Mischeif still worth starting a fresh character?

On Mischief BIS gear was crazy expensive - but it always is. If you drop down the list a little it gets super cheap very, very quickly. I hit 65 and geared up a caster in POP EP gear for a few hundred plat (just to be not-naked). This was months ago when I played, so YMMV.

More common raid items were in the 1-10 plat range.

With everything free trade, nothing ever really goes away on Mischief. It just get recycled again and again and again.

With the random and bonus loot drops, it also made raiding virtually stress-free gear-wise. Though this may have been scaled back since I played there.

EDIT: With the AA autogrant active you won't even have to grind AA as you level up.

Mischief is the easiest server ever to catch up on, since gear is so cheap. Sure, BiS items are 5-20 krono, but why would you worry about that when there is so much awesome gear from previous expansions available, often for free.

That was my point to the OP.

Another suggestion if you are indeed a completely fresh player with no other resources, is to hop in the EQ discord Mischief channel and mention you are a starting player with nothing. Mention your class/in-game name and I can almost guarantee people will send you stuff for free. Its sorta a strange combination of people wanting to flex their knowledge/resources while also being genuinely helpful.

Is Defiant armour dropping on Mischief yet? If so, that's pretty much all you need to get started and get leveling.

Yes. On TLPs, the initial Defiant gear batch (up through Intricate) drops in TSS. Unfortunately, some of the achievement rewards are locked until SoD, but you can get equal or better either from random drops or from vendors. The Hero's Journey questline is excellent for levelling if you don't have any personal preference, and Teek is also up with good non-visible slot rewards.

Not sure how it was fake news, when I logged on both servers at that time and /joined general, general1, general2, general3, general4 and counted. Numbers can change though.

Point of the post wasn't that Yelinak was dead, but more that Mischief was more populated than some of the newer TLPs

Can anyone tell me if they have opened it up to box 2 characters on the same computer for this server yet?

I don't think truebox will ever be removed on Mischief prior to getting to live. Could be wrong but that's my recollection. Not my thing anymore but it is a fun server if free-trade is your thing. Very easy to get up to speed and probably any relatively casual raid guild will need bodies more than they need you to be BiS at this point.