How to get TLPs to survive past PoP with a solid population

It's kinda true, but not completely.

Selos was a good test. GoD was still poppin with the 1 month unlocks. Omens was starting to die, and after that it was toast.

It's a mix of things. The TLP servers definitely spend way too long on expansions that lack content. On the other hand though, a lot of post-POP expansions just frankly suck. The game obviously had a fraction of it's budget going into DoN, DoDH, and PoR, etc. It's just a worse experience once you break into those. Everything becomes instanced and quest based. It's just not EQ anymore. GoD to me is probably the final real EQ Expansion. It's a vision of things to come, but still has plenty of that oldschool feel. Flopped horribly at launch due to bugs and balance issues, but it's really good on the TLP servers.

They might be able to keep servers healthy up to omens with all of the 2.0 quests, but after that it really is over.

Some valid points here, some of which could be addressed fairly easily while some would require a major shift in direction from the development team in how they build expansions.

This would mean them departing from the model they've used more & more between Seeds of Destruction and Torment of Velious where they strip away mob kill xp & load almost all of it into the progression system of partisan/mercenary/heroic quests.

Were the devs to change direction & put more design effort into the game outside of the progression they could very easily recapture some of that lost EQ magic I think, the question is whether they can actually afford to do that with the resources the team has and if they even want to recapture that flexibility of playstyle any more.

Here's the expansions I would "pair up" and unlock together on TLP servers to make the flow a little better & cut down on the overly long level 70 stretch that I think is at the root of a lot of player attrition.

PoP & LoY
GoD & LDoN
OoW & DoN
DoDH & PoR

Here is how you help them survive past PoP.
Remove Ldong or add it to the release of PoP, or GoD.
Tailor how long an expansion lasts to the specific expansions, or go to 2 months for all.
Up the drop rate of keys on later expansions.
Add mercs early so people who want to join a server, but dont want to try to solo to 75, can get there easier, or give a free level boost for new characters up to 5 levels or so of the current level, post PoP.
Make the server free to play, and actually get some revenue off of your dead servers via micro transactions.

People will eventually burn out on the same 5 expansions. I know that this will be the last TLP I play unless somethings along these lines are added, and the only reason Im going to play this time is because there is one class I am interested in trying.

I dont consider LoY an expansion, but rather extra content. Imo, I firmly believe LDoN should be released either before PoP in last month of Luclin or at same time as PoP. Otherwise having just done PoP to TBS I think putting those expansions listed together works great.

LDoN Raids have gear around Elemental planes level so I would say if it was to be out during PoP it should only be for the last 4 weeks of a 12 week PoP stretch at the earliest, otherwise you undermine PoP Raid progression too much in my opinion.

You are correct but if I recall correctly it has aug slots like slot 3 meaning only can be used with augments from LDoN, and no one really wanted it.

Most TLP servers survive just fine after PoP.

If you're speaking on the fact they lose a majority of their playerbase? It's because most of the old folks are too afraid to learn new things /shrug. Not much the company can do there.

Sad but true, far too many are intent on sticking to their comfort zone.

I quit live in 2008 just before Seeds of Destruction launched & took a 7 year break & have since been on both live servers with Heroic Characters & on 2 TLP and I have to say that for me personally I find the early expansions far too boring, much prefer Gates of Discord onwards as a raider and I ding 50 IRL next year.

Depends on what you consider solid playerbase? I consider 6 active raiding guilds on RF solid population but others call that dead.

6 guilds in SoF? That's pretty good I think seeing as Phinny only had 10 by then.

The attrition rate is the more important measure, how many guilds does the server lose per how many expansions?

I am sure it's attrition will be slower than Phinigel's which was averaging 1-2 guilds lost per expansion as being able to box from 1 PC does help retain the boxers at least.

It will be interesting to watch what Mangler's attrition rate turns out to be once the new TLP open.

* Combine Some Expansions
* Sell key drops for $$$ to replace the lost $$$ from not selling 40 slot bags every half year
* Give account-wide bonuses for completing expansions

I like your suggestions.

Something that might be interesting would be to group releases by level and release things in chunks. Gear is pretty similar based on levels, and i think if you had 2 or 3 month unlocks for each 'stage' it's more than enough time to do the things you want to do.... and still have enough raids to keep you busy.

Server opens classic
unlock 1 (60) - Kunark, velious, luclin
unlock 2 (65) - planes, ykesha, ldon, discord
unlock 3 (70) - omens, dragons, depths, prophecy
unlock 4 (75) - serpents, buried,
unlock 5 (80) - secrets
unlock 6 (85) - Seeds, underfoot
unlock 7 (90) - house
unlock 10 (95) - veil
unlock 11 (100) - rain, call
unlock 12 (105) - darkened, mirror, empires
unlock 13 (110) - ring, burning
unlock 14 (115) - torment +

assuming you go for 3 month unlocks, then that's still 42 months of progression.

it would get rid of some of the 'long haul' dead zones which bore people to death causing a mass exodus and mean that you've levels to achieve with every unlock as well as gear to upgrade.

No changes in length of expansions will change the "start over" behavior.

Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher death, and God adore.
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come. --Poe

there are always people coming back to eq and a small trickle of new players in fact the majority of people play the game and do not post,like today i was teaching a friend how to play a class in eq and they are exited about the new tlps,the reason db makes new tlp every year his because people play on them and theres a market for it.

I'm not sure why everyone thinks these servers all die just after PoP.

80% of the day 1 player base won't even make it to PoP. When you look at all the people over on p99 who willfully stay Velious locked, it's pretty clear the game starts it's downward descent in Luclin.

When stuff starts to hit too hard, takes too long to kill, and the key attunements become a second job, the player base loses interest.

ill be honest. havent read a single post in here except the title. Answers pretty obvious. Stop making 2 new TLPs a year and the pop will be fine.

I think 1 month unlocks led to a lot of burnout more than anything. A better example for the sake of the OP's argument is Phinny, which did not treat LDoN as a separate expansion with its own timer. There was very little population drop from PoP to Gates.

Phinny DID have a separate unluck timer for it actually had the longest full 3 month timer. Not only did it have the longest time in PoP/LDoN Agnarr launched when Phinny was in PoP/LDoN. Most people quit playing because they hate the game post PoP, not the new TLP or slow unlocks

If you are regurgitating any belief without having checked your facts then you are only propagating a lie.

There are zero facts to support this lie so the belief in it is based only on how often the lie gets said, but as some of us have learned, repeat a lie often enough & for long enough & it can become considered truth no matter how colossal a lie it may be.

There are myriad reasons why players leave EverQuest or individual servers and they mostly don't even coincide with Planes of Power, some of these are:

Some players openly say it is because they don't like how raids are harder after PoP, this is because from GoD onwards was when "raid mechanics" started becoming a key element of raid design, this doesn't actually mean they quit after PoP though.

Some players don't like how raids became instanced with GoD, this coincided with raids being restricted to 54 players, again plenty who said this started on a server with AoC available for some raids during classic due to it meaning they could play through that content anyway.

Some players never played beyond a particular expansion the first time around & have no interest in seeing what came after as what came after is not part of their nostalgia trip, the expansion they stopped playing in was.....all of them depending on who you ask.

Just look at any TLP server's progression and attrition and you will find none of them implode after PoP.
None of them see a cliff-edge drop of guilds actively raiding (i.e. losing players) right after PoP.
The decline is fairly consistently 0-3 guilds lost per EVERY expansion on all of them, including classic, Kunark, Velious, Kunark & Planes of Power itself.
The one TLP that did take a pretty big hit was Ragefire but that was due to Phinigel's launching with the new killer-feature Agents of Change and that didn't happen after PoP, Ragefire was still in Velious when Phinigel launched.

All the above said I think I know how this myth came into the collective subconscious.

The only time player numbers took a bad-hit after Planes of Power was 2004 during the Gates of Discord debacle expansion.

1. Gates of Discord had launched on December 17 2003 in a terrible state, buggy, incomplete & massively over-tuned. Many guilds left EverQuest during 2004 as a protest and a big chunk of those entered into beta tests for other games to be released later.

2. EverQuest 2 was launched November 9th 2004

3. World of Warcraft was launched November 23rd 2004

That massive confluence of 3 very big things happening within 12 months has NOT been repeated since, though WoW Classic had an impact across many servers.