Ragefire vote

And because there were free transfers, a known /charcopy dupe allowed platinum and items to be duplicated, while DBG denied the existence of this for a week while it went on, krono jumped from I think 3500 to 7k in about 2 days, and before phinigel came out krono was already at 25k. Ontop of telling people hey no velious until march, phinigel will open expansions without a vote, every 84 days so phinigel will see luclin before ragefire does.

While some people think that the dev's went through and removed these items and platinum, smarter people were able to use shared bank slots to hide items, among other methods, from deletion.

To anyone that was on during it, it was pretty clear that ragefire was a fail, lockjaw was an attempt to help that fail, and after rotations were proved to be unenforcable (thanks apok), they decided to open phinigel which IMO proved that both ragefire and lockjaw were a fail and destined to die like vulak and combine servers did.

And NOW we have rumors of them opening another TLP. The producer's letter hints at it and one of the developers here asked posters if they would like focus items removed, on a future TLP server.

Phinigel will see PoP before ragefire sees Luclin

Combine did not die. People need to stop spewing this nonsense. The server made it to live just fine, both the top guild and the others below it. No matter how much people want to spin a narrative that all TLPs are inevitably Vulak, it's not true, and repeating it will not make it true.

What if the next "TLP" rumored to be coming is actually a velious-locked and pop-locked server set? I don't see those killing Phinny. What about seasonal TLPs with lightning xp rates and unlocks that merge into the existing ones once they catch up? If anything they could help fuel new blood to the current ones down the line. What if it's a pvp server?

LJ and RF have a chance - they'd need a timely merge and I suspect some cleanup of the apparent lackluster play standards at the top, but a timely merge and using the eventual 54 limit as a way to weed out poor players COULD save things. I personally think they'll eventually die, but, it's not inevitable.

Ragefire wasn't a fail. Though past history could have told us that having two servers at the same time to overcome log in queues would backfire in time.

The biggest problem with RF and LJ was the timing of phinny. I don't think there are enough people interested in TLP for long enough to support 3 servers at around the same time.

But there was definitely the demand for the Phinny ruleset. I wonder what the relative populations would be if Phinny had only 2 of the 3 things out of, true box, instanced content, 3 month unlocks.

Ragefire always has the merge w/ LJ wildcard up its sleeve.

Biggest risk is progression / new server announcement this summer but that might not be released till early next year. All about the settings. ( box friendly bigger risk then truebox )

That said im sure at least one guild will stick around just like Fippy.

Ragefire/LJ launch was so successful and brought so much money in that they rushed to release a new progression after 6 months instead of five years. Phinigel bought insane amounts of money in also with all the potions / big bag. If they do 50% xp potions and big bags + add a few other things expect a yearly launch and them being able to keep more jobs.

For the original topic : Dont expect any warning of a non-planned vote. In classic on LJ about a week before they did a ninja early vote they ninja deleted a topic asking for it and removed forum acces from the creator then dropped it when no one expected it. If they feel its in the best interest for them they will do it.

That's what Vulak players thought too. Everyone assumed Vulak and Fippy would eventually be merged when population was low enough. Turns out when it reached that point. SOE was no longer able to pull off server merges and it never happened. I think it's very dangerous to assume that wildcard is up the sleeve somewhere.

devs or holly released that they were working on the code or w/e to allow merges somewhere. There would be no other reason to say that.

She mentioned it in passing, that doesn't mean it will ever be a reality.

they never even offered free transfers off of vulak to fippy, which also would have helped. they simply let vulak die. expecting support from DBG if rage/lock ever reach the point of needing help to survive is foolhardy based on the past actions

That was 6 years ago. A very different time. A once every 5 year progression server wasnt really cared about back then compared to the job saving server it seems to be now. As soon as DBG bought EQ the talk of progression server started right away.

I think it was made to sound like more of a big deal but I cant remember. Letting a progression server die now is just bad for business. They need the $$ and helps not to have dark clouds.

I was told that some raiding guild went from vulak to Fippy so your answer seems to say the opposite unless they all paid to transfers.

they paid

Most prolly used the free monthly SC. Some paid.

Oh I completely agree, and I think it was just as important when Vulak needed to be merged and they dropped the ball. Ultimately they lost quite a lot of subs over it, probably on both Vulak and Fippy in the end.

Plenty of servers have been merged in the past, through what I presume are a myriad of techniques. The presumption that merges cannot happen now are false.

Of course, the expense to do so may make it so cost prohibitive that an internal cost-benefit analysis may reveal that merges will never happen again purely on the expense to do so makes the concept of merging servers a obvious business decision.

I mean, we ARE playing cash cow after all.

The official line we were given from Sony on Vulak was that it could not be merged into Fippy because it was an afterthought server spooled up on an old test box and the scripting was not in place to merge them.

Nobody really believed that but that was the official line. Also we gave them tons of station cash when they finally did let us x-fer to Fippy. Then they put Xfer tokens on sale 50% off a week later. Hah.

"We cant merge the servers, but feel free to send your players through the same name vetting and server transfer process with the tokens you can buy from the station store. never mind its our fault the server cant be merged, you the player can reimburse our ineptitude with the aforementioned tokens!"

This is exactly correct and a well written summary.

The last time DBG/SoE merged a server was seven years ago now. There have been several cases since then where mergers would have tremendously benefitted the servers and their bottom line subscription #'s, but they didn't pull the trigger on it. They haven't come out and said they can't, but Holly certainly implied it when she said that they needed to redo the way character data is stored before they could do any merges again. The evidence is pretty plain--they don't have the resources devoted to EQ at this point to get it done, at least not on top of everything else they need to get done, with the current state of the game. Maybe that will change with the character database upgrades, maybe not, we'll see... But wise players won't be holding their breaths for server merges.