Is 5 years to complete a TLP really reasonable?

That's what you are focusing on? I provided evidence that lots of guilds clear everything in that time frame in a ridiculously short amount of time. My casual guild wasn't even a raiding guild. We had no plans to raid passed BoT towers. It was just 10 of us chillin. Servers absolutely should not be planned around a guild with no ambition to even do the full expansion.

Any guild with an actual base of people is easily going to clear all that in 2 months. Seriously, what game are you playing where this content is difficult? Every single one of these giant raid zones that used to take forever is done in a raid night now. On mischief I was in a 2 night a week raid guild. Very casual. Cleared PoP in 2 weeks. Is that a better example for you than my 10 man selos guild? Cause we spent the next few months bored until GoD dropped.

Evidence? Lol.

You can keep repeating the same things but it doesn't change the fact that people aren't easily going to clear all that content in 8 weeks plus leveling, AAs, and gear.

It isn't even about difficulty of the content which you love to keep focusing on. It's the sheer volume of it. If you count up just the raid targets/zones across all those xpacs combined it ends up being a ton of raid nights ticking away.

That doesn't include time spent leveling, AAs, and other individual/group progression tasks.

Make a mistake or don't get all the gear your raid force needs in the 1st shot to take on the next xpac's raids? Hi lockout timers!

Even just with Kunark I'd love to hear how quickly you think your whole raid force is going to get the key done, while competing with other guilds. Which, ya know, you need to clear the content and has been a PITA bottleneck consistently.

Feel like either you pick and choose which content to complete before moving on to the next xpac, which is totally fine, or haven't sat down and thought about the actual # of items to get done before an xpac is cleared.

I feel like you aren't even playing the game and just on the forums. I'm not even going to bother quoting all that nonsense.

Vulak died in 1 day on mischief.

But we can go for slower servers. 5 guilds had Phara down in 2 weeks on Aradune for your beloved kunark and it's impossible key quest. She died in 3 days.

You clearly don't play the game or don't pay attention at all to serverwides. We should probably just agree to disagree, but feel free to get another bs last word in lol

Thank you for repeatedly proving my point by quoting time frames in your different posts which clearly show all but the hardcore guilds wouldn't complete all content across all those xpacs in 8 weeks.

Also hilarious you've failed to acknowledge that every guild had a mob being brought down on every previous TLP with more time to level, AA, and get raid geared before hitting the next target.

Targets would totally go down as quickly on a server with 8 weeks to do it all as they did on a server with weeks per xpac to raid gear your guild.

You give a prime example to completely show it - it took 5 guilds 2 weeks on Aradune after having 8-12 weeks of classic to gear up (I can't remember Aradune unlock).

No. 1 year to get To Level 70 alone is completely unreasonable.

Double Loot, Double faction, 4 or 8 week timers depending on the expansion. Start at Luclin to dive right into AA.

Half lockouts on Selos were not the way - too much raiding.

Faster timers is the way with more loot and faction and faster exp - reduce playtime required as the player base gets older is the only reasonable move for sustainability.

I definitely think some expansions need the 12 weeks, but some are ridiculous. Now that I am on my 8th TLP and my 7th raid guild to lead, I have come to change my opinion on certain expansions.

For instance:
PoP is TOO LONG. It should be lowered by 2 months. Drop PoP and LOY together (as we do) and then drop LDON 1 month later and 3 months total of PoP. This 5 months of PoP causes a TON of burnout and that is the second biggest drop in guild membership after classic (Classic by far is the biggest drop).

Hot take: I think Kunark and Velious are terrible expansions and should be 2 months as well, though I will concede Kunark 3 months because 50-60 does take some time to get being one of the slowest level increases ever. I could even get behind Luclin being 2 months but I really like Luclin so Im ok with 3 months.

The 70 stretch is ridiculous.

OOW - 1 Month later drop DoN 3 months total
DoDH - 6 weeks later drop PoR 3 months total (DoDH can take a little longer for more casual guilds, getting through Demi took our guild longer than I thought it would).

I think TSS and SoD were better suited to 2 month expansions as well. Though SoF was my favorite expansion after PoP I think and it had a fair amount to do.

Then again we have expansions like Underfoot that is 8 weeks and could easily be made 12 weeks because of its difficulty. Even with Mischief loot half of the raiding guilds never finished Underfoot in era (though this is also due to holiday eating most guilds raid times, ours included and we did finish Underfoot). Though I can see the argument for leaving it short cause if your not gonna be able to do the content a shorter schedule gets your out of it faster. I was happy we cleared it, but I was also happy to be done with it (Though I think Convorteum was a good zone, everything before was just horrible).

I Agree that half lockouts was a terrible solution. Every single person who left Selos and came to my guild on Mangler (Was it Mangler? I think so lol) their BY FAR number one reason was because the lockouts were so fast they couldnt keep up and felt like they had to raid 5 nights a week to stay relevant.

Mischief solved this by instead of making half lockouts and forcing people to no life EQ, they just doubled loot and let people raid casually but still make great progress.

I agree with double faction and double AA experience too. This is MUCH better solution than shorter lockouts.

cant you just do this on live? A guild chooses how fast they progress and the server doesn't limit it? Whats the point of making a new server for that?

back to the original question, 5 years is not too long.
My wife and were part of the phinigel from start ( ok we bumped into the server in kunark ) till finish.
you make it sound though like you have to play almost non stop for days on end in order to keep up with the server. that is completely false.
my wife and i usually took 2 or 3 days off when a new expac opened ( and had the following weekend off as well ) and made some arrangement with other people in the guild to have a decent set up group and when the new server opened we went to town, hitting new max level, get through the progression and most of the aas in that short period. so it cost us 10-12 days off in a year to keep up with the server.
after the initial start, it was more or less helping others in the guild keep up, fool around and of course raid new content. it was pretty awesome.

what you do need though is a guild that has a lot of members that want to work together and help each other. We'd have groups that got people through hard parts of progression doing that for a few days if needed. We had others that helped people catch up with aas and levels if needed if they had to take a break for longer then a few weeks.

Few things you must not forget though, you dont need to be max aa to function in a raid, you just pick the aa lines that are relevant for your class first. you also dont need to be in full BiS gear to be able to crack the next expansion ( me, as a beastlord, upgraded either my visible or my non visible slots and usually my weapons for each expac ). The only classes that show the biggest gain from gear are your tanks. so help them, let them get the gear they need first.
Act as a team. you will forge friendships that last forever and actually go through incredible fights against all odds and get to tell the stories. ( beating vyskudra with 26 in raid was unbelievable for us for instance ).

/salute DWX and RG3.

LDON should just launch with PoP and LoY. It brings almost nothing at all to the table that is out of era. 2-3 months for these 3 is plenty of time since it's pretty much just PoP, and PoP is cleared so ridiculously fast by everyone. It used to be hard back in the day with Rathe and Corniav as massive blocks, but these days those fights are completely mastered. A bard can solo chain pull rathe without any issues in 30 minutes and Corniav is just an AOE fight now.

People that want 3+ months of PoP can just go play agnarr.

DoN and OOW are already being combined on Oakwynd as they should. DoN is literally 2 fights so it's about time really. 5 months of those 2 absolutely decimated servers.

After a year I'm usually burnt out, so no idea on later expansions hah.

There have been a few guilds over the years that attempted this, but the game just isn't built for it on live. There's not nearly enough people, so as people need to quit for IRL or burnout, it becomes impossible to replace them. TLP's give a massive pool to draw from, and if you can backflag people into your current expansion it would let people pick and choose guilds that are currently on content they enjoy.

This is a very popular concept on private servers and works amazingly well, but limited to their limited number of avail expansions. The current most popular non P1999 style one is a small group progression server. I know a lot of people who would much rather play the actual game than , and be able to do it past OOW since that's where those typically end due to limitations.

Plus racing other guilds is fun. That alone is something I'd love to take part in.

I 100% agree on bis and max aa. That's not required at all to clear content. I'm surprised so many people think it is. We have so many badly geared/low aa boxes in our raids these days. Hell, on Mischief I leveled/aad a monk box in a week and a half just cause bard was boring in PoTime, picked up a shanai, and was top DPS. I just grabbed DPS aa, and there aren't a ton. The rest of that monk's gear was absolute trash, but it doesn't really matter with how easy the content has become at that tier.

I think your situation is a little rare though. I've been in a lot of guilds over the years on TLP, and once one of those big 3-5 month wait time expansions hit they almost always fall apart, and very few people actually come back. There's a reason why PoP is usually the end. That PoP+Ldon gap is murder. Only Mischief so far has recovered, and it's still a ghost town compared to a fresh tlp.

They don't necessarily have to combine expansions, just shorten the time until the next one opens up. I think all expansions should have at least 2 weeks to shine before the next one opens up. I'd also like to see a max of 12 to 16 weeks at any one level.

Man, nothing against you, but these 2 sentences really make you lose a ton of credibility. First, anyone can get together with like minded people and move to any server they want to and play the game however they want. DPG is much better erring on the side of caution when it comes to unlock timers. Servers that have slightly longer unlocks are better because people that get burned out during an expansion tend to return. People that feel they are falling behind will not.

But then to blatantly say you can only play for a year, my guy. I dont think youre the player they are designing TLPs for. If you can only make it a year, and you want to see later content, maybe just wait 6 months before rolling on them. Nothing good happens in the first 6 months anyways, and you can easily be caught up.

I mean, that's exactly how Daybreak releases these servers isn't it? Every year a new TLP that wipes out the old one because the majority of the playerbase is gone.

I think they design their servers specifically for people like me, who get bored and want a fresh start with fresh rules so DB can make the maximum amount of krono. Oakwynd is on PoP right now and will absolutely get obliterated, as is tradition, once its year in the light is over. Maybe pander to that audience and give us a server we can actually do in a year.

All they'd need to do is up loot drop rates, up key piece rare spawn rates, and raise xp. The actual content isn't the time consumer. It's the artificial time sinks to pad out that content.

There's obviously a huge amount of us. And a lot would be willing to go further than Pop/GoD/OOW when this game tends to die, but not if it's going to take 5 full years. That's a huge chunk of life to commit to a game.

Man, nothing against you, but these 2 sentences really make you lose a ton of credibility. You clearly have no idea how DPG is making money on these TLPs.

Every new TLP they sell new bags for $20-$30+.

Every new TLP people clearly have to start over leveling - that's xp pot sales.

Someone who plays for a year is perfect for them - maybe they buy some bags then a year later they start on the new server and maybe buy some bags again. Someone who stays on a server for years isn't doing that.

There's a reason they do new ones every year. There's a reason new ones every year are packed and people aren't going "well I'll stay on my established TLP server".

If people REALLY tended to come back after being burnt out you'd see that in population numbers and you just haven't on any TLP except maybe Mischief. No other TLP has seen the usual exodus pre-GoD then seen their population recover significantly to what it was at PoP launch.

Sorry, so you are arguing that DPG should change the way they operate the TLPs so that they are able to make more money?
Do you not think there are people at DPG who already understand this concept? Youre not the first person to understand this lol.
They clearly have run profit analysies (idk how to spell that word) and decided against lowering the unlock times.

And if you look at the servers they have been spinning up lately, they are servers with new ideals, different playstyles. Ask yourself this. If all they cared about was the bottom line, why wouldnt they just release a new FV style server every year. It was CLEARLY the most successful server they ever released. It lasted longer than any before, people bought krono en masse to gear their toons.
I think they care more about older servers than we would like to think.

If this was their true mentality, once they discovered how popular mischief was, and how many people played/bought krono there, they would be spinning up a new Mischief server every year.

I think more goes into what they decide to do than we think.

Also, right now its 5 years or so to reach live, you want to reduce that by half, but most of the people that play dont even last that long. 2.5 years would put you into something like Secrets of Faydwer. But most of ya'll cant even make it the 1.5 years to DoDh lol.

I dont see any evidence that points to people playing LONGER on a server if it has a shorter unlock, other than the same people who reroll every year would just get to experience more of the game.

I think that's the point though. People want to experience more of the game, but expecting them to stay committed for so long is just nuts. Especially when the siren call of a new TLP and all the hype surrounding it drops and kills off your server anyway.

A super fast, high loot, fast respawn, common rare spawn, game-long server for a year would be a blast. It's so much easier to plan out a year of life around this ridiculously time consuming game, and the constant release schedule would mean there's always something to do. Right now with a 5 year TLP getting bored and quitting is just inevitable for a lot of people. There's so many stinker periods of EQ time that don't need a full 3-5 months. That OOW->DoN 5 month marathon is an absolute guild slayer.

You could quit and come back, but that's almost a meme at this point. It's always a 50/50 dice roll if someones going to come back from 2 week vacation, much less 2 months later for a new expansion. There isn't a whole lot of permanence for a TLP character, so people getting distracted with other things during those breaks is almost inevitable.