Agnarr vs Phinny population?

Those are mostly the farmers from live and Phinny, rolling on every item because they want to get as many krono as possible before going back to wherever they play regularly. Once the price of Krono becomes high enough to make it less attractive to these people, they'll get flustered and quit.

I'm 27 and climbing with my shaman, and since I haven't been in any of the power gaming groups, I've had a pretty good experience overall so far. We've discussed the loot like adults, even though it's only stuff from upper guk and unrest. I would expect competition in the money camps to be a different, but that's life.

Planes of Power was released in October 2002 and wasn't beaten until like May. This was because TRC was released in a broken, untuned state.

GoD took longer than 3 months and that was because Tacvi was released in a broken state. Literally you could not beat some of the events due to bugs. The final boss was so untuned that when someone finally downed it, it was discovered this was a trigger for the boss. Tuning and it got fixed.

SOE was always notorious for releasing broken raid content in order to halt or slow guild progression. Its ultimately what caused a lot of guilds to head over to WoW. Anything actually released in a reasonable state, was usually run over.

People are overusing this assessment in my opinion. It seems to me people joined World of Warcraft more for what that game meant than any dramatic flaw in an existing MMO x they were playing. Sometimes the new kid on the block gets the attention, and this new kid was - how much I hate it for mainstreaming the MMO genre to kingdom come - very good.

WoW was just the next evolution of the genre quit acting like EQ is perfect or something, far from it. It's an old game, and it shows.

Why isn't everyone still playing Half-Life 1 from 1998? Because technology and gaming evolved.

Put the rose colored glasses away.

I would agree for casuals concerning WoW. For top-end raid guilds... they were very vocal about the issues and SOE's bs during PoP, and in particular GoD, leading to the infamous 'guild summit' at SOE headquarters.

Afterlife and Fires of Heaven being the prime examples. They were the top two guilds throughout Classic up through GoD, and pretty much transferred over to WoW, and flat out quit the game as viable raid forces.

Per those casuals, a lot of them did try out WoW for a bit. Some didn't come back, a lot of them did after a couple months and the freshness of WoW wore off.

+1

WoW was and is a great game. It didn't just beat other MMOs, it turned them to ash. EQ community has a serious inferiority complex about the game and it's just weird because most people have played both and many still do.

since Agnarr launched its the first time I have seen Phinnis population drop below full on the EQ server population chart!

Comparing Fippy to anything is meaningless. Fippy's raiding population took a YUGE nosedive when Sony got hacked by Anonymous in May 2011, just as Kunark was due to come out. Both Citizen and TL weren't back up to their March #s when Kunark went live.

This is temporary. LDoN is amazingly boring, and three months of it is far too long. Every Phinny person I have spoken to has confirmed they will be returning for GoD, they are just killing time until then. We have seen no noticeable drop in raid attendance. The only player we lost to Agnarr was Mabbu.

Hmm, multiple TLPs actually sounds pretty good for people that get to max lvl quickly and get raiding done. They can bounce back and forth, while the slower people can casually make their way through. I kind of like that idea.

I just noticed on the official Homepage that Phinny's population is still sitting at Medium while Agnarr's is already at "High". I'm sure Phinny will also hit the "High" mark later in the day (however DBG calculates those icons), but...

• Is this a sign that Agnarr has taken over as the "go to" TLP server?
• Does this mean that Phinny is doomed to the same death as all the other TLP servers?
• Does this confirm that the TLP crowd of players bounce to the latest server DBG hands out?

1) For new players, probably
2) Every TLP is doomed. That is the nature of TLPs
3) If this were true, Ragefire, Lockjaw & Phinigel would not currently exist. Or, better put, they would exist but have no playerbase (See Vulak).

Phinny is dead for casual players. There are going to be next to no new casuals on there even if the upcoming exp boost is significant. Some raid guilds will keep playing but they will fade away over the next year. Eventually a new TLP will open with new rules (every item tradable). By this point Agnarr will start to fade and Phinny will totally be forgotten. If you want to play new content then stick with live. If you want to have fun for the next year and a half or so, play Agnarr

This just sounds like over-dramatization and sensationalism. Agnarr is currently exceeding expectations and doing really well, which is great and we'll see if that continues going forward(I don't see any major reason why it wouldn't).

However, Phinigel has been sitting in PoP for almost half a year at this point. The server is incredibly top-heavy and daytime population is going to be quite low since people have nothing left to do. There is still quite a buzz related to the upcoming GoD release, since there is a very significant population of raiding folks who haven't done this content in ages(or at all) and are itching for some new stuff to do. Check back in a week and see what the populations are - I'm willing to bet Phinigel will be "high" for quite some time.

Regarding your specific tabloid questions:
1) New players will more than likely start on Agnarr, since its still new and a fresh start. Kinda obvious. However the thing that differentiates this situation and makes it impossible to call it the "go to" server is that the inherent rulesets are different, and cater to different people - so neither one can really be considered the "go to" server.

2) No, for same reason as above and more. There are plenty of people interested in content that will never exist on Agnarr, and combined with the raid instancing that has kept Phinigel overstocked with raid-geared guilds, it provides a formula that should(hopefully) make it much healthier than other TLP servers.

3) There will always be people that flock to the newest server but it doesn't "confirm" anything. Its just a very rough snapshot of the current population. Again, given the different rulesets - sometimes people just want a fresh start, some are just killing time until the next expansion on Phinny/Ragefire/Lockjaw, and some are there permanently.

Hahahahahahaha.... hahaha... HAHAHAHA.... HA.. HA.... HAAAAAAAAAAAAA.... *gasp* HAHAHAHAHA.... HAHAHAHHHAHAAHAHAHHHAAAAA.... *long breath* HA!!!!! HAHAHAHAHA!!!HAHAH1.1.1!!!!.1...!

HA
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HA
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H....A...

HA .... ahem... sigh....

whew....

He "played on Agnar for a few days and left", yet he can clearly see the number dropping on Agnar... because... you know.. .in those few days.. he saw all he needed to see. The population was disappearing at lightning speed during those few days.... uhhh... yeah. ok.

Actually, up until some time AFTER WoW came out, every new MMORPG was referred to as "THE" EQ killer. Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, Asheron's Call 2, etc.

As each new one would come along, people would proclaim that the end was near for EQ!... "The end is coming! Hurrah!"

And, then they would come back to EQ with another "it just wasn't EQ" story to tell.

There were a few factors that actually (in my opinion) lead to WoW actually being the monster to shake up the industry that it was...

1. SoE itself had in a way declared that it was time to move on in so much as they created Everquest 2. For those that don't remember, SoE put a boat load of resources in to the creation of EQ2, and it was supposed to be the next big thing. It wasn't. Sadly.
2. Blizzard had a built in fan base for the Warcraft license... a massive fan base at that
3. EQ1 raiders were getting highly fed up with the half completed and totally broken expansions being shoveled out the door at SoE. I mean seriously. Some of the expansions were just straight up broken, and it smelled of being that way on purpose because the content wasn't completed before the expansion was released.
4. Blizzard was smart, and actually hired developers away from SoE to make WoW. As much as we all like to hate on WoW (and it's modern day likeness if worth that hate for sure), the original World of Warcraft WAS the natural progression of Everquest when it released. Original World of Warcraft was more akin to being the REAL part 2 to Everquest than Everquest 2. It wasn't until the first expansion that Blizzard started really jacking with the EQ1 formula. From then on out, the designers at Blizzard went straight batcrap crazy and destroyed any resemblance to EQ that was in WoW's design. God only knows why.

The point is, people were looking for the NEXT everquest for many years prior to WoW and EQ2 being released. The fact is, everything before the release of WoW just plain wasn't as good as EQ1, so people kept coming back to EQ1. When WoW came out, people were like "hell yeah. Finally. F U EQ! I'm outtie500!" Then Blizzard pulled the rug out from under them and turned WoW in to the kiddy-friendly pile of crap it is today. Woohoo. Way to go Blizzard on ruining a good thing!

Yeah, except that over the course of those 3-4 years, server population massively dropped and Everquest went through several waves of server merges. The reality is that the large majority of those players who left for other games did not ever come back to EQ.

That's a pretty good summary of that piece of history.
We began looking in 2003 as it was just plain the grindy time sink buff and nerf model was not going to change, say what you will about that but it was just boring and was not run as well as it had(trend begins). Anarchy Online was good but poorly run (trending) so SWG and it was great but again poorly thought out changes and bullheaded about adding content thus badly run(trend continues). Then WoW and EQ2 hit, EQ2 was just not going to cut it for so many reasons and WoW actually started out very well despite it's cartoony graphics and well run (trend finally bucked). Since then the great killer of games was and is the companies that run them not the games themselves in most cases.
Did not go near EQ for over ten years until Wow drove off the cliff permanently. Lot of games during that time all either badly run or so poorly designed or just a scam (Age of Conan/DarkFall).

In all that the only games I can point to as being well run was EQ up to the PoP era and WoW.
WoW became a monster because BLizzard did an excellent job of running the game for about a decade. Heck it still is a monster but obviously headed for the pit by now.
I do not think it will ever be replaced. I hope to be very wrong.

Just to clarify, the developers that were 'taken' from EQ/EQ2 for WoW weren't poached. They were contracted developers who's contracts ran out with SOE. They went to Blizzard to help finish up WoW and once their contracts were up with Blizzard, some came back to SOE for a bit.

At least according to a dev in the EQ2 forums (in the Archived section) a couple of years ago in reference to why some things look similar between WoW and EQ2.

Second part is absolutely correct. Early vanilla WoW was basically EQ with a very different paintjob, and some bells and whistles added. The end of zone questlines required groups, keying was a thing to do certain content, and raids were very large. Hell even the early PVP in 2004 WoW is what it should have been in EQ.

People like to claim WoW was easymode EQ, it wasn't in the beginning. I had had done OoW content and did very well in EQ. Got my rear handed to me in early WoW when even 5 man dungeons had mechanics a bit more complex than even Citadel of Anguish. Death in EQ was a simple corpse run and 10% exp (reversed by 96% rez), where death in WoW cost coin. Of course later they mitigated alot of that so repair costs were much cheaper.