Fellowship slots

Is there a reason fellowship slots are capped at 12?
If there was a way to increase fellowship size I'm sure i wouldn't be the only one willing to pay. (maybe like merc slots in SC store?)

Several other recent threads on fellowships that you can search for and read but...

Yes, because that's what the devs want (short answer).

Yes, because fellowships were designed to be used more as temporary groupings for players per session than the permanent institutions that players have used them for. Devs have not really liked the way fellowship campfires have been used to get around obstacles trivially and thus have been very reluctant to change the number in fellowships or the number required to set a campfire (long answer).

...and I have no idea where the whole xp vitality thing fits into their line of logic...it was added later...

Ngreth has been the most recent dev who has answered/responded to fellowship change inquiries. And there has been zero wavering in his responses.

But there's always tomorrow to change someone's mind.

Personally, I'd be willing to live without fellowship vitality for another 6 fellowship slots...I think expanding slots without reduction/elimination of vitality could cause some abuses/encourage even more botting/afk xping.

The increase from 9 to 12 was a welcomed surprise.

And add a second person that could invite/remove

I'm not sure that fellowships were intended to be temporary groupings, so much as for more close-knit friends that group together regularly, and that don't necessarily have to be in the same guild. For instance, I had a couple friends that left or wouldn't have joined our small, casual guild back in the day so that they could raid end-game content. But, I'm sure they both would have loved to be in a fellowship with us make gathering for regular groups easier. And, they probably would have liked to share some of the xp they didn't really need with us since they played more often than we did generally. It would have helped us keep up for the grouping.

When you look at it like this, 12 seems like plenty. If everyone is running one account, that's 12 people and should be enough for anything other than raiding. Now, I am a boxer (I do not bot, as I don't use any additional software to run any of my 3 accounts), and I do have lower level alt teams as well, so my one friend left from the old days and I fill up our fellowship with our 2 3-box teams and 2 alt teams. But we don't use the campfires for anything other than helping us get places to group together, like if one of us gets online before the other. Though, we would happily use the buffs for when we camp in one spot, we haven't done that yet since they changed it.

As for vitality xp, I'm not sure it's working correctly anyway. I've been playing more than her lately since I'm off for the summer (teacher), and I tried sharing some xp to help her catch up to 110. I set my guys to 50% AA and it gave her team almost a full bar of AA vitality, but almost no regular vitality, when she was online next. Then she kept getting messages about AA vitality being applied for our kills, even though she was set to 100% regular xp. ???

You can already invite 12, so you can drop a guild banner and go from there if it's about movement.
I don't see how adding a few more would hurt.

One downside to the limited number is I have a dead slot in mine.
Literally, the person died. So mine is down a member forever because there is no way in hell I'm deleting them.

Sorry for losing a friend but I don't think that is a downside to the limited number of slots. The limited number of slots actually makes your choice more meaningful then it would if it had no affect on your gameplay. Just saying it is a different way to look at it.

If DBG wants to monetize it, I suggest an implementation where for X DBC (1500 standard, 1000 on sale once/twice a year would be my suggestion) your character gets flagged to no longer count to fellowship size (like free storage on Keyrings)

I would burn a lot of DBC to be able to get my characters into one big fellowship, and EQ would get a chunk of revenue credit.

There is a way to have more people... make a guild. If you want to regularly do things with more than 12 people you make guild with those people. There is no need for any more slots in a fellowship. If you want to argue for anything, I think that it would make more sense to ask for being able to be part of more than one fellowship at once or better yet add something similar to campfires for normal groups. But fellowships themselves are fine as they are now.

it would be Real Nice for me if fellowship membership were account based instead of character based. but I understand that for some others, having "secret" characters & such is pretty important, so I don't campaign for it

Some of us sort of get around the limitation by having fellowship "alliance" as it were, 2 full fellowships, and 3-4 partial fellowships all working together to do things. Most of us are already in a guild together. We use a chat channel to coordinate who needs what and who is available. The leader of my fellowship, collects bards, we have 3 live ones... I think there is only 1 more Live bard in all of the others. so we work together and everyone benefits.and yes, we do work with people in and out of our guild and alliance, it's just faster to grab a group from our pool.

Maed once called our FS alliance the biggest Clique he had seen in EQ... but I don't think of us that way, it's just a great extended fellowship.