Give us an Era Locked Server [OOW/DON]

In the annual tradition of people begging for TLP servers with different rulesets, let me once again make the case for an era locked server. There's a strong argument for such a server, so let me explain in detail.

• Era locked servers protect a players' investment. Many people invest a lot of time and resources, including real money, into their characters. On a "standard" TLP, you may play for a period of time, invest a lot in your characters, and then have to go inactive for a number of reasons. At this point, your investment is basically gone; playing catch-up is super daunting, and most people won't have the time to do that. It feels impossible, and many players just won't come back, or they'll wait for a new TLP. On a locked server, you can leave and come back any time and your character can ALWAYS stay relevant. For example, I can quit Agnarr for 2 years and come back and my BIS character will still be BIS. If I quit Mangler 2 years ago, I'd be 50 levels behind and have to play an inordinate amount of time to catch up to levels, aa's, gear, etc.

• Era locked servers are great for casual players (which represent a majority of the player base). TLP's are fast paced. It's hard to keep up, and the later you go into the game, it gets harder. There are hundreds to thousands of AA's to get. Keying, faction, flagging, every expansion release. A casual player will quickly get left behind. On an era locked TLP? No problem. Play at your own pace, and you'll eventually catch up to end game. On a TLP that constantly progresses to live, if I don't keep pace I will literally never catch up, and I might as well quit. On an era locked sever, I can go slowly, take my time, and at some point, I'll reach max level and all the AA's I need and be able to raid. Alternatively, if I can play a ton for 1 year, then need to be super inactive for 1 year, catching up can happen eventually. The server will stop progressing, allowing me to make up for lost time.

• Era locked servers allow you to end in an "era" that you enjoy so you can play it long term. I love POP era. I could keep recycling TLP's to play through POP, or I could just stay on Agnarr, which will always have the content I want be current. If I don't care about later EQ, I can invest time in my characters and play in the POP era to my heart's content. Most importantly, I'm playing with a group of people who share the some love for the same content. You could say: "You can just stay in the era you like on a live server or something," but that doesn't really work. First, you'll have access to things you may not want. Second, you're going to be playing by yourself, which you may not want.

At the end of the day, an era locked TLP server is a smart idea. Very few players on each TLP reach live. I think each TLP that has reached live has had 1 raid guild left by the time the server "finished." The current era locked server, Agnarr, has had a steadily growing population for years, despite it being one of the oldest TLP servers. This shows that there is a demand for such servers. The populations aren't big, but they're dedicated players. There's a constant trickle of new folks coming who specifically want to enjoy POP era.
There are 10 TLP servers and only 1 of them is era locked. The last one came out 7 years ago now (2017)! It's time for a new one. We've had a lot of other ideas: free trade (now multiple free trade servers); w/e Oakwynd is; Vaniki, and so on.
Why I'm looking for a DON locked server:

• DON is a much better version of a "companion" expansion (similar to what LDON is for POP) to OOW

• Epic 2.0's are still bis weapons for the most part

• OOW/DON (in my opinion) represent a perfect era of EQ that has a great balance of slightly more interesting raid mechanics, interesting + useful quests (Epic 2.0s), but doesn't have insane stat bloat. It's an era that players who never played past POP can still feel pretty comfortable with. I say this because I am a player who had never played past Agnarr until Vaniki came out. Having now experienced a lot of the game up to lvl 100, I can confidently say the 70 era is my sweet spot

• I think it has the widest variety of content that is relevant for players, raiders and casual alike. There's a good amount of content for casual players: they can do 1.5's, MPG trials, DON progression through the first few tiers, farm GOAT armor, etc. For raiding, Tacvi is still somewhat relevant, Anguish, and DON can all be a part of the regular raid rotation. In Agnarr, Time and a few LDONS are the only things that are really regularly raided, non raiders can't get good enough gear to do anything really fun on the server, and Epic 1.0's are generally useless (and by the time you're 65 with a lot of AA's, almost all 1.0's can be done with 2-3 people tops).

Why not just unlock all of the lvl 70 content? Personally did not really enjoy POR. DODH was OK. My main issue with those 2 expansions is there's a pretty big gear jump there that essentially invalidates almost all the previous content from what I've seen. I really want an era where 2.0's are the centerpiece. It's really cool thematically.
Honestly though, I'd also enjoy a HOT (lvl 90) lock as well. Any locked server, really.

Listen to him! How great would that be!

Also gives the server Epic Request to get the Epic 1.0 Ornaments we can’t get on Agnarr.
Come on Daybreak this is what we want and been asking for.

I support the OOW/DON era lock proposal.

Epic 2.0, much like the 1.0 is a key nostalgia event for many players (Others being those first dragon kills or those first boss kills behind key locks like Seru, AHR, Elemental gods and Quarm). Where Kunark falls short on content to keep TLP players active from a 1.0 perspective, the OOW/DON 2.0 parallels the current PoP locked server benefits with enough things to do to keep alts / personas continuously recycled through the content. Often, many casual players never accomplished a 2.0 because how the GoD/OoW roll out originally went - so this sets up casual players with new milestones that are nostalgic or first time accomplishments without the race or underwhelming reward for completion of it out of era. And with the proposed era locked, the nostalgia / achievement will be forever preserved and relevant once you obtain it.

It also offers a wonderful middle where grinding to 70 from scratch is easily obtainable for new players so the hurdles still remain low for players to join the end game after the server has seasoned. The further down the expansion path you go, that initial hurdle becomes Everest.

I also particularly like that this era includes the first iterations of melee foci and an era that offers the first dot critical which makes more classes viable to contribute to groups / raids in more varied ways. There is just enough class complexity in this era to keep building a toon to be "best in slot" and execution for its role a challenge, but not so much that you have thousands of AA and many item/AA clicks to complicate a class' contribution.

One other benefit that often gets overlooked is this era offers the last class archetype, Berserker. For all TLP this class gets brought in years after the expansion launches and a person playing the class has to play catch up. At the rate TLP advance, this can prove to be an overwhelming deterrent for people to choose this class given the reset button they have to hit to do so. While I don't expect the class to be available on a launch for this content locked (although that would be nice!) - locking in this era allows new players joining the server to choose from all class choices including a far under appreciated Berserker class at this point in the game.

Please please please make this happen!

That would be horrible. There's not enough to do in oow/don.

That's your opinion. However, I feel like there's absolutely a ton to do in that era, as others have described here.

cause Agnarr makes them so much money...

this is a niche request along the lines of PVP and other era locks. Most people actually want to Progress on their Progression server.

When making these requests, please consider the health of DBG and Darkpaw as a whole and not just your personal desires. There are e m u servers for those needs.

Epic 2.0s even on all alts are done in the first 2 months and then there's nothing to do. Feeling like there is more to do doesn't mean there actually is more to do lol that's not how that works.

While I see the novelty of it, I don't see it happening. The company isn't going to lock hardware for infinity. There needs to be a clear end point so they can free up hardware.

Literally everything they've done since Agnarr is evidence of them not wanting a neverending TLP. They had fast unlocks, single TLP launches, merges for servers that didn't even reach their end date, etc.

I think only DBG knows how much money Agnarr makes them, not sure that's relevant. I also think 'most people want to progress' is not a great argument, seeing that servers like Phinny and Coirnav that made it to live had... 1 guild left? Agnarr has 4 active guilds and it's been around 7 years. To me, that seems pretty good.

I wonder how hard it would be to start a new TLP this year, then upon reaching OOW having a server transfer option to a blank OOW-locked server. Seems like it might be the best of both worlds.

They could even allow Agnarr folks to escape at the same point, making a new interesting mix.

DPG most likely doesn't want another permanent server. You should probably be counting your blessings Agnarr hasn't been merged with a server rather than asking for another era locked one.

And Coirnav schedule was hastened at the end otherwise it was closing prior to reaching live. It was a compromise.

That's because there was one active guild with a couple dozen people playing on Coirnav. The server was a ghost town. Agnarr is into the hundreds at peak time and has 4 active raiding guilds doing Time and LDON raids each week.

Not a fair comparison. Two different types of servers.

I agree. I wasn't the one who brought up Coirnav. I stated that the original intent was not have Coirnav make it to live because it was in an unhealthy state and they put off merging it too long.

A server of 4 raiding guilds (with probably very little outside of it) and not being able to even move the needle a bit on EQR's server tracker of low (it's the lowest that low it can be and has been for years) doesn't mean the server has a healthy population. Of all permanent servers, Agnarr is absolutely dwarfed by literally every "live" server not called Zek.

DPG has taken many actions that prove they want to keep their server count about where it is. Releasing a permanent server - which would eventually be the lowest population permanent server by a long shot - goes against everything they've done in recent history.

Let's face it, it's most likely not going to happen. That's the cold truth. I get the novelty of it and would be cool having a 70-era locked server, but the juice more than likely isn't worth the squeeze for DPG. Agnarr's population is probably barely breaking even on their accounting, why would they want to add another server like that?

I don't think that's a fair comparison either. Live is bolstered by the F2P population. Agnarr is a paid server being TLP. If you remove the F2P numbers from a live server, you may get a closer representation. But seeing as we don't have that, it's a moot point...

Agreed. Not likely to happen, but doesn't hurt to ask / plant the seed! It would be fun. Having a locked server is more conducive to the aging EQ population; many don't have the time to play as we used to, unfortunately. Xeris summarized the problem best in his OP.

You're putting way too much importance on F2P. It's not really common. You're also forgetting most every live player will buy yearly expansions. If each server only has 1000 sold @ avg of $50 a pop, you're looking at 50k I'm sales per server. Plus the subs? Is Agnarr even pulling 1/4 of that? And before you say 100 seems high, it really isn't. The average person in a raid guild buys 2-4 copies and you're talking 50-100 raiding mains. Do the math.

Live servers are the best casual atmosphere servers. You have an entire year to do minimal amounts of content.

Nobody is talking about live servers here. Ultimately, only DBG knows what revenue each server brings in, literally any statement on the topic is pure conjecture. Ultimately what I think would be best for the game, is a series of servers that are locked at specific eras, and allow new TLP servers to xfer to them when a new server reaches that era.

This is the best situation: it allows players to get the new TLP rush, it then allows players to find a home at a rough era of EQ they want to stay at: i.e. POP era, OOW/DON, HOT, whatever. Pick 4-5 different era locked servers eventually... And the players that wanna go to live can stay on the tlps that are gonna go to live.

Will DBG do this: probably not. However, asking doesn't hurt. So here we are

let's hope the gods of norrath will ear your call !!

EQ could benefit from is a series of era-locked servers with free transfers to any server that's in a later era, or live.