Turn on the ability to start saving AA

I don't think there's a large audience for classic vanilla EQ. There's a large nostalgia factor drawing people in, but an equally large attrition rate when the rose tinted glasses wear off.

DBG knows TLP have a very fast attrition rate, there's a reason you need a sub on phinni. Most players quit after a month, because nostalgia is a quickly fleeting feeling. You need them to spend money before they quit, so you force them to sub for access.

You could argue there is nothing wrong with this business model. Attracting players through nostalgia who then quit a month later. Nostalgia is Nintendo's whole business model. But does a player who stays 1 month, leaves because they realized they actually don't like super slow travel / slow XP / thousands of AA / farming / keying / LFG, and then gets replaced with another player who still has his rose tinted glasses on, really count as a satisfied player?

We'll see how many people are willing to farm VT shards, do the PoP progression, and farm hundreds of AA with the current XP rate when /LFG will only get more challenging as population drops. I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say not many.



I do think there's a large audience for a server which limits boxing, and phinny does that. Because it helps socializing. But this only works with a very high pop server. It works best with a casual server, because most people who don't want to box are casuals (or people who want to play more casually than they do now), and most people who do box are hardcore players. I have seen quite a few people say they started up a "true box" because they couldn't find groups on phinny.

When you make travel slow, xp slow, recovery slow, making groups slow...this whole Single Account mantra falls apart. Because on phinny, you depend on others entirely, that means you need a very high population and very accessible grouping. The first one is debatable, phinni has an average population, higher than other servers, but nothing like old EQ had, and it's a declining population, while EQ back then had a rising population. The second, accessible grouping, is not the case at all on phinni, you have slow travel, slow XP, making groups is a pita.

But these are two different things.

If you're only levelling a druid to PL a beastlord, 50 is good enough. None of your over 50 buffs will work on a lowby at all (anything over 50 won't land on someone unless they're 15 levels or fewer than the level of the spell). Once the beastlord gets within grouping range, you can duo quite effectively.