Was hoping Velious would bring back players

Even Fortnite is running a recruit-a-friend promotion.

I also suspect folks are saving money and time (work) ahead of the holiday season. The reports about the state of the economy (recession) does not help.

It was great the first time. But, yeah.

Velious is the first expansion I enjoy. A lot of lore and the world expands in a cool way. There's a lot of raid content (growth, revamped fear, sleepers, TOV, kael, skyshrine, thurg).

Problem is generally the pace at which most players play the game and the existing knowledge base. It's just too easy to breeze through all the content. From a raiding pov it's a long slog. I remember on Agnarr our first Lady Nev fight took almost 45 minutes. That part of the expansion sucks.

You're preaching to the choir. The players understand that the normal TLP grind is simply no longer fun. Sure, the TLP concept was great the first few cycles but no player should be expected to grind the same levels, the same keys, the same raids, year after year after year, and not end up bored to tears. And bored players don't play, at least not for long.

The devs thought they could just continue milking the same cash cow forever. But that cash cow is going on life support without some new perspectives and a healthy dose of foresight.

The overall required "grind" to unlock access artificially locked zones is why I left EQ for Vanguard in the SOF/TBS era then started on a TLP after VG shut down and live was in CoTF/TDS.

And I hated he grind again, to the point where were' about to reach the TDS era and I really don't feel up to grinding out all of the progression.. let alone, from CoTF onward, you basically have to + (at some point) going and doing the bonus achievements for the heroic AA boosts.

Early Progression servers have been progressively more and more toxic, in one way or another. Barring the originals (Combine and Sleeper), the methods used to attempt to block or extort access to content has simply shone a light on a part of EQ that people have either forgotten, never experienced (due to not everyone being at/near the same point in game or knowing where the "best" of everything was), or stifled away from official sources. People began speaking up, changes were made, the "blockers" became vocally defiant and insulting towards those in favor of the changes.

I played around on Vaniki, and I have to say.. it is not nearly as unpleasant as many of the previous Progression servers. Double loot drops makes gearing up better. VP/VT key changes + AoC's have made the earlier expansions easier to swallow. Anguish signet drop increase has made that task so much better (not that it was near as bad as earlier keying quests).

But I know even Vaniki won't hold off the inevitable Access quest grind. Access to DSK, Access to DK, Access to al of the TSS raids and TBS raids, and so on and so forth. That doesn't even really touch raid flagging like SOF/UF/HoT/VoA. Oh, you don't have 7 raid-geared class X in your guild for this one event? Good luck!

The only reason people are even wallowing through progression on Ragefire is to gain access to start the raids. A handful burn through them asap to begin raiding, another handful push through for the heroic AA's and/or completion rewards, and the rest either don't care to bother or go through it just to experience the content in-era. They've lulled during RoF/CoTF.. not really being locked out so they could do what they'd like.. but come TDS... the zone locks come back as will the headache of not being able to do things in-game with others because of not having done the unlock quests. Then will come the forerunners getting burnt out from repeating the same access quests/missions all of the time and the insta loggers because other people are in locked zones and can't/won't drop everything to get them keyed/flagged.


I never felt Yelniak was going to live up to their forum-fed self hype. It was just another vanilla krono-farm TLP with boxing restrictions (which only impact the more simple players, not the major box/bot groups). At least Vaniki has people going to and farming different things than the past 7 years of TLPS.. Arcstone group armor? Veksar? Corathus Creep (excluding for faction/crafting mats)? DoDH evolving items.. Really? Riwwi/Barindu? And the list goes on. Zones that are skipped because the xpac launches and everyone is already max level/gear (grp or raid) have people all over them. Groups forming "mini-raids" to take down higher level grouped mobs for some choice drops? That was something from old EQ that hasn't been a thing until now.

There's a lot of tweaking that needs to go into TLP's. I still think a Vaniki variant is due, and removal of lock REQUIREMENTs is due (maybe add a bonus for getting them done anyway). Straight Vanilla TLP's (especially box-restricted) shouldn't totally go away, but spread out more maybe every 3rd or 4th set could run Vanilla.

weird to see people complain about population on yelinak. it's extremely busy compared to vaniki. probably the most active server currently.

there's less than other tlp's cos some people stay on the old ones.

Yelinak isn't busy compared to past TLP's. Kunark died out quick and Velious didn't even have increase wave at all. The server is always at medium population.

DBG allowed the game/community to morph into a game where only the players playing, are working on the krono economy. They are actually working, and are viscious about it. This has corrupted the game.
Allowing the woke stuff in was just kicking a dead horse.

what do you mean?
there's so many people on yelinak that even siren's grotto has 100+ people playing at 3am in the morning

I think this goes to show just how much Mischief has maintained its player base. Those who would normally change to the newest server have continued to play on Mischief instead of doing the same old thing once again.

That server is a tough act to follow.

The TLP experience of Velious is one of the biggest casualties of the MotM system. Having to raid zones like ToV every week with mitigation on is just incredibly boring and painful. I think most people who've played previous TLP cycles have come to this realization so the hype for that expac is pretty dead. MotM is entirely pointless post-Kunark due to mob hp pools ballooning and only really makes SoV and Luclin terrible.

MoTM was an awful move. It's great, for preventing /pickzone "abuse" but they really should have 86'd it when AoC's came into play. No one is sitting at Naggy with 24+ mages trying to poopsock the spawn.

Keep MoTM and the effects that manage pet abuse, but drop all the crazy mitigation off it. The only good thing from MoTM was being able to tell what mob to kill in the Khati Sha event to get bonus loot.

It -NEVER- provided an experience like OG EQ with lower damage etc.. Those old world mobs were never that difficult to begin with.

I've been saying this for years. If Daybreak doesn't do anything to change the TLP experience, the population will exodus elsewhere just like it did back in 2004. Let's get real here, if the goal is to streamline players from TLP to Live, then there is A LOT Daybreak can do to go back and fix the issues that break player's interest in moving forward.

EQ went from 550k players at its peak to 90k players now. Very, very few games have a second chance to recapture some of that audience like Daybreak has with TLP's.

Holy hell, it's nice to see someone else who sees the problem. Motm is crippling these TLPs. Instead of being able to form small, tight knit community guilds to do the content, players are forced into these massive zerg guilds where you're just a number to get around ridiculous damage output and HP pools of these bosses.

They could just set unlocks into larger chunks of expansions at a time…

IE launch TLP that starts through POP, with immediate unlocks of each expansion when all bosses get defeated in each expansion:
Classic = Clear Dragons + Planes Bosses, unlock Kunark 24 hours later
Kunark = Clear Dragons, unlock Velious 24 hours later
Velious = Clear AOW, Kings + Dragons, unlock Luclin 24 hours later
Luclin = Clear AHR, unlock PoP 24 hours later
PoP = Clear Time, unlock 2nd Expansion chunk after 30 days or 24 hours, whichever is longer.

I’d also argue for unique rulesets - double loot; 24 hour lockout timers on AOC, FV ruleset, once final expansion in a “chunk” is unlocked; double xp until next chunk is unlocked.

the sad reality is that the average age of people playing this game is over 40, and every year less and less people are alive who want to play this, even if you ignore people who simply move on to other games

new players who wander in and stick around are outliers

While I do think we get stuck in most xpacks too long, i think something like this would kill off the population quite quick. Your guilds like Faceless would roll through it so quick most guilds wouldn't be able to keep up and either be stuck doing not current content or skipping entire xpacks of raids to keep up. Anyone outside the top guild or two wouldn't stick around long.

What’s the true box there like? Up to two per pc yet?

1 per pc until further notice. Last I heard DPG will "revisit this" after relaxed truebox unlocks on Yelinak next year.

There would always be guilds that plow through content in any TLP format. It is true that I ran with Faceless on Lockjaw for a long time, even through the transfer to Ragefire and that specific version of the guild dominated raid content for a server without AOC for a few years; at least until instances became a thing in expansions and it didn’t matter anymore - and we still were the guild clearing content first to unlock the next expansion. Spending 6 months is PoP was a lot of fun, gearing 1 main and 2-3 alts in time gear. It was also an awful drag that saw lots of people internally and externally call it over for them. Thank god we had unrestricted boxing to push through that and subsequent expansions.

My concept was structured in a fashion to provide a pace to reach a “live” server that was not nearly as long of a slog - which is what seems to kill off servers faster than anything else… simply too many expansions to go “one by one” if the concept is to actually make it to live. By the time that happens, it’s going to be a single guild anyways - if that guild doesn’t fizzle out and the server stalls out.