TLP idea - A Democratically-created server.

You do understand, first off, that the current Devs managing EQ, are NOT the same ones as the ones from 24 years ago, right? I mean, this game has even changed companies like 3 times. I doubt there's even a single original person still working on it.

Secondly....yes, level-locking a server was a player idea....ONE single player, if my information is correct. And of course it went terribly. That's what happens when you just randomly pick ideas from individual loud people and run with it instead of trying to go for a consensus among many.

Yes if you put forth no effort whatsoever to prevent abuse, abuse happens. It's really not THAT hard to prevent it though.


The only valid criticism I've seen thus far about voting is that it's been mentioned that the majority of EQ players are quite possibly A-Holes who will ruin anything fun.

I suspect, however, that's actually just the Bat-phone guilds that are filled with A-holes.

Many different people have proposed the level locking idea over the years, not just one person.

It doesn't matter who was or wasn't with the company 24 years ago. The point is the company is still going. With the people it has keeping it running, and those people hit it out of the park with Mischief, an idea they came up with without ANY player input. Players don't know what is fun for the masses, they don't know what will work in the long run, and they don't even know what is feasible for the devs to implement. They are the last people who should be deciding what the next TLP should be. Give input? Sure. Provide feedback, absolutely, decide through a vote. Just, no. It has never worked out well in the past and there is no reason to think that would change in the future.

If you think creating a public vote for new ideas is a good idea, then please take the time to go back and count the number of idiotic requests there are on these forums for tlp feature requests. Not saying there aren't some good requests, but having read majority of the threads each year since tlps started.. the majority of them are a waste of a read and skewed towards people's personal eq experience that lines up with what they want their sole personal experience to be of a mmorpg and not a community experience.

I also like that this assumes that the people voting would desire the best outcome for the server and will be people that are going to actively play on it opposed to say people trolling for a PvP server to see the social experiment of probably the most toxic server eq has ever had play out while we all continue on mischief and laugh.

Bad idea, the Devs need to make a server with a ruleset that makes them money whereas the democratic community will want stupid features such as no krono, no boxing, 24/7 GM supervised and very quickly no server to play on.

Those who post on or only just read the forums are a minority of the active game players, even if you only counted the players with All-Access accounts who play exclusively on EQ. This is also one of the reasons and in-game poll can have a majority opinion that is FAR different than that of those who post on the forums.

Even if you put forth effort to try and regulate them polls on the internet can be manipulated. In Everquest a quick example is the people who have multiple if not dozens of accounts from which they can vote. It isn't easy to exclude all of them while not impacting families/households that play together.

The fact remains that they used to have and use an in game polling system and they stopped using it after it did not get the results that they intended. There is no reason for them to go back to that system when they can gather feedback without polls and make their own decision. We have no right to make decisions about the games direction,

True Democracies always become a tyranny of the idiots.

The devs did not use level-locking the way I or players before me had suggested it.
They used it in a way to create a fast-paced "Challenge server" and the tuning was not right at the first attempt - if they re-use that idea I am sure the next one would be a better stab at it.

But Vaniki's implimentation is definitely not the only way to use it so the devs didn't use it best as they could, they made a choice about how to impliment it as they saw it had potential to offer players a tougher challenge, something they had asked for a lot.

Another level-locked server that did not have that "challenge server" design is still an option they have though they probably wont go with that this year.

IIRC back during the vote for that saw 51/50 Mayong created there was a faction we will call the "Classic Crew" who made the current PvP fans look polite and rational who managed to alienate the rest of the player base so badly that the opposite of a "Classic locked" server was the favored choice.

Out of the endless bad TLP idea threads, this one is the worst. Never forget the last time they used in-game polls we got that dumb Mayong 51/50 server that nobody played.

Just because you don't like what they came up with doesn't mean they didn't implement the server in the best manner they could with the time and resources they had available.

Without the challenge aspect isn't a level locked server just a live server that won't let you level? Doesn't seem to be much of a point to me.

Doesn't mean they did either, which was my entire point that there is more than one way to do a level-locked server, "best manner" is entirely subjective & I explained why they chose the option that they did.

Just because YOU don't see the point does not mean there is not one.

most people can't be trusted with any kind of power on the internet

in the minds eye it sounds like a cool thing, but any kind of "democratic voting" would just be abused

If there is such a big draw for this type of server why didn't the folks who wanted it play on Vaniki and just ignore the challenge part of things? Not like they would kick you off the server for not completing the challenges.

Come on, you can do better than this.

How Vaniki was set up was as a challenge server that unlocked expansions / levels faster than even Selos did, if you did not want to have a pace that fast why would you play there?

There is a reason the 8/12 week cycle is repeated often & why Selo had a much smaller number of players than other TLP, that pace issue was just one part of why Vaniki was going to be niche from the outset & even if people were interested in level-locked, the very fast pace of Vaniki was a big factor in not playing there just like it was for Selo.