SoL
L65 - PoP, LoY, LDoN, GoD
L70 - OoW, DoN, DoD, PoR
L75/80 - TSS, TBS, SoF
L85 - SoD, UF
L90/95 - HoT, VoA
L100 - RoF, CotF
L105 - TDS, TBM, EoK
L110 - RoS, TBL
L115 - ToV, CoV

I combined L75 and L80 because there is only 1 level 80 expansion, likewise for L90/95. Additionally, it gives each server (after L60) 2 years worth of content per server.

This idea has been trotted out before a few times, "feeder servers" was its prior player-assigned nomenclature the EQ population is too small to make this viable & there are limitations on how many individually named servers EQ can have anyway, at least for now.

I think that's a really bad solution. You need a "critical mass" of players to make any server viable in its own right, WoW has that, EQ does not.

The current TLP model - where for a year-ish you have a reservoir of players building up anticipation to join the new TLP & then once it opens you have the floodgates opened for them & that reservoir of players can all play together flooding the server with exited little Norrathians is better for EQ.
If you start splitting that reservoir up over a year & over multiple servers instead of a big TLP launch you have a squeaky little leak that barely gets any server wet.
And all you would end up with is a hardware representation of what eventually happens to every single server but with the players level spread physically distant as well as level distant from each other, each server would feel dead after the initial "wave" passed, what would come behind would be smaller & smaller until it all but dried up basically as all you would have is the folks that got left behind & a trickle of new players moving through these feeder servers, the players on the earlier era servers would feel more isolated than ever before, each server's economy would also be far worse & each server would not be able to benefit from "hand me downs" like a conventional server unless all the feeders shared a bazaar & that then ruins the feel of the earlier feeder servers. There's just too many ways this idea doesn't work for EQ.

Better to create a side-kicking solution like CoH/CoV had whereby lower level players can be automatically raised up to the current highest level player in the group's power so that they can join in at the top end and "invisibly" catch up by gaining xp & levels in the background. The problem there is how to do that, keep the limited toolset of the lower level player & just boost their abilities so they overall somewhat match up to higher players or give them all those tools & confuse the heck out of some as they try to figure out all these new buttons. Something like a "playable Merc" almost.

There are currently 9 TLPs active as of this post:

• Aradune
• Manger
• Selo
• Miragul
• Rizlona
• Agnarr
• Coirnav
• Phinigel
• Ragefire

My suggestion is for 11 servers, though it would be possible to merge the first two (Classic itself is kind of weak on it's own tbh) and lower it down to 10.


So it is certainly possible for them to implement it with the current number of servers. As more expansions come out they might start to hit the limit, but I'm sure there are ways it could be done if it was needed to.


I don't actually think that would be a large problem for the earlier servers, if any of them were to lack players, it would likely be the later ones like L75+. But this can be mitigated by having players *copy* from one server to the next which would help maintain a population vs *transferring*. (This might have its own set of problems, but we don't really know yet).

Well you can strip Selo they are live "in a minute" and Phinny is live around May

Miragul should be taken out behind the barn and shot

That leaves 6.

Miragul honestly needs to be restarted and remove truebox. I know there is 1 guild on the server actively doing stuff but make a business decision and tell them sorry. Restart the server...allow them to keep their current character but Lock them as unusable until the server returns to the current expansion they are in. This would of been one of the most popular servers they ever launched if it was a boxing server. The discord had like 2k people in it and after launch week it was empty. With most of that week everyone saying how stupid it was to launch as truebox.

Fast forward over a year later...Rizlona is going extremely strong.

Give me an oow lock server and I'll pay a large sum of money.

Well that would be a bit odd solution but IF they made it the same rules minus the truebox then sure I could see the "locked chars" but else just freetransfer + merge with whatever (not like the merging server would feel anything)

What expansion are they in now anyways?

I still got 3 chars from 3boxing in classic on Riz... was a nice server, Phinny just took way too much of my time so it faded... Where are they at now? Luclin?

OoW is also amazing and loved the new epics both for groupers and raiders and plenty of content to do. But I must admit I don't mind servers moving on, being locked will get stale eventually (went really fast on PoP server

I'm not sure what your point is.

What I was getting at is that if they sunset the existing crop of TLPs (not all at once of course) they should have enough servers to setup a new chain of locked servers like I listed above. Thus, the argument that they can't support the number of servers to setup the chain isn't valid...they would just reuse the existing servers.

well there is 6 active if you strip those I listed... you could use the stripped ones (3) for your project to start with.