Runecrow - Vox used to be able to support several good sized raiding guilds. The dwindling population killed them all off one by one and drove all of us raiders off the server. PnG has recently reformed and is trying to make a comback but they are stuck in CoTF (whereas before they were making progress in TDS). For 2 years I was a recruiter for Indubious, and I kept a close eye on general chat and population numbers. So, again, I just have to disagree. You and I remember these events and the population numbers very differently.
In my experience since day one, Vox has never revolved around the end game. There were always more people spread across all the levels doing their own reminiscent quasi-progression than were ever at the end game. The raid scene has never been indicative of Vox's population. To this day, CR is full of new characters (if not new players). I quite regularly still see characters earning their traveler achievement zoning out of the tutorial when parked at Origin. Vox may not be boom-town, but it is consistently stable. Except for the known trolls and PnG spamming general every 30 seconds for 3 years trying to recruit, the majority of players quietly go about their gameplay and log out.
Kuk was very vocal in recruiting for Vulak, I think the truth was that he was looking for new people to buy krono from and load them up with plat in return. He took quite a bashing after a pic showed up on the Kuk website showing hacking use the bashing came from Fippy members. Was fun watching them get mad as he recruited. I think people blamed him for the reason Fippy couldn't get new members. Surely it wasn't the blatant hacks and constant training on Fippy that was the reason . Some would have you believe that Kuk and his entire guild were banned for hacking. His forum account was still active and I saw him in TLP beta for Ragefire so I'm guessing when he said he was leaving to play another game he might possibly of been telling the truth (I believe when your account is banned you lose forum access). When he left, everybody else just called it a day. Wouldn't be surprised if he's farming krono on Ragefire/Lockjaw/both as I type this. As for Vox, it's a funny server. It probably has the highest population of any EQ server with people that don't want to or have no intention of ever raiding. The main reason given is the drama that always surrounds the raid scene. PnG did raid current content and iirc were one of the top ten guilds in EQ to first complete Plane of War. They had their fair share of drama which pushed people away from the raid scene and pushed others out of the game or to other servers. When the server went through a period of serious lag issues it really killed the raid scene. I think it's Lynne and Maz that took over the guild after their old leader left, and tried rebuilding the hope of doing end game content again. It can't be easy as much of the population is free to play. It's a good place to hang out if you just want to chill evenings but I'm not one that enjoys raiding a few expansions back when current group gear is a better option. I'll be trying the new instanced content tlp server that's supposed to coming out in the next few months and keeping my fingers crossed that it's not a disaster!
Literally every screenshot posted on the kuk clan website front page was taken from a cheating client. It definitely wasn't just fippy players that thought it was hilarious enough to report to soe. No one thought he was killing fippy, but his screeds in favor of keeping his private server in every thread in the TLP forums were pretty annoying.
Well, I don't have a problem with somebody trying to drum up interest in a dead server. If somebody else wanted to try on Vulak or Trak I certainly wouldn't be sad enough to spearhead a hate campaign against somebody willing to give it a shot. Hilarious is that he was never banned and the pics are still up! I guess Kuk had the final laugh.
I don't think the discrepency is the result of our memories I wager we're just accessing different numbers. Bear in mind I'm f2p so I am barred from entering any chat except for the "newplayers" channel. At any rate, I am certain I'm remembering the numbers correctly- the numbers relevant to me. When I started, newplayers contained 40-80 people, now it's 80-160. All I can really be sure of is that the numbers on Vox "newplayers" channel has doubled in about a year's time. I have characters on two other servers, FV and Cazic. I logged in to both and the number on FV is 46, and Cazic newplayers chat is 37. So I can at least say that Vox newplayers chat is triple those numbers. This makes sense since Vox is probably going to get most new players coming through since it seems to be geared to do that- that's why I'm on Vox because it was at the top of the list of servers and said "preferred". I wager the low numbers on FV and Cazic are because these servers contain veterans mainly and so they're not in the newplayer chat. As for real populations, I have no idea. Like I said, I can only relay the info that I can access. I do know there are some people who come through frequently claiming Vox is dying come to this other server, and the people in chat tell them to go away and recruit on some other server. So, I don't know; I'm way out of any loops being unable to group or guild so all I know what I see. Or, also I can say that PoK and CR are both populated enough to immediately crash my computer if I zone there so that means there's a population in there that my computer can't handle. Which means it must be at least 10 people lol
