Just came back last week.

Leveled up to 28 so far and I've only found 1 other person to group with, was a twinked beastlord at level 26 in warsliks.

The only way I could have leveled was with my insanely op gear (fungi+fungus staff).

At this moment the lower level game is completely dead and the only way to level fresh is to play a solo class or drop $100 on Krono to Twink.

This effectively neuters any new players and the XP for soloing is absolutely gabage.

I'll agree that solo exp is garbage, but you came back a week into a new expansion so most people are on mains raiding, leveling and aaing. I still see people asking for members for unrest in general chat and in a month people will do alts again. I wouldn't call low levels dead yet.

Oh my mistake I guess I was wrong.

You aren't wrong, you just picked the worst possible time in the last three months to start. In a couple more weeks everyone will be maxed on their mains and starting alts again.

Even so, I saw two groups looking for more in your level range today.

i have the same problem, but $100??? one krono gives you around 12000 plat, more than enough to get a fungi tunic and good weapons lol

i dont know if its just the weekend but its geting a little better, i see more people in lguk now, but yea prob just a weekend thing

Just wait for the new TLP. XP on phinni is still terrible, the server is slowly dying.

Phinny has like 25+ raiding guilds now. That's slowing dying to you?

Without new players the server will slowly die, there's more to an MMO than just raiding at max level

like you said solo xp is crap its not bad tho if you're very twinked out and have ds potions...


almost can somewhat pl yourself

Any server is slowly dying.

Phinny looks to have a healthy raiding population for some time to come. This is good. I think Phinny gets past SoD with many raiding guilds intact.

Phinny from a casual playing under the level cap, enjoy the journey through the old stuff point of view is following the same path of prior progression servers in that people to play with is getting thinner, the gap is getting very wide (3 months is fast unlocks for this part of the population) and the time needed to progress is a wall (xp rate and 3 month unlocks is not the longest term way to retain this playerbase). Note that much of this playerbase has left every prior progression server before GoD drops. This playerbase is probably the ideal target of the summer 2017 progression server.*


*but why did these players go on Phinny over Lockjaw/Ragefire?
-truebox
-instancing (my family guild will be able to do epics, raid guild drama/rotations not part of it)
-no voting

Always up to link up with new players like myself! Add me to your Friends List and send me a /tell whenever you're in-game, would be happy to add you to the XP groups I am running with!

All servers are slowly dying.
All MMOs are slowly dying.
All humans are slowly dying.
All stars are slowly dying.

Have fun anyway.

Yes, because the OP is asking about grouping, not raiding.

Did you know, that not everyone likes to raid? Yes, it is shocking but true.

I find servers with only raiders unhealthy, because there is usually little community, few people in zones, and no new players means turnover without replacement resulting in a rapidly dying server.

It was a conscious decision of Phinny players (mostly raiders) to have no changes to XP. And since XP on phinny will remain horrible, it is much better for the OP to wait for a different TLP.

I've played enough MMO to understand the dynamics between server demographics. It is primordial for a server to survive to have casual players on it, they keep the server healthy, they give the server a sense of being alive, they make the server active at any time of day. When new players and casuals are removed from a server, it tends to die. Well, to be more accurate, it lingers on supported by a small number of raiders logging in for a few hours only to log off soon after, interested in raid loot and little else.

I call them zombie servers, while you can still log into the server, it just seems empty for new players, and the few players left are hardcore raiders, who have no interest in communication except for their own guild and raid, ie, they seem like zombies.

EQ suffers from zombie servers more than other MMO, because there is no enough support for solo or casual play. When there is support for Casual play, like McKenzie missions, it is shot down by devs, for reasons that make little to no sense to me. You can prevent a server becoming a zombie server by actively supporting new and casual players, things like the PoP newbee quests and defiant packages and monster missions are very important tools that should be used, especially on TLP.

Casuals aren't hardcore raiders, they're two different groups of people, while you can go back and forth between those two groups, the 2 groups want different things.

Casual players want to discover new zones, make friends, go on adventures. What a casual player wants is completely different from what most raiders want.

Most raiders want somethign else, they want loot, and each time they get new loot it triggers a sense of fulfillment, and then they want more loot to get that same feeling, a sense of power over the game and other players. It's easy to cater to raiders and easy to keep them in the game, you just keep giving players new loot, it becomes partly an addiction for most, a pattern of logging in and raiding and logging off. Well defined patterns are very addictive for humans, it's hard to quite a habit. Addictive behavior is linked to habits, repetition, patterns.

Casuals want something completely different, that's why it's so hard to keep those players interested. They get their enjoyment from adventure, new things, new people, grouping, socializing with strangers. If XP is too slow or if there are not enough players left, that sense of adventure is taken away from them, they feel like they're getting nowhere, everything takes too much time, they feel lonely instead of part of a community, forced to solo is just a precursor to quitting for most.

The difficulty as far as EQ goes is that there is not a significant influx of players past the first rush of a new TLP server. Even if the game were designed to keep this non-raid population interested it would be moot after a year or so because that population barely exists.

With that in mind, I don't think slow XP is the problem. If all XP is sped up and easier, that just makes it easier for people to powerlevel and chain level alts like no tomorrow. This reinforces the raid-zombie like mentality which you describe. Why group with players if it just slows you down? Guild low on clerics? Let's see if some of the core members are willing to box a cleric or even just PL one quickly so it's available. The easier it is to level quickly and without bothering to group, the more likely players are to choose it over traditional grouping.

I know powerleveling and alts/twinks are a huge core part of EQ, but so is the social aspect of gaming. I wonder if a ruleset could be devised that would (1) create incentive for players at the top to make and level new characters while (2) doing so through traditional means of social grouping.

If that could be accomplished then the "casual" player base you describe would have more players to interact with and there would be a much more healthy sub-max level population. The top-end population would also be logging in for something besides raids.

The way I see it is this, regardless of the "truth" about grouping and whether there "are" groups going, my impression of the situation was a negative one. The groups are far too scarce at this moment to do anything consistently. The xp for a low level without the "new tlp" experience is broken, simply put. I understand fully the idea behind the XP on this server and it worked in the beginning but now it just simply doesn't work. To level a rogue(which is what i wanted to do) would be very boring and most importantly, not fun. I'm sure a ton of people know what it feels like to be LFG for your entire gaming session in Tranquility, now imagine your chance at finding a group is even less than what your average 60 experiences.

Before I subbed again I asked simply if the server had a ton of people still playing and the answer was yes. The actual truth is theres plenty of people still playing at 60+. I came back and played my lvl 60 and found out that the class I had played before was actually quite boring to raid with (shaman) and I wanted a more DPS orientated class, the Rogue is something I have always wanted to raid with, upon seeing what the reality of leveling a rogue from scratch on the server with its very scarce low level population on top of the harsh XP rate, stole all my motivation to slog through it.

With the looming TLP server, there's little motivation to add to the population of the server and it's not the end of the world, it is just unfortunate.

To make it clear, I really want to play here but I can't make any sense of it to spend the next month+ leveling a new character by myself to end up playing on the new TLP anyways.

To the devs: I think it might be a good idea to increase the XP up to a certain point (level 30-40 maybe? based on the current expansion on TLP servers) where twink players are more inclined to group and concentrate the lower level population in a specific level range, similar to the idea behind auto granted AAs on the other servers to make the road not so daunting for new players, to keep the TLP servers desirable throughout its life.

Regardless, I wanted to express my experience with the playerbase and the devs. Neither wants less people playing.

#altfacts

We need a new TLP soon, phinny is turning into a ghost server for anything but PoK

The whole point of TLP is to progress from the start, not to stagnate at endgame, now this time actually put some time inbetween expansions...like 6 months

The new expansion has been out 3ish weeks. Once people get their levels maxed/farm spells/AA's they'll make more alts and play in the old zones again. I know I will. Experience is fine, leveling is an adventure and fun. Joining a raiding guild that's "casual" (many Casual guilds are in EP+) will let you make friends in game to go out and do fun stuff with.

+1

The new TLP needs to have a MUCH longer unlock. we are less then 3 months on Phinigel and with the exp rates its just crazy. Either they make exp on the new TLP server like Lock and Rage with the 90 days unlock or they leave the exp the game and extend the unlock to 4.5 months. Either way then need to keep the true box code and no voting.