Any new progression server coming?

Id like to see a progression server where there would be totally different expansion after velious / popowers.

If they do make another line of progression servers, I would really like to ask/encourage them to go back and instance the following zones: Planes of fear/hate/sky. Trak encounter and VP. ToV and Sleepers. VT. This would allow the casual guilds the ability to have some content to raid while still offering the heavy raiding guilds a large amount of additional encounters to compete over.

It would be amazing if they did this, would go a long way to lessening the negative attitudes that the first 4-5 expansions brought out in people. Nothing like having 3 guilds leveling up SKs for the sole purpose of macroing a HT macro to instakill all meaningful content for the first 6 months.

And I can't imagine anyone actually enjoyed "poop socking" everything else.

The flip side is, without the guild vs guild competition, at least the first couple expansions are pretty boring with the current level of player character strength. The actual pve raid content is a walk in the park. When all the content through Kunark can be killed by one or two groups at most, if you instance that you'd see even more box armies running around, less player interaction, and lots of CoF's for sale in the EC tunnel. No thanks, I'd rather have open world competition.

As far as , it would be very easy to get rid of that by adjusting the randomness in spawn timers. happens when you know the mob will spawn within at 12 hour window. Increase that to 48 hours, or 72 hours, by whatever means, and no guilds will be sitting there waiting (at least not until it gets into the last 6-12 hours of the window.) It'll become more a contest of rapid mobilization, which is much more fun.

Alternately, drop it to a 1 hour window, so everyone knows when the spawn is coming roughly, and let everyone who shows up dps race. (Preferably with HT nerfed so it's not 20 sk's from each guild competing for the kill.)

Either way, the problems are gone.

Lol. They *** out poop socking if you don't put a space in between poop and sock. But poop by itself is ok. That's funny stuff.

Not completely true. In classic you still have phinny, naggy, and vox open for competition - I'll grant it isn't much but then classic didn't have a lot of raid content to begin with. Kunnark opens up another few targets, and then Velious and Luclin open dozens each. All of which need to be competed over.

The idea is that the heavy guilds still have a chunk of content to compete over, which is what they will want. On the the other hand all guilds gain the benefit of having some content out there that they can be assured will be open to them. That leaves the smaller guilds that want to do things like offer their members set raid schedules the ability to have at least one or two targets a week they can go after.

I think you missed my point. All the pve content in classic and kunark is completely trivial. With the level of dps we have now, ac mitigation/cap changes, super overpowered pets, etc etc, there is no raid content in classic or kunark that can't be 1 or 2 grouped.

If they were to instance all this, which do you think people would prefer--raiding Naggy with their guild and splitting the loot 30 ways, or 3 boxing it on their own? It would ultimately have a huge negative effect on the game for the first few months, as people would be disinclined to join guilds or raid with guilds.

Regardless, it's a pipe dream anyway and Sony is never going to do this.

From the way I've heard it explained, as in...at fan faire and anytime they've spoken to players directly from development standpoint they have to be able to justify the overhead. They don't make the calls as developers, they make suggestions.

So basically, even if we had the greatest suggestion ever...it still needs to make money. I personally think and from looking at how Vulak'Aerr & Fippy Darkpaw you could consistently release a 'new' progression server about every 2 years. If you alternated between time locked (3 months, vote) and flat out run (think mayong here) you would need about 4 servers for 10 year sections, assuming you merge the servers as they catch up to live.

This would cost them little once the work is done at the beginning to get it rolling, might be an upfront investment...but I could easily see several thousand if not tens of thousands playing every new server that's released.

How about SoE selling the software so we can set up our OWN servers with whatever previous expansions we want on them? Of course they could keep the most current couple of expansions for their Live servers, but all this old content that just gets blown through now could make them some money for those of us who would like to setup our own, private, "friends only" servers or even make them free to the public.

It costs them more than you are suggesting here. The progression servers have always required ongoing development as things never work quite the way they should, and changes on live can have unintended consequences. And we have a much higher need for CS support than live servers, especially the first few expansions before instancing. There might be ways to address these things, but the more they make it inexpensive for themselves to support, the less authentic the progression experience will be. The suggestion to instance everything is a good example of that. It would drastically cut down on their customer service support needs, but it also would be a very different game during classic through pop than what we played back in the day. At some point, you make too many changes and the nostalgic feeling is lost and people stop being interested. So it's a catch-22.

And it's never going to be tens of thousands of players. Numbers on fippy/vulak and combine/sleeper weren't even close to that, and the longer time goes on, the less players will come back.

I'd love a new server, though. The instance idea would be amazing.

I love the idea of merging Vulak in to Fippy and then restarting Vulak.
When Fippy and Vulak came out I was really happy. Unfortunatly I did not have the time to put in to it then. I want another chanse

I'm not on a progression server... so I can't comment on how successful they've been. However... your reply there makes me wonder what kind of server you're on. I'm on Xegony/Ro... and before I go further I should remind you of what Machen actually said...

The key word there is "raid." On Xegony I doubt we could get 10 active raid guilds together if we tried.Oh yeah, sure there are tons of raiding guilds on Xegony.... I mean, most of them don't actually raid, or they raid content from 6 expansions ago because they don't have enough 85+ to actually do any raiding. There's also people who solo raid the 75 content... And I know two folks who each 5 box and do some raid content together that way... but... Real active raiding guilds? There might be 10... maybe... but that would really be pushing it. So it seems to me that if Fippy can muster up 10 active raiding guilds, that actually raid, the progression servers are doing better than the live servers... maybe I need to think about making a toon or two over there.

In fairness, we're down to 4 now, only two of which are in current content. Population has dropped pretty dramatically over the past six months.

I remember another time, on live servers, when population was dropping and spirits were low... and then on the horizon I saw an expansion. One with features to combat the problem and help the players who remained to continue questing. What is that? What do I see in all it's glory? Is that Seeds of Destruction?

/play glorious music

Really, SoD has great content. I hear the vote should open in December and go live mid month. Have a blast Fippy. It might be what the doctor ordered.

We have Secrets of Faydwer yet before seeds of destruction. SoD should be around march or april.

In lieu of making a new forum post about this I'm going to throw my hat in here. I missed the launch of the last progression server and have kicked myself ever since.

I dream of this, and if you take a look at runescape oldschool its doing pretty good.

I think it would be very worth the time to actually code the game to be a little more like it was in vanilla, but even if you didn't I'd be the first in line for a new one.

Sure but once the code exists it's as easy as copy pasting or triggering. When they decided to go with voting it's been automated for over a year now. All of the tweaks and fixes they did to remove bugged items, npcs, quests etc. all exist on their server side database. It really is as easy as saying 'Ok, every 4 years we're reseting Vulak'Aerr, even though it's uniquely coded we've spent a few days to make transfers off allowed. When Vulak'Aerr reaches 2 years in age we will release the Mayong coded server."

By the time the First server reaches the 2 year mark (the decline period) you start the opposite 'progression' themed server. By the 4 year mark of the first you simply say 'Ok, rebooting to start, you have 2 weeks to move characters to live".

This gives people who enjoy the 'golden age' several months (if not years in time locked case) of their playtime. Every 2 years you get a unique server to promote growth in the game overall & at the 4 year marks you bolster live servers.

Voting system appears to be broken on Fippy again. Don't assume that they got all the code corrections correct. The current system still needs dev work. See the Jewelcraft trophy for another recent example.

make a pvp progression server, and BOOM no more issues of what you carebears refer to as "poop socking"

fight for it, winner gets the mob losers get a long and miserable corpse run....

of course with the rampant hacking and the lack of effort on the part of sony to stop it caused so much trouble on a blue server, the problems hacking would cause on a red server would be infinitely times worse, and i don't think sony would ever put the resources needed into a pvp progression server.