Wow, what a difference. I decided to roll some characters on Fippy because PoR is soooo boring. It's like black and white. I managed to get to level 20 going through a few zones and at each zone there were exp groups, people looking for groups, and /ooc discussions going on. On Vulak you are lucky to get five lines of general chat in a whole day. There were server wide messages of bosses dying that were kills from multiple different guilds instead of just one. The bazaar was bustling and had things for sale that have never been sold on Vulak eg. AAAA. I wish Vulak had a population that even came close to Fippy's, but I am happy that I will have something to do while my Vulak maxed level/aa characters sit waiting for TSS or a merger which ever comes first.
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/fippy-is-dead.5201/ I'll assume the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I saw a pretty big decrease in the amount of postings both here and on the fippy forum. I assumed their population was struggling. I assumed wrong. With 300+ in /general and indeed /ooc action with people lfg vs's Vulak's 50 in /general and next to no use of the chat channels at all, yes I'd say there's a huge difference. I honestly don't understand why. Fippy had similar playstyle on their server yet maintained a healthy population. To say that Vulak started with a lower population would be nonsense, we had plenty. We just didn't hold on to the players. I'm honestly shocked to see such a huge difference. Vulak is pretty much a depressing ghost town. Sorry to all that enjoy it there but it is what it is.
I've been playing on Fippy lately myself. Vulak has been struggling for a while and a few of us thought we'd try it out (and start preparing for a merge.) Anyway, Fippy is significantly more populated than Vulak is. My experience over the last week or so is similar to the OPs. XP groups and items for sale and all the good stuff you'd see on an active server. Some friends joined a guild there and they are filling raids with mostly single toons (as opposed to my guild on Vulak where we probably average 3-4 toons per person, some as high as 6, some as low as 1. I play 2 myself.)
Yeah, Vulak has really died out completely. I still play there but also have chars on Fippy. I used to sell things in Bazaar, but shortly after SOE posted that they are "considering" a merge someday it entirely died off. I don't bother trying to sell anymore. It would still be interesting if SOE opened Vulak up to Silver or FTP players, maybe with some sort of level caps or expansion limits to promote subscriptions (since AA caps don't apply yet).
Oh yes this! I haven't seen my shaman on vulak for a very very long time! Or I guess just seems like a long time to me.
I'm saddened by the loss of population on Vulak. I started on Fippy, but I always had characters on Vulak. It's maybe good that there is a merger under consideration. I cut down on my characters on Vulak a long time ago in anticipation of a merger. Vulak had some fun things going on, and there were some rival guilds and family guilds running around at one point, but now they seem to have disappeared. Very sad.
I think part of the problem is that Vulak has decreased to the point where virtually all new players joining TLP would go to Fippy. Its been this way, for whatever reason, for a long while now. Its even gotten to the point where folks playing on Vulak reroll on Fippy after significant time invested in their Vulak toons.
I think there have been a lot less posts on the Fippy forums (and probably here also) because there is just much less drama now that A) most of the raid content is instanced, and B) no one wants to compete any more with Citizen for the stuff that isn't instanced. It makes for a lot less new drama, and time has mostly caused the animosities from earlier in the server's life to fade.
Merge is long overdue...It's sad when I see long time lvl 70 1500aa people making brand new characters on Fippy because they have completely lost faith in Sony to merge these servers. Please Sony, look at merging the servers now! When people are talking about cancelling accounts in the hope to force sony into merging the servers then you know that its gotten way past the point to merge them...
Fippy population took a dive recently. Guilds like Rosengaurd / TL /Ascendency have folded. 3 New guilds were made recently ATM / ToE and Obscure. But from what i am hearing only ATM is doing well.
Sadly this was months ago for me. At this point its probably too late, although my curiosity keeps me checking the forums so maybe not.
I don't think this is Fippy population taking a dive so much as guild structures reorganizing with a lot of people shifting around. I know a few people just quit when each of the guilds that have suffered took their downturn. But most of the people from Rosengard/TL/Ascendency are still around, just playing with different tags now. We still have the same # of active raid guilds, although sadly the top end competition is nowhere near what it was a year ago with just Citizen left to push the envelope now.
Wont see many people sticking around after TSS if things are as easy as they have been to this point, hardcore raiders really have no reason to play for long periods of time with new skill caps etc making things so simple.
Make Vulak free to transfer to Fippy; then switch Vulak to a non-box-allowed and no-transfer-in server, I think it's better than merging.
Non-box Allowed? What the heck do you think is paying for Vulak right now!? And how the heck would you even enforce that!?
It's already a no-transfer-in server. Or out, for that matter. No-boxes allowed is an impossible concept to enforce, outside of controlled physical environments where you can have monitors in the room with the players. From sony's point of view, an account is an account. Any technological way to automatically enforce such a thing has problems, like differentiating between you typing on two keyboards and the spouse typing on one. And IP restrictions are easily bypassed by already-available technology. Multiple IP's, proxy servers, Multiple ISP's, etc. I have three strong wi-fi signals from neighbors I know, on top of my own service.
The closer we get to live, the less those things are a factor. We are already seeing less guilds beat content while it is current. PoR was pretty trivial but a few of the encounters in demi were no walk in the park even with the ac caps etc--we are 4 months past dodh launch and only five guilds have beaten it between both progression servers (out of about 13-15 total raiding guilds.) SoF is three expansions away, underfoot is 5 expansions away, somewhere in there things will get much harder.
