Thornblade will have the better economy.

What is this new transfer policy also? Do tokens work again?!

Server to Server transfer always worked (with certain restrictions in destination), it's Account to Account transfers that are disabled and likely not returning.

Ahh, ok - that's what I got confused with then. I assume transfer between these 2 will work though.

I'd assume there would be unrestricted transfers between the 2, but enabling the to/from in a server transfer is a manual process which requires server outages so its not a guarantee.

First is indisputable - but unless Thornblade breaks typical trends, the character population (and thus demand) will be drastically higher on Mischief. Simultaneous launch will likely reduce that some from the times I saw directly tracked, but still it's likely to have quite a rift, instead of the general presumption of 60/40ish that folks seem to be making.

There's good reason they're promoting the fact that it will merge quite early along, because normal routine decay really has hit second servers hard. As such, recent second servers have stumbled around 20-30% of the primary.

Or net, I don't expect the prices to be drastically different - because while the supply will likely be 2-3x better, the demand will also be 2-3x more as well.

Also keep in mind the "shark" effect - both in arbitrage and initial sellers - with more people involved in the economy as it rolls along, the more likely you have people investing and holding out/price nudges/etc - negotiation tends to be easier with less sharky types.

I imagine the hardcore buy/sellers will go to Mischief because they need goods being bought and sold, and that's just a matter of numbers. Given that, in Classic you don't have much LORE gear, so it's a lot easier for a tunnel-quester to buy items cheap, hold them, and keep prices high on the market.

I also think some items will be relatively more rare than in the past. Prior TLP's you had camps like GEB or Lguk that were close to "saturation" in that they were always camped. But now, those items will be more evenly distributed, thus lowering supply of the most (formerly) camped items. Likewise, marginal items that were never really camped will be far more common. The net effect? The best items that might have been cheap in the past may go up in price now. This also further helps tunnel questers (you cannot just go farm your GEB's as easily).

I would like to point out that Thornblade is not the second server, it is a simultaneous server with the same ruleset, which I don't believe has happened before in EQ. Also with the announcement of TB just late yesterday, I think it's too early to say which server will have more population. Plus if at launch you can't login to Mischief, many will just move to TB so at worse there is a good chance the two populations could be close to even.

The problem is that they have not communicated that really well, its an edited line on the forum, was nothing posted in the discord Announcement channels, the main announcement article doesn't even mention TB. If they want it to be viewed as not a consolation second server they need to really be hyping/pushing it.
https://www.everquest.com/news/eq-mischief-progression-server-2021
This needs to be edited, the banner graphic needs an update, etc.

While I hope this is true about people going to TB pretty easily, I’m a bit concerned as others have mentioned about people “thinking” it’s an overflow server and therefore will die out pretty quickly and not join it for that reason. I don’t think last I looked the website showed the two as a simultaneous launch of equal rule sets, so as others have mentioned, people not checking the forums much (the more casuals and/or people returning after a long time after hearing about mischief) won’t be as aware TB can be a good, long term option.

I’m now personally leaning towards TB in hopes of finding lots of players and groups to enjoy the game with for quite a while, but have to admit I’m worried about people considering TB as an overflow since it didn’t get as much hype (as it was very recently decided to be a dual launch) and having it die off relatively quickly. Granted, if that happens the merge could hopefully fix it, but it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if both servers stayed super lively and didn’t need a merge

It has happened previously - Fippy + Vulak, was IIRC, no? But yea, many of the cases have been stunted that way.

I do expect with the tweaks they're doing with presenting it this time it'll be better than average - average has been more like 4:1 population difference in other cases though. So better would have a long ways to go for parity.

Biggest game changer is them announcing that the merge is guaranteed - that has been the primary issue with secondary servers after the first batch with Combine/Sleeper (which IIRC were staggered by about a week), since Sleeper stagnated a LONG time waiting for its merge, making people even more leery for the next secondary server. IF my guesstimate is wrong, it's safe to place much of the reason on that wild card, since it reduces the longterm risk a TON - as in PoP/LDoN or GoD the servers should be merging, when secondary servers start to see dire population issues typically.

Has that been guaranteed though? The only thing I thought I saw was Dreamweaver say they would look into it based on the population and apparently server merges have a small window during the year, so if for whatever reason (TLP server release schedule for ex) makes the populations on these two "fine" when the window opens next it could potentially be a couple years before they even consider merging again. That was my understanding of it anyways, but maybe something more has been said somewhere?

It's been like 24 hours, word will get out. People may not know yet, but somebody they know will know beforehand. Decisions will get made.

I had thought it was more specific, but apparently from Dreamweaver: "I've mentioned a few times, there wont be any merge specifics, if it ends up being merged it will happen around the merge period for everything due to team resources, that time frame is may/june/july period." was the official one.

But still, sounds like they're thinking about it in advance rather proactively rather than reflexively, still a better approach for the playerbase.

I played on Sleeper, Vulak, and Lockjaw and all 3 servers were fine for the natural "life" of a TLP (meaning through OOW basically).

After OOW the every server takes a nose dive even Phinigel.

Sure those servers were lower pop than their other servers, but all 3 of those were released 1-3 days after the launch of their main server. I think because of the simultaneous launch Thornblade will definitely be in an even better spot than those servers and all 3 of them were fine with strong guilds that cleared all the content, with Vulak finally loosing EoE when the merge to Fippy opened in like TSS or something (I played Vulak through PoR and then quit).

Either way, my RL friends and I are going Thornblade because we prefer the lower population servers and we don't want to sit in Everqueue again.

Based on www.phinnyprogress.com, not really a nose dive but a steady decline.
Classic - 22
The Ruins of Kunark -23
The Scars of Velious -23
The Shadows of Luclin -22
The Planes of Power -22
Lost Dungeons of Norrath -22
Gates of Discord -21
Omens of War -19
Dragons of Norrath -18
Depths of Darkhollow -17
Prophecy of Ro -15
The Serpent's Spine -14
The Buried Sea -13
Secrets of Faydwer -10
Seeds of Destruction -9
Underfoot -7
House of Thule -6
Veil of Alaris -6
Rain of Fear -4
Call of the Forsaken -4
The Darkened Sea->Claws of Veeshan -3

Sure, Phinigel was the most anomalous server they ever released so this makes sense. That being said, I don't think anyone thinks that while there were guilds killing content past the "prime" expansions many of those guilds were not running the same 60+ or 72 main raids they were running in the expansions through PoP or OOW - boxing raids becomes much more of a thing past OOW because the population does start to decline. Just because raids are able to field their attrition with boxes (and remember raids go from 72 man to 54) doesn't mean the population wasn't on the decline.

That last chunk is 7 expansions without a drop. Impressive... Maybe more people should play those eras.

Oh the population was definitely on a decline, I was just pointing out your comment rehinny having a nose dive wasn't perfectly accurate. I also agree Phinny is a special case, Coirnav did take a big nose dive around GoD and I contend the main reason Mangler didn't was because Aradune's launch was so poor. Beyond that we don't have much more data for AoC enabled Non-Special ruleset servers so time will tell I suppose.

True that! I concede to all these logical arguments.

See sometimes the forums are not always toxic

I think once you get that deep into it you've committed 4 years to get that far, might as well see it through to the end. I'm more curious how many will keep playing on Live, will re-roll on another TLP or will quit in general having "beaten" EQ.