Raid scene on Mischief lacking?

Nonsense. Phinigel and Mangler were the two in that situation, and both of them experienced hardly any drop in population at GoD or OoW.

Phinigel 22 raid guilds in PoP, 21 at Gates, 19 at Omens.

Mangler was steady at 17 then 16 then 16.

Neither of those servers even came close to "barely limping into OoW." They were both consistently high on the population meter well past OoW as well, something that Aradune can't say.

For some reason some people can't handle that EQ doesnt stop at pop and just assumes because they cant make it past pop the server must die. Mangler GOD and OOW was crazy populated(I didnt play on Phinny but it looks like it was too),

There are a lot more small casual guilds on mischief and i think come velious and luclin we'll see even more people joining the server. I know at least a dozen people planning to start in luclin because "thats when you character starts to matter".

Server is great, people are having fun.

Basing population on raiding guild progress isn't a very good way to gauge population IMO. I was there on Phinigel and yes the populations dropped hard. Just because the population drops doesn't mean people can't still beat content. Every guild is getting hit by people leaving, it's not just those guilds that disappear from the guild progression lists each expansion.

There's also the argument that no one really knows what the different statistics actually mean on the server population list, and honestly do we even know if it's the same for each server? Consistency wants to say yes, but the fact that they have used different caps on various servers could mean otherwise.

My guess is no, probably not the same between Live & TLP at all, probably looks something like this:

TLP 0-499 Low // 500-1999 Med // 2000 - 3999 High
LIVE 0-499 Low // 500 - 999 Med // 1000 - 1999 High

I believe this is incorrect. There shouldn't be any distinction between servers on the population metrics.

I was talking about PLAYER population not GUILD population for the.... I don't know what number now-th time.

Every Phin guild I was privy the numbers of in those eras halved their numbers or so. Nearly every guild had so many as to require splits - my guild went from double splits w/ a waiting list 5-10 deep to barely having any waiting list with a single raid INCLUDING THE RAID MAX SIZE REDUCTION.

You also saw the same reflected in Gen channel use - where it was into Gen5-6 during the week in mid SoV (my log before I took a break) to Gen1 at the most during the week in late OoW/early DoN - and weekends were similarly scaled - Gen8-9 vs. Gen2-3 in my logs.

Those are precipitous drops by both metrics, and other guilds experienced the same from what I was privy to. But again, in your hypothetical pants on head crazy world - a server with the entire US population playing on in the guild called <America, Hell Yeah!> as the only guild doing 400 splits a day would be a dead server, because it only has one active guild.

I seem to recall dev comments stating that they in fact DID do that, because they recognized that (at the time) PVP and PVE servers at the time had different "tiers" for when they seemed x/y/z density.

It's possible they never revisited the idea for TLPs and other "alternate rulesets" but seems unlikely, especially since they've stated that TLPs have different hardware than standard servers. (or did before the recent upgrades - perhaps that changed things though)

The Live server cap is at least 4K.

Dev comments have stated before that the queue threshold was over 6k for TLP's - so assuming that's accurate, TLP's ARE designed to handle more.

I seem to recall last time they discussed such it being more like 3k, but I'm far too lazy right now to try to refresh.

I don't know where you're getting that, it's completely mistaken. None of the TLPs from the last few cycles have ever had a population cap higher than 4K. Aradune had it's cap set lower than that for a while due to the queueing issues at launch. All servers, both Live and TLP, run the same code on the same hardware configuration.

Last few cycles may be true, last I cared was Phinigel launch - and it absolutely DID have a higher cap set (in part because of being the test ground for pickzones/etc, I'd imagine).

And on hardware, just no - look at past comments by Rashere and Holly. (Or just use your brain and see how many servers had never gotten an upgrade to their hardware previous to the across the board hardware upgrade a few months ago - now it's possible that standardized things, as I already stated, but previously it did not)

There were posts by staff that basically explained that they had raised the cap to 6k to reduce the problems with queues but players then found the server lagging so hard that the game was defacto unplayable so they had to lower the cap back down to 4k - this was in the weeks after the launch of Aradune if I recall correctly.

The problem with player population is that its just you remembering vs me remembering vs Machen vs etc etc. There are no hard records of how many general chat channels there were. I think eqresource tracks the DBG server population (down,lown,med,high) for all servers and may have trend data you could cross reference to expansion unlocks but that would only indicate when they crossed whatever the magical threshold from high->med->low was. The raid kill page at least gives a general idea of how active the server is that is viewable as recorded history years later.

It's possible that I'm only remembering 50%, this is true. (Especially if it was in different times)

I'm sure everyone remembers the days when the chat server was handled similarly, where channels were allowed to get to 600 (or higher sometimes) - but then they said that was making the chat server unstable and reduced it. (Conveniently in the same scale - 600 to 400)

Except if you actually FULLY READ WHAT I POSTED - I am reading logs I HAVE ARCHIVED FROM BACK THEN - this isn't my memory vs. Machen's memory - this is literally logs of back then with the exact metric stated(highest general channel me and the two boxes I run get dumped into on a given login when I searched for "Channels:"). I have logs going back to the end part of my time on Stromm (which was back when OoW first launched for LIVE servers) still archived, because my oldest box machine has hard drives THAT old.

Why is reading full sentences so hard for people? That was literally in the post you opted to quote. And then you make the assertion I'm going off of memory.

I can't wait for the next EQAnon theory that my GINA search is altering the logs or something though.

When something is off my gut or impression of something I caveat appropriately with "I think", "IIRC" or otherwise - when I say something affirmatively, it's because I have direct evidence with a high degree of confidence - and as a rule of thumb I will cite the source immediately. At this point of writing enough things for peer review or preparation for peer review, it's just natural habit at this point - almost feels dirty to skip full APA citation.

I agree that there shouldn't be a difference, but when they moved to vague descriptors of population it became very difficult to know what "high" meant when comparing servers. The actual threshold numbers are unknown to us, and could be completely different from one server to the next even if we believe it shouldn't.

I don't recall the details ever being disclosed. However, I do recall the mention of over 4k causing issues on Aradune at launch, but I can't use that information to say when FV is "high" it means they are at, or near, 4k for instance.

I was there on Phinigel as well, and saw very little population dip within the guilds I was playing with.

Here's the thing about population drop within guilds.

The guilds at the bottom of the totem poll will blow up if population drops very much at all. The ones that are barely completing content will stop completing content. Their members will leave for larger, more successful guilds. The slightly larger guilds that have members leave will start poaching the members from the smaller guilds, even if the smaller guilds have still been striving. Over time, guilds that cannot succeed on their own will merge.

This pattern happens over and over on every TLP.

You could argue that the drop from 72 man raids to 54 man raids helps some, and it does. That hides a little bit of attrition. Not a lot though. And it's the same for every server.

Addressed in my other reply. If every guild lost half their members, half of them would have folded.

Moon logic. The guilds (and this IS off memory besides my own) I was aware of their roster numbers were having enough where they were having splits or huge waiting lists in PoP still (AKA 72 + at least 10-15 waiting list) - so losing half would in fact reduce them to a normal single raid group, not folding. (median of 84 for the low-end divided by 2 = 42 - a perfectly functional raid size for GoD content and that would be the LOW-END few - sure, some wouldn't cut it, but 50%? Hell no, EQAnon moon logic)

Guild populations aren't on some sort of bell curve for the most - most linearly try to clump around the same total number of players besides a handful of outliers. Just polling a bunch of people right now from nudging people from the /who all 60 list for character counts per guild, nearly all are in the same spectrum with the exception of one that is massively higher. The rest are all seeming to fall in the in the 200-400 range with the exception of the handful of respondents that stated it was "just a guild for my own characters" and similar, that obviously aren't truly guilds by your or my standards to count.

What I think of every time I see a Demetri post.