Fippy looks a little iffy...

Where is most of the population of fippy? I started a character a week ago, level'd up to 39 or so, casual playing.

Now the odd parts: Never sold one item in the bazaar. Odder is that there were never more than 12 or so traders up, and maybe 2 buyers.

And not to forget, general chat is very, very quiet. I sleep during the day as I work nights and there were maybe 15 lines of chat total that were seen in general....all day today, as my trader is up, yesterday and any given day over the last week.

So my question is, where is everyone? In guild halls? Impossible to start a new toon on this server as it is now and try and start out as a fresh toon.

99% of the population is already at cap. Finding someone level 1-75 that isn't being powerleveled or boxing is like a four-leaf clover. The economy is pretty stale, you won't see many items being sold that don't drop at current content level and even then they are rather sparse. Older twink items are likely to be overpriced or just tributed due to lack of demand.

The server has probably been quiet this week due to the SoD launch scheduled to go live tomorrow, speaking for myself I took most of this week off to play other games to be mentally ready for EQ grinding the next few weeks of the xpac. General chat is usually the same 10-13 people with the odd guy asking a question.

Your new toon will be able to level much easier after tommorow with mercs going in on the server you can faceroll your way to 65 easy and if you are basically any class except a rogue you can get to 80 with just a merc with little pain. Fippy is comprised of about 33% mains and 66% boxes (I pulled these numbers out of my ). If you are a cleric or bard and are able to breathe and click a button at the same time you can probably get into any of the top guilds and get handed a decent set of gear.

so if im brand new to EQ n looking to dump my life into this game would the progression servers at this point be worth it n bring the experience i want, IF i catch up or is the live regular servers like the new Vox server my best choice???

Both vulak and fippy unlock(ed) so fast that there was never any point to trying to do anything with a trader other than maybe gate potions or the clarity potions.

So fast? It feels like the server unlocks too slowly. I mean the server is over 3 years old now.

way to slow on the unlocks

This sluggish pace is precisely why the server has dwindled. One could make a case it has never fully recovered from the blow in momentum caused by the repeated GoD no votes. Up until those votes the server seemed to be gaining momentum. It was the beginning of the end. The fact remains there are still many active guilds and players gaming hard and enjoying the content though. Also, now all the players know they're free to move off the TLP's at their leisure. If my friends moved over to my live server I'd join them in a heart beat.

disagree. i think the pace has been almost perfect, leaning towards slightly too fast. Especially once we got to expansions with more meat to them.

i think it was the server as a whole acting like a bunch of children with GoD that did the harm to the server, not the time delay of progression itself.

GoD wasn't really that big of a blow to the server. We lost casuals because "PoP is the end of 'real EQ'" or whatever, and we lost some of the raid crowd to "You're stagnating the server" on the No votes, but it wasn't nearly the kind of drop that people continuously insist it was. The biggest population loss on the server was the full year with level 70 as the cap (OoW - DoN - DoDH - PoR), with two of the four involved expansions introducing no AAs.

The blow was Sony taking everything offline for that extended period of time after being hacked. People started other games and never came back.

I disagree. After a few months back online, it almost seemed the publicity of being hacked help attract even more people to the progression servers (can't say the same for live servers). Offering that 3 or so free months of play to people yielded ALOT of people who haven't played eq since PoP who weren't playing before the hack. I think if eq went to a f2p model then, we would've had 3 or 4 progression servers running at the same time. All conjecture of course.

its really hard to get a helping hand on progression servers . the people there are of the mentality i got max level myself (even though most had groups when server started) so you need to do it your self as well because heaven forbid someone catch up to me .. the merc opening on fippy will help many new comers catch up quickly though but dont plan to get help 1-80 use your freebie bayle marks wisely

If the pace was almost perfect I doubt we'd have this thread. It's not the only variable but it's crucial. If you raid hard core after a month you're ready for something new and if you aren't a raider opening new content shouldn't have an effect on you, it's not as though new content comes in and the last expansion goes away. I've never understood the mentality of someone not want new stuff because they're not ready even if someone else is ready and waiting. Or is that what you were referencing as childish.

With the continued no vote the guild that was at the top during that era had most of it's core and all of its officers leave. To say population didn't take a hit is obtuse.