If you don't see how similar they are then you don't have enough perception. Its ok, we'll continue without your input.
Your input with suggestions that do not really work for the gameplay that has developed in EQ and that a large portion of the player base appears to dislike? What works in one game does not always work in another.
Wrong, Drakkin are irrelevant to classes, and the Froglok Monk / Wood-Elf Beastlord combinations are not available on TLP until CoTF unlocks.
I've played both, while each has similar root systems & mechanics they play & feel very differently during combat. Raiding in FFXIV is mostly based around 8 players moving around a small circular room with a boss at the centre and visible cues on the floor that mostly reminds me of a 70's kids toy. Or for the younger players:
This has been changed on TLPs such that you can begin work on Hero's Journey achievements in TSS. Some of the achievement awards are withheld, however, because they are deemed to be OP for that era (although I personally disagree with that in several cases). Any pending achievement rewards you may have earned in that questline are automatically awarded when SoD unlocks. The final tasks in that questline are SoD content (up to level 85). There was once a Tome which allowed you to track your progress in the Hero's Journey before the associated achievements were added, but it is no longer in the game. There is nothing to prevent players from starting an existing TLP at TSS when it reaches that threshold. Almost nobody has been interested in doing that. Progression from UF onward is quite linear, and also from UF onward there are progression achievements in place which I find to be complete. I'm not sure what to say to players who claim to be "clueless" about what to do or where to go at that point.
I think a server that allowed any race class combo would be hugely popular, but it would require new animations, especially for the monk class. It's a pity, because I think people would go nuts playing all sorts of cool combos, like Gnome Monks and DE Shamans.
The dropoff does not begin in PoP. No matter how you measure it, no TLP has ever had a major drop in population at PoP unless it coincided with a new server launching. Aradune and Rizlona are a pretty good example of the difference -- Mischief appeals to Aradune players and Aradune took a huge hit. It does not appeal to Rizlona players because of truebox, and Rizlona took no hit at all. The dropoff starts in classic, and continues pretty steadily and constantly from there on.
Rizlona is also the only non-truebox to ever exist isn't it? Unique servers should in theory last longer. But Aradune has been parsed as a mostly medium server through PoP and I seem to recall other TLPs not dropping to medium during PoP. I don't have the data to be able to check though.
Only non-truebox that has AoC, every TLP before Phinny was non truebox, Ragefire still exists and is non truebox, you just don't/didn't have AoC to go along with it.
Yes. That's precisely my point. PoP isn't the problem. I do think the content in the level 70 stretch is a problem, but prior to that server population tends to drop at a fairly constant rate -- 5-10% per expansion due to attrition of various kinds. Barring a new server launching and bringing competition.
When queues stop is when populations drop. Its within weeks of a server. You may not notice it at first, but it happens. Look at aradune progress site. Each expansion less guilds were listed. Its quite clearly a steady decline in population. Even in beginning luclin with actual AA grinds for grouping options, there wasn't nearly people out as there was first couple weeks of classic. First day of POP i saw around 400 people in POT. It still reaches close to that number when guild raid hours align.
No one is going to deny that populations drop steadily from launch. TLP brings in a lot of people who haven't played EQ in a very long time. Many of them can't stomach the old graphics, UI, controls, bugs, and severely outdated client. But I don't get the point in denying that sometime between PoP and GoD there is a bigger drop than "steady." We've already had a discussion about how pointless it is to gauge population by guild count.
We;ve already had the discussion, yes, and you're one of the few who disagrees that guild count is a guage of the population. You prefer to go off general chat channel population? Thats also a metric that has its pros and cons. Server status is also a metric with pros and cons. You can "feel" that the drop is larger at that point, but only DBG knows.
Not everyone is in a guild. Not everyone raids. Even though I think both of those are very weird and defeats the purpose of the game, those people are there and they are a decent chunk of the playerbase. I prefer to base it on my own experience on the server, with my own eyes, and whether or not I am seeing less people in the game world, and to what extent.