Agnarr 2.0 proposal -> Dranik TLP

classic eq servers have always been the more popular ones/do classic 1 month,lvl 60 pre aa 1month,luclin 1 month(increase shard and ssra emp etc drop rate by 10 or just no keys/lvl 65 expansions x1 month each open them in a block foreach,and then so on.

Level 70 is the next natural stopping point if there were to be another expansion locked server. To be honest, I felt like Agnarr should have included GoD.

The problem with all tlp, and live for that matter, is the server gets top heavy and the level climb becomes a boring lonely grind even for those who may have skipped an expansion or two. EQ is a multiplayer game for raiding at this point. That’s why you see the deep PL groups. Why darkpaw doesn’t come out with purchaseable level boost to the last expansion max is beyond me. Use the krono for bazaar gear and you are able to participate in raids much quicker.

I’d like to see a TSS start tlp progression myself with maybe a lock at UF. I would find the guild raid approach on server opening interesting.

Eh people say the leveling grind is lonely b/c server is top heavy... It's TRUE that Agnarr is top heavy, but you can always find people to level with you if you're patient and in a guild. Sure, you're not going to go to guk and find 50 lvl 30 chars leveling up, you'll need to put some work in to find a group, but you'll likely get one more often than not.

And during times you can't find a group there's more than enough people readily buffing in POK so you shouldn't have any trouble xping anywhere. If you're in a guild you'll almost certainly find someone or several people who have alts at all level ranges willing to group.

Server will just be Agnarr that takes a year or so longer to die apart from a couple hundred die hards.

Everybody loves the idea and a few thousand will roll up and maybe even stick around until the last expac is beaten, but then vanish like smoke once they realise there's no more content to prepare for.

All expansions have people vanish even with more content to prepare for. They all have lifespans. It doesn't matter if they are expansion locked or not.

Phinigel and Mangler had about 16 guilds each in DoDH. By TBS Phinigel was down to 12 guilds. By Underfoot down to 7 guilds. Currently in ToV on Phinigel there are 3 guilds remaining.

A server that goes to PoR and stops will likely have a similar number of guilds up to the lock, then they would slowly whittle down to the remaining 2-3 dedicated guilds, just like Agnarr still has.

I'm not sure why that matters? If Agnarr wasn't around I probably wouldn't be subbed to EQ. Every TLP population dwindles down to a very small number of server die hards. Agnarr is no different. The only difference is there's probably a few hundred people who wouldn't be playing AT ALL if Agnarr wasn't around.

This is one of the best suggestions I've seen in any of 'these' threads. Ladder servers with free transfers up the eras all the way to live. Or perhaps, free transfers are only given to accounts with the latest expansion purchased. Seems like a fair exchange to me.

This is the perfect way to accilmate new players into the complexities of live.

I'd love to have the chance to fully epic 2.0 a box crew in a oow Era lock, experience all that Era has to offer in full without time restrictions. Then xfer all my boxes to the next tier, and so fourth.

Unlike most players of this game. I started playing eq on Coirnav a couple years ago. Eventually I'd like to play live. There's just so much tlp content that I've never experienced that is too good to pass up (in era).

Agnarr boomed because a section of the FoH boards, and a section of the perma TLP crowd decided to make their own self-found hardcore ruleset progression guild (no bazaar use, die and join a different guild or reroll) and picked the content locked, stagnant economy tlp to do it on.

IF they do another era locked server, which I don't personally see a need for, I would think a server locked at PoR makes the most sense.

As someone before me stated, the end game for that server would require someone to acquire items from Anguish, Vishimtar/YarLir, Demiplane, and Deathknell to assemble their 100% ideal set of gear plus a large number of hours acquiring their aug set, and completion of Breakdown in Communication. Nearly every character has a use for tradeskills (cultural armor being a part of BiS sets) and a huge array of level appropriate grinding mechanisms including tasks, instanced content, good ol Paw and RSS, etc.

Class balance at that point in the game feels very good, as opposed to the PoP locked era where there are a few stand-outs that need some love.

epic 2.0s are still bis weps in por, least for every class ive ever run

if ur gonna stop at 70 may as well give yourself more content, aa's, better focus, clicks etc

also por removes velious motm right? that sounds like the kinda thing a lvl 70 locked server player would enjoy

That's actually very untrue. Agnarr's population was up big prior to the Mandalorian guild, and I can say very confidently that there are many new people who have even joined and returned from breaks in the past month that aren't in the Mandalorian. Aside from the first few days, Mandalorian hasn't had a huge consistent population of players. Def 40-50 hardcore people going at it, but that represents only a fraction of the new pop of Agnarr.

"Ladder" servers is a really terrible idea, TLP are very much raiding-guild dominated with a tiny handful if any casual players, once the raid guilds start moving through the servers all of the early ones will be as much of an empty desolate wasteland as the early levels on a live server or much worse & they would be a complete & utter waste of resources for the company.

What happens when you just have a series of ladder servers for TLP?
No more waves of players to create a "clump" of players to play with, what you will end up with post-launch is a slow trickle of players that are forced to play on servers which have almost no other players in their level range on them.

This is the kind of idea that looks like it will work on paper but it completely ignores all of the evidence about player behaviour all it ends up doing is creating a carbon copy of a live server but spread across both physical servers as well as levels and with none of the benefits of a "hand me down" economy, it's literally the most comprehensive & powerful method of diluting & fragmenting the TLP population, the exact opposite of what makes a server healthy.

Don't really get why people think ladder servers are bad:

- Many players like very specific eras of EQ. Comments on these forums and talking to people echo that. A very small portion of players on any TLP actually stick with it from beginning to end, that isn't really disputable

- Many players enjoy the rush of a new server opening and will play on it. This isn't really disputable either, even people who have home servers elsewhere end up on new TLP's during classic

Thus, I don't see the problem with a series of era locked servers being released that lock at specific times. Note: I'm not suggesting that all the servers come out at once. I fail to see the issue here.

a) Each server will have the exact same influx of new players at the start, because everyone loves a new TLP release
b) Once the server stops, the people that want new content will move on, the players that enjoy that specific era will find a long term home
c) Many of those players will still go and play a new TLP if it launches
d) If an even later progression server opens and reaches a new era, the players on the 'lower' era server (I.E. POP locked -> OOW locked), may transfer over. Either way, the end game population will ultimately remain stable

I really don't quite understand how people don't see the benefits of an era locked server, for players that enjoy a very specific set of content. You will never fall behind. Your characters will always be relevant. Wanna take 1 year off to play a new TLP, get busy with IRL, etc? Well guess what, my BIS SK on Agnarr will still be BIS when I return. I stopped playing Mangler in Velious. It's on who knows what xpac now, lvl 75 something? At the rate I play, I'll never be able to catch up to where my former guild was. Damn, that sucks. If I wanted to play like DOD era EQ or wherever Mangler currently is, and it was era locked, I could casually work my way up and enjoy the end game content of that server with people who were playing it. As a casual player, it's super unlikely that you'll be able to reach the current level of a TLP unless you start in classic and play all the way through or you seriously grind/PL yourself. Locked era servers solve that problem completely.

This is exactly the reason, because what happens when all the ladder servers are up? Now there are no new TLP's ever again, because we already have 10 ladder servers covering every era. No new rush, no new clump of players to level together and form guilds together. Ever.

It's a losing proposition, both for the players and for DPG.

It will?

Let's expand on this logically.

Classic (level 50) locked LS1 opens on March 16th
Luclin (level 60) locked LS2 opens on June 16th and on June 16th and also open free Transfers from LS1 to LS2

on June 16th you have a newly opened server that also now has Level 50's jumping right onto from day 1 and leaving an existing Classic Locked server behind it.

GoD-Locked LS3 opens on December 16th and also free transfers from LS1 & LS2 to LS3

You now have a newly opened server that has most level 60's and maybe a few level 50's jumping right onto it from day 1, leaving an almost empty Luclin Locked server & an almost empty classic Locked server behind it.

See how this works in practise?

Whoah, what do you mean by "once the server stops" ?

Do you instead mean once a new ladder server opens? What will happen is the vast majority of players will move on to the next server, this will be because the majority will be going with their guild.
What will remain is a small pale remnant of the TLP - this is dilution at work, already the "clump" of players have moved on to the next server as part of the initial "wave" of players, no new wave will be following along behind them, instead having access to a series of servers you will have the aforementioned "trickle".

And everyone starting fresh on the next LS will be doing so with a pre-existing, near to max level population of players arriving on the server right as they do.
You think people are going to want that?

So you mean players may want to skip a Ladder server or even a few of them and hop from say Classic to PoR era?

All that will be "stable" is that players will be diluted amongst a growing set of low population servers with each server having an economy disconnected from all of the others and largely dead - unless you propose some form of shared bazaar which would "pollute" the earlier locked servers with items from later ones. The initial wave of this "ladder server" system will be only ones that gets to "ride the wave" of a decently sized population, every server behind it will be starved of players and have a terrible economy. A trickle of players moving through this set of low populated servers is going to have a worse time than they even would have had trying to catch up to the max level on a live server and every time a new server opens they risk falling farther & farther behind the initial wave /clump and having a harder and harder time catching up.

You are literally being blinded to the realities of how this system would play out in practise by your desire for a set of era-locked servers - just having the era locked servers open is not going to make your dreams come true, you also need for there to be players who want to stay on each era locked server to make it remotely viable and if you think there is THAT big a population who want an era locked server of each level raise or expansion or even a set of expansions you are seriously deluding yourself.
EQ does not have enough players to fill that many servers with enough players to make them work.

Its a terrible, messy system.

Even if you had just 4/5 "era servers" such as:

LS1 as LDoN-Locked ("Classic Era/Golden Era") - and after 1 year merge Agnarr into it.
LS2 as PoR-Locked ("Discord era/Lost era")
LS3 as UF locked ("Renaissance era")
LS4 as TBM locked ("Heroic Era")
LS5 as CoV locked ("Nostalgia era")

You are still going to end up with some or most of those being close to dead population-wise, after the initial wave passes by.

I am willing to bet that only the LDoN locked is going to actually retain much of a population, if the others "grow" they will do so over decades maybe but they will likely not survive long enough to ever become attractive enough.

I could get into something like that...but for me, I would take it a step further. My 2 cents specifically on era-locked servers is that they need to be slow moving...and my long-standing opinion on all EQ TLPs is that they are too dang easy - so I would propose the following rules in addition to what you are saying:

Slowing it down and spreading it out

• All L70 expacs open
• Base EXP rate about 0.5-0.75*Current Aradune Rate, but with a "resting" EXP Bonus, similar to how WoW does it...to help those of us not living in our parents' basement compete.
• Reconfigure and rotate ZEMs weekly based on zone usage - Bottom (10) used non-city zones get 10-50% exp boost, top (10) used non-city zones get 10-50% exp reduction. Hopefully this will let people spread out.
• Revisit pick thresholds to have them make more sense (i.e. increase SG past 13, but reduce others)
• Reinstate quest EXP back to normal for all quests - however, a select few "abused" quests (current and historic) will be nerfed even further.
• Lock distillate potions to their original eras (PoR I think?)
• Reinstate "hell" and "double hell" levels
• More items LORE and NO TRADE (looking at you, GEBs).
• 4-5mo unlocks

Turn down the power

• Reduce player DPS by something like 10-25%
• Increase NPC power by something like 10-25% - not necessarily increase their DPS, but increase AC / Resists / HP
• Nerf charm by 50% (not in addition to previous 20% supposed nerf)
• Reconfigure MoTM - the unintended consequence of MoTM mobs "ignoring" pets lets raids get near infinite-aggro on raid mobs makes already trivial raid encounters more trivial. Remove this feature and instead just give the raid mobs a 1000% damage increase to summoned targets.
• Actually enforce some type of 2 or 3 boxing limit.

Ahhh the glory I would be in.

The TLP model is stale and boring. How many regurgitated slightly different servers do we really need?

That said, Aradune and Rizlona are headed to live and are both half-way thru Luclin. Another restart would just cause unnecessary fractures in their healthy populations. Personally, I'd rather them focus their efforts on improving the promised GM support and actually get rid of the riff raff cheaters.

In my opinion, the best route forward would be event or challange servers with special rulesets to keep things interesting as Aradune and Rizlona head to live.

I think that you and the 20 other people this server would appeal to would be in absolute heaven.

Looking forward to all the epic piece lacking level 25-45 zones sitting at permanent bonus xp, while every zone with usable augments (not to mention the other good zones to AA in) is always reduced xp.

That will certainly feel fun and not at all like a shithole.

On paper, a server that ends with UF, CotF, or TBM (though tbm hits the squidgy 'this isnt the last expansion at that level' issue, though TBM seems to hold its value far more) should pull a lot of people who want the "this is really cool group content and has some raids if you like" experience.

But Test would do that too, and nobody goes that route.

How do the max level people on a ladder server setup bring up their alts/boxes? Do they have to have a max level PL toon left on each piece of the ladder? do they have the ability to start a level 1 on their max level server and level it there? If that was available, that's what EVERYONE would do. Few would go through the ladders since new people with friends would get PLed on the higher level one to get the help and play with their friends sooner.

Ladder might sound fun the first run through but I think it kills a lot of the other things many people like about EQ.