Genuinely curious on how these TLP rules are decided.

I love the idea behind Vaniki and it's a great way to get people not interested in the same old thing again, to want to come back to play.

But the level 40 start is so incredibly terrible I can't imagine how anyone thought that was a good idea. Much less a whole group of people who develop the game for a living. I mean at least one person had to raise their hand an ask if they were taking crazy pills.

"But there's challenges!" Ah yes, the challenge of killing CT at level 40. That sounded like quite the feat that would be really impressive since CT was revamped as a Velious level raid boss.

Only it wasn't the Velious version, but the original version.. With no MOTM.

Which is literally much easier to kill than a non-level locked server killing MOTM CT at level 50. The "challenge" server is literally much easier than killing a level appropriate raid boss.

Am I missing something? How can DPG have such little understanding of their own game?

Why wouldn't you be expected to kill the original version of the mob at level 40? The reward that you get from that is an item that summons a low stat food, it isn't something that is going to be game breaking and need to be super challenging to get.

I'm playing on Vaniki, and it uses most of the ideas I proposed for a GoD-Start server and I have to say that so far it has been more fun than even I expected.

Are you actually playing on Vaniki? Because if you aren't I think you should before passing judgement on it from a position of detachment.

Level 40 start is fine, I had actually suggested level locking at lower levels than this but 40 seems okay.

I already explained why, did you not read the post?

It's not a "challenge" it's literally much easier than killing any raid mobs at the appropriate level on a normal TLP. It goes against what a challenge is supposed to be.

Holy crap, can't believe I had to explain that twice.

Level 40 is pretty fun, lots of people actually doing quests for gear! The gear from later quests is useful. Lavastorm Mountains miners quests, Luclin quests, Velious quests. There is a whole lot of questing going on which usually gets ignored.

Not to mention Warens, Stonebrunt Mountains, Nediras Landing and Jaggedpine forest are being used for leveling. Again mostly ignored as players have out leveled the content on normal TLP servers.

And I am stating based on the rewards it isn't supposed to be some sort of major challenge. I don't think many people expected you to beat the newer version or a version with motm. Not only that but the devs did revert it back to the original version after launch which shows that it was expected to beat the original version.

challenge doesnt necessarily mean difficult I guess, I consider this first wave the calm before the storm cause some later ones sound pretty rough

One of the challenge rewards is level 60 which isn't difficult.

I wanted Vaniki to work but it just hasnt attracted enough players and i do play on that server. There are less people LFG on Vaniki than on Mischief during prime time. That says a lot. I just want a server where we can play a bst or a zerker at launch and not have to wait months but Vaniki's population is going to suck going forward. It'll be bot armies and one/two raid guilds max within 2 months.

Vaniki has not hit High pop recently - it spends half of it's uptime at Low pop and the other half at Medium pop. This is probably the least appealing TLP server that has been launched based on population.

I am playing on Vaniki, and I actually really enjoy the ruleset so far. Some minor gripes, but overall it is a fun, interesting rule set. It has me exploring zones and doing quests that I have never done before, because the era they were added in makes them irrelevant for 99% of the server. The ability to take on higher level mobs makes leveling faster than usual. I think everyone thought this server was only going to be for the "hardcore" player, whereas in actuality it takes the least amount of time to level up and stay current on AA's. This allows more time for questing and killing group content to obtain usable gear outside of raids as well, especially with double loot on everything.

Unfortunately, it is also clear this rule set is not popular enough within the community to sustain a server with more than 1-2 raiding guilds for more than a few months. There are only 3-4 raid guilds, including 1 EU guild. It likely takes an even more experienced raid leader than usual on this server, due to the selection of raid targets from multiple eras. I will likely keep playing on the server for a while, but do not see a long term future here.

Loving Vaniki myself. Never really played another TLP because I didn't want to deal with how bad resists were early on. Just wish we started with a cap of 50 and had more time before level jumps.

That server will be more dead than thornblade once the oow to por section hits. I also can't wait to see those on there claiming the xp was fine to do the sof lvl and 700 aas in 2 months lol.

Worse than Miragul?

They basically draw raffle tickets based on what they can nerf or break…

Still waiting on classic locked pvp tlp

Mischief is a very special server.

That doesn't mean Vaniki isn't fubarred going forward though. There are hardly anyone LFG prime time. Sure guilds will guild group for awhile but even those guild groups start to dry up as TLPs progress.

Also doesn't mean that it is.

Poorly executed TLP imo. You have one dev working already on random loot tables and then you shove him on another TLP and tell him to adjust all level required things in an MMO that is heavily based around level requirements throughout. Whether it be ae dmg in an encounter or even down to pick lock cap there are a ton of things limited by level in this game and you just told your one dev to change it all on the fly as you go while doing random loot on another server lol.

On top of that the playerbase from this game mainly plays classic - pop. You are attempting to appease maybe a thousand players at best with anything past pop and I can tell you a few large communities that have went that far do not care about this server as we all know what it will be. The discussions are "amg we are gonna zerg CT/Kael" and I've heard very little discussion past anything in Velious really. How is Queen Sendaii planned to be killed? Vish? Meldrath? with no zerg available after GoD.