Free Trade, is it really that popular?

It hits it less often than Mangler and it hasn't hit OOW yet. That's life support. It may be the lowest population TLP ever for how early in its lifecycle it is. It's been this way since Luclin.

It doesn't matter how often the server is hitting a medium population level the fact is it still hits that level and has a decent population. It isn't anywhere close to being on life support.

Ok.

The server still has enough population that they didn't merge it into Mischief and if the server really was on life support a merger would have been a good idea.

You really like hearing yourself speak sometimes. You managed to reply to "Ok"

P.S. DPG is notoriously bad at waiting too long to merge servers. Using that as evidence is...oof

Seems you feel the same way as you decided to reply with an "OK" to my post. And I am not using the lack of a merge as the evidence but the fact that the server population still hits medium on a regular basis.

A server that doesn't manage to have above low population more often than a server 3x older as it is undoubtedly "dead man walking," regardless of what you say, especially considering it hasn't even been affected by the advent of a new TLP launch. I don't think a server has ever been like that.

Random loot was fun.
Free trade ruined it.

There I fixed it for everyone.

This poll is interesting, but I'd argue the phrasing makes it hard to gauge overall popularity. Simply asking 'what are you playing on?', it shouldn't be surprising that a majority reply with Mischief, because that's the hot new thing. Then asking 'Are you going to play on the 2022 servers?' is also a bit misleading, because that can be a testament to the lack of interest in the offerings, as much the popularity of a previous ruleset. In no way does this measure anything more than what the current fad is. In the same way that polling kids in the mid-90s and asking if they liked pogs would give an impression that it's super popular, but wouldn't have been an indication of any enduring interest.

So that's the real question: Is Mischief popular, or is it pogs? Only time will tell.

get rid of the free trade, heck even get rid of the random... the double or more loot is the best part of mischief

Such an ignorant statement, you have no clue if Mischief was supposed to be a one off. stop spreading false statements.

What does that have anything to do with the server being dead or not? The only thing you should be judging is the population on that server not how it does compared to a different server with a different ruleset.

It appears that they did a decent amount of work up front to get the server running and have been tuning the drops as each expansion unlocks. I would think they would not want to do a lot of work for a single server that would not be used again.

i imagine the random loot was meant maybe more as a one off as thats the flavor of 'mischief' but if they deemed it popular enough they may do similar in the future, freetrade seems like a different discussion and its hard to say if that is what makes this server so popular? or is the random loot or is it the double loot? or the combination

i do however thought the devs commented that freetrade wouldn't be a standard for TLPs going forward? could very well be mistaken on that

I am sure random drops that where useless to anyone in the group would go over well with the general population.

Not sure why they would put the work in on the servers to not use the ruleset again. As for the free trade part I am guessing that it just goes with the random part of the ruleset and we won't see free trade again until random loot gets used again.

EverQuest has a Soft-cap on how many servers it can run at one time.

I know that for a fact since it was discussed prior to Aradune & Rizlona's launch that the dev team needed to merge some servers in order to free up some server slots for Aradune & Rizlona to occupy - and that in turn necessitated fixing their server-merge script which had not been used in years because of things like characters no longer using the old flat file format in their database. Hence why the launches of those two were delayed.

That was also the key reason it took years before Fippy was merged, because they didn't have a working tool that they needed to do it.

So, natural extrapolation from the above is that at any one time there will be a limitation on how many TLP can be active at one time - mergers with live servers are absolutely 100% guaranteed and when that happens they switch off all of the funky features.The exception to this being Agnarr & only because it is era-locked.

Free Trade on Mischief dictates it will be merged with FV because of the way the loot items on Free Trade servers are coded - the random loot feature will be the part of the code that gets switched off once Mischief reaches the live expansion era.

Your belief that Mischief will be a stand-alone former TLP is mistaken, it will be merged with FV & it will loose all of the features which differentiate it from FV in the process, on the upside players will get more XP on FV than they currently get on Mischief.

Yes, there is a cap but all the past servers have had the same ruleset as a live server once they get caught up. Since there is no real difference between the servers it makes sense to merge it into another server due to the cap on servers. That being said once Mischief/Thornblade catch up to the live servers they will still have a unique ruleset that includes random loot. If the server is still popular there is no reason that they can't keep it around since it will still have a unique place in the server lineup. I see no reason to speculate about the future of those servers when they are still a long ways off from reaching a live status and something needs to be decided.

You seem to have the wrong idea "buddy." I don't need to dream about mischief, I play on Aradune. I don't actually give a crap what happens to mischief.

If mischief is dead by the time it gets to live, then yeah it will almost certainly get merged into FV. On the other hand if the server has any semblance of population left at that point (in other words the server is still profitable on its own), it would be a mistake to merge it into a server with different ruleset. If you did that I suspect that most of the mischief population would just quit, and if you don't have a fresh mischief for them to reroll to, then revenue is just being lost until another easy mode loot pinata server is opened up. We know damned well that mischief has essentially ruined EQ for the sissies. These people will never play EQ again unless its on easy mode. If daybreak/darkpaw wants to retain these revenue streams then they will have to maintain a mischief type server.

And when Aradune reaches live it will most assuredly merge into a regular live server and lose it's 2-box limit rule (if it doesn't lose that beforehand).

The devs have already shown they have no issue removing some server features for merges. I don't see why Mischief would be any different.