What is Darkpaw doing to Bring New Players to EverQuest?

^ Yup.

TLPs seem to be the best option to bring people back to the game. If it was me I would look at how to make the TLP experience work as a transition to live. Servers like Selo's seem like a great option to fill out servers that need more players.

Would like to see cross-server instancing for most starting towns/oldworld/probably everything up through an expansion or two behind present. As in, every player in Grobb can see, buff, interact/etc with other players in Grobb regardless of server (trading disabled maybe) Enable /pick to add a private zone whenever the player needs it. PoK/Baz/etc would be excluded from this.

Then you need that 75-105 activity:

1. Instanced mission-giver in PoK.
2. Scaling content range from 75-105.
3. Soloability tested viable for all classes.
4. Crazy fast experience. Like getting PL'd.
5. Merchant that sells 75-105 gear for Tribute.
6. Tribute merchant for turning in your old gear.

A FTP TLP server perhaps so new players can try the bare bones experience? Just need to ensure they know there is a whole other side to the game as first impressions are meaningful.

FTP live server that all toons 1-100/110 can use (optionally like CR) and then transfer off of to their forever home (for free)? this condenses low level populations for grouping with others before heading to live. Though the point at which they can no longer progress could be in question. I feel a case for allowing all the way through ToV and 115 could be made. This could also be a more manageable solution to the cross server interaction people have been posting about.

Though AAs become a problem by around level 80 if you don't have any... perhaps remove the ability to autogrant on this server and cap players at 25-30k? Or the option to "Silver Status" your account for the amount of a single monthly sub fee in which you have free rein to gain all the AAs you want limited to this server but there is no autogrant.

Maybe not a TLP but I think a server capped at 70 would be wonderful here. There's a whole lot of 65/70 content to chew on. Especially if autogrant is disabled. Add free transfers to live... you might have a real winner.

What is the point? You can do all the 65/70 content that you desire without having to cap at level 70 and a new server that is level capped at 70 isn't likely to attract many players.

I've often wondered why, in the era of pickzones, instanced raids, etc. -- there isn't a merge of all Live servers into one "virtual" server, to massively increase the feeling of population/activity across zones. (Again, with pickzones, this wouldn't lead to too many problems.)

It must be that the underlying code for handling a lot of EQ just isn't amenable to being rewritten to make this happen.

I guess you have never been to PoK or the Guild Lobby on a populated server where people sit afk for days on end... now x any of those by however many servers you want to combine. No thank you

If it was that easy why do they spin up multiple progression servers and the first one hits the world cap with a login queue when a new one launches?

You've literally just described TBM HAs. All you missed was the starting zone of Plane of Health.

The last time I tried these was around 80ish and I was mercilessly slaughtered. Tuning pass since?

Funneling new players to a smaller environment to facilitate grouping. "Newbie server" if you will.

Put them at a new server with a low population? They have plenty of "preferred" servers in the past but those never worked out.

It still needs retuned. But at least all the mechanics are there. It's an easy change really.

Unusable by the intended players which leaves a huge gap between 75 and 105 for new players.

Seems to me that prog servers generally have a healthy low level population.

Until the servers die after 70ish.

/shrug

Correct a new TLP server would but not a normal live server that is just level capped at 70. You are talking about two completely different servers

Indeed.

Not so sure. TLP's have a tendency to fizzle. We can speculate on the reasons. EQMac, P99 etc, tended to sustain their communities.

You are not going to get any significant new player base without a new graphics engine, new models and a new UI... The game just looks very very very old.

Even if you funneled all the new players onto one server I don't think you'd have much of a population. Also, if you never played EQ before, the game appears to be a pretty daunting mass of systems, functionality, and content accumulated over the decades that never really underwent any pruning or unification. TLPs are probably the best route they have for getting new players introduced to the game without actually making sweeping changes to live just because they pace your introduction to all that stuff.

They could probably do a better job of advertising TLP launches to people who aren't actively looking for them. I hadn't heard anything about the game in years and probably wouldn't be playing it now if I didn't randomly google search the game myself around when Mangler launched.

They probably should send out promotional emails every now and then to the old accounts to try to entice them back in. This would be good around the time the TLP launches. But one problem is that TLPs require subscriptions. Most people won't subscribe to try out game they haven't played in decades. What they should do is have a promotion that if they log in during the TLP launch, they get a 1 month free subscription. This would only be for previously-subscribed accounts that haven't logged in for at least X years (5?). Something like that would snag a few people who played EQ a long time and may not realize it's still plugging along.

Along those same lines, they should have some kind of referral bonus where you get a goodie if an old account logs in from your referral link and re-subscribes. Perhaps you could get some DB cash for each old account which you get to re-subscribe. This would encourage people to mention EQ to their friends who played log ago and help spread the word on their own.

They should also make it easier to find out which servers you have characters on. With all the server merges over the years, returning players have no idea where their old characters are. Other than logging in to each server, I'm not sure how someone would find their old characters. Players should be able to go to their account on the EQ website and see a table with all their characters and which servers they are on. Or even better, the server select screen should have that info. Make it so people can click on a server in that screen and see a summary of the characters they have on it. They should make it as easy as possible for a returning character to jump right back in to their old characters.