2024 TLP Ruleset!

Oakwynd is likely to be down to a single guild a month or so after the new server hits....but that is because the economy is ruined and it lost a bunch of players in the first two weeks oif Luclin and has nothing to do with FTE.

Luclin hits Nov 9th...mass exodus because people with a lot of level 60 characters were not getting bonus XP for AA. And during a high XP event. Nov 15th patch introduced tradeskill depot exploit....it is left untouched well beyond a week.

That is why the server population is so down....Server was great prior and people enjoyed the drama free environment that FTE fostered.

You sound like the typical anti-FTE player who now openly admits they prefer engaging a mob someone else has engaged and just out DPS'ing them...you never wanted a true race. You want to be able to steal a mob someone else got to first.

i disagree. FTE and Oakwynd were a huge success until the dupe hit.

There will be at least one FTE server.

If recent TLP's were stand-in's for The Three Little Pigs you'd understand why this argument that a handful use to justify low pop on Oakwynd is laughable.

Oakwynd made their house of straw, and the wolf blowed his tiny house down.

Mischief made their house of steel, and has remained structurally intact, word is they have electricity and everything.

Mangler made their house of bricks, and the house stands, but lacks amenities.

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Mischief has endured multiple dupes.. if all it took was one to crash your server then there wasn't a healthy population to begin with.

Stealing a mob isn't a thing, not since the PNP was tossed out the window. There are no camps recognized by DBG, and if I were to want to race you on a rare-spawn I should be capable of doing so. But that is not my motivation for criticizing FTE, nor do I frequent that playstyle. It's what some folks do and it sucks to occasionally encounter players with a bad attitude, but you aren't avoiding that by the current iteration of FTE.

Does your band of white knights have a hat or t-shirt yet to monetize from your pro-FTE rallies?

Despite the FTE skeptics I am convinced that any weakening of Oakwynd is in fact due to the duping exploit and that FTE will take its place beside True Box on all future TLP servers. What I don't think we will see going forward is the release of pairs of servers with different rulesets.

FTE allows level appropriate characters able to go to Rathe Mountains and compete for mobs rather than have a level 60 dominate every spawn...being able to XP on Seafury Cyclops and get and Ancient Cyclops all while level appropriate...fighting for named mobs in Skyfire Mountains in early Kunark and Kael mobs in Velious all because FTE prevents a max level character from dominating an area.


The current version of FTE works quite well, it is not perfect but there are a lot of positives and very few negatives....if they would make mobs instantly available on spawn it would be even better.

/agreed

I do not think there is a large enough base remaining to support two servers. every year.

It works well for you maybe. There are some tweaks they could do to make it work for the other half of the player base. Allow you to add your alts to a list that would eliminate the need for /yell and fix out of group play, remove OW raid targets to allow guilds to dps race big targets again. There are a ton of negaitves to FTE, you just may not see them.

Ahh the real motivation for you reveals itself, it's not to stop griefers, it's to farm the same platinum they do.

They nerfed Seafuries

Just nerf the hill giants

I think a huge part of the push for FTE is jealousy of what people think as the elite. Malicious trains are pretty rare outside of launch weeks.

Oakwind's population had far too many negatives going for it to ever blame the population issues on a single thing. The biggest issue the server had was that it was just a boring vanilla TLP with "perks" that wouldn't really kick in until far too late in the lifespan of the server. They didn't toss in heirloom or alts having individual raid lock outs until after the playerbase basically rioted at how bad it was. And then they had the worst plat dup issue that has ever hit any server and completely destroyed what remained of their population.

But yeah.. sure... it was all FTE

FTE, love it or hate it, is going on the servers moving forward. It saves DPG money. End of story.

I dont know why people keep repeating this. How much money has DB saved because of FTE? What would be the difference in revenue if Oakwynd was more successful? We have no idea. As for it being on every TLP moving forward that just isn't true. Its not even a year old and if they continue to lose players because of it I would hope they would change course. You can say FTE didn't cause Oakwynd to flop but it was a part of it.

I assure you that they can place a monetary value on every single CS ticket that wasn't filed. They 100% know exactly how many CS man hours the feature saved them. They know how much revenue a typical server earns and how much Oakwynd earned. The manner in which Jchan spoke about FTE it is a success in their eyes. I don't need to see the numbers to see how this cookie is going to crumble.

Not really true. The population was low from the beginning, before any dupe, because of all of the crying about FTE. People actively went out of their way to very loudly declare how horrible the server was. People actively went out of their way to talk about how they were going to grief the entire server. That is what hit Oakwynd the hardest.

At the same time that Oakwynd was releasing, Diablo 4 was being released as well. Many left for it.

Next, a lot of the sweatier individuals found out that FTE actually kind of worked better than expected and made it harder for them to DPS race mobs. They worked as many tricks to break FTE and get the kill, but it was no longer as easy.

Additionally, the server never broke out into a race to engage old world server. Almost eveyr guild ignored OW unless it was very convenient to kill. They stuck to just doing AoC's and not racing. Without named kills to grief and OW mobs to race, many of the sweatlords left.

Hitting Oakwynd as well was BG3 releasing. It was a very successful game, and more people left the game for it and didn't come back.

Then the issue was that many expected Legacy to work on AAs from the start. It ended up that for several weeks once AAs were available, that wasn't the case. It was eventually changed, but many of the people who leveled up 4-5-10 characters to get an additional boost to their grinding decided that was it and left.

While that was going on, WoW SoD was released. That drew a large number of players away from Oakwynd.

Then came Red Wine. Perhaps as a way to appease the legacy AA issue, another experience week was enabled. Quite a few used this time to use the old red wine quest to level up new alts. Quite a few people, some who have never been in trouble before, got hit with suspension for a week or two. For some, that was the last straw and they left.

And of course, besides all of that, there was the tradeskill bug where near unlimited amounts of plat were generated. Many got banned, but billions? trillions? of plat got in the system. A slow response allowed even more people to get in on the dupe. The economy was hit especially hard. Even more people left.

So those are the key issues Oakwynd had to go through. At the same time, everyone knows that just around the corner is the 25th anniversary server. The big expectation is that something special was going to happen and a very popular ruleset would be released. Many people had no attachment to Oakwynd from the start, as they knew the 25th would likely be a big thing. To them, Oakwynd was just a placeholder until the 25th came out.

Additionally, you have TLP fatigue. There have been a lot of TLPs. Every year, 1-2 new ones. The EQ population is not robust enough to continually support every TLP with a massive population. People either stick with their old TLP while others take a break. That means less of a population for Oakwynd to draw from and keep.

Finally, you have the serial rerollers. The ones that almost no matter the rules, will re-roll when the newest TLP comes out. It's what they do, for a number of reasons from earning krono the easiest to just enjoying that era more or this being the "final" server they will play and this time they will keep up.

Everything added together, and its not a surprise that Oakwynd has taken some hard hits. So no, it wasn't just a plat dupe that hurt the server.

It's a shame, because for many of those who actually tried Oakwynd and stuck with it, have loved it. It is probably one of the least drama-filled servers with a lot fewer problem players than normal. Each expansion and it's feature have slowly started to add up to some very cool benefits. The 25th will absolutely hit Oakwynd hard, but I think people are underestimating how many will actually stay.

Quite a few people on Oakwynd are tired of the TLP hopping. They are tired of Classic and Kunark and Velious. They want to complete GoD and beyond. Will it be a huge, populous server come this summer? No, but there will be a good handful of guilds still going strong. And those of us who stick around will still have some good times ahead of us.

They should release one with FTE and one without, identical server rules except this one thing and let the players decide.

I dislike everything FTE stands for, for me it is too far away from the original EQ. My opionion has nothing to do with a DPS race, I can't be bothered with it. It has nothing to do with intentional training.

It is just one step too far from the original game.

Not at all...Have Hill Giants drop zero plat, would be fine for me....they are GREAT XP when level appropriate...I did not stay from 27-60 in Rathe Mountains....I was gone from Rathe by 35...Once they go to dark blue con they are not good XP....

And FTE makes whatever zone I want to go XP in give me equal footing.

Finally someone who knows about Oakwynd!

Compared to Mischief, EVEN IN CLASSIC, KUNARK, Oakwynd population was low.

Now it is a ghost town. PoK got so empty I stopped two weeks ago.
Time /played I have there is so high, it is sad that the server got decimated.
What was annoying was non-players of Oakwynd (Mainly Waring) theorizing based on the one time a day they checked the server page during peak times, and deemed Oakwynd as booming!

I did not like FTE at first, but I grudged through it on Oakwynd. Now after a year on Oakwynd, I will not play on any server unless it has FTE. It has been one of the best changes to the game in my many years of playing the game.

I do wonder - amongst the FTE haters, how many of them hate it because they can't KS anymore?
Obviously none will admit it, but if it was common enough to cause FTE, it means it was pretty dang common.