What permalocked expansion would you want?

Perma lock is perma death.

I like that they're trying new things but this one seems a bit short sighted.

I would like to see Classic, Kunark, Luclin, or Omens locked.

Best locking points are at the last expansion of a multiple-expansion-without-level-increase era. Doesn't matter which level this is done at but this leaves the widest array of both group-level and raid-level content for the playerbase. These expansions are:

Lvl 60 - Shadows of Luclin (3 pertinent expansions of group and raid content)
Lvl 65 - Gates of Discord (2 pertinent expansions of raid content, 3 pertinent expansions of group content)
Lvl 70 - DoDh (3 pertinent expansions of group content and raid content)

Stopping at LDON is a bit of a ridiculous choice. Players get 1.5 expansions of pertinent group content, and 1 expansion of pertinent raid content. With a bunch of outdated content, except for the possible caveat of casual Vex Thal guilds (is that even a thing?)

I agree with this for the most part, except one thing to consider is that with Luclin @ 60, the reality is that once you start doing VT, that is pretty much the only content worth doing, especially with instances. If there was competition for content(imagine the tears), I could see Luclin being more successful because the population could spread out over multiple expansions and have lots of decent content.

I think if I HAD to pick(my personal choice is to not lock any server as I think it will just die out), I'd probably choose GoD. Doesn't seem to make sense to stop at LDoN when you still have a whole other tier of content in GoD that you could add on without increasing the level and overly trivializing the previous content with its release.

It didn't kill EQ Mac (Pop locked expansion) in fact there is a team working to make that server live again in a private server version. It also didn't kill P99 which is locked at Velious (but without raid instancing). P99 has been going strong for years.

I think Agnarr will be a great success with a long term dedicated population that will easily pay for itself in new and retained subscriptions.

Its not a matter of the previous content being utilized by the top guilds, its a matter of the secondary and tertiary guilds having something worthwhile (and accessible) to raid. Casual guilds are not going to put in the effort to key a guild and casul raid VT at lvl 65, and Velious-era quest rewards are nigh-useless to lvl 65 as they lack the proper level range on focus effects, and LDON group gear with proper slot9 slot11 augmentation is essentially a sidegrade to the velious raid loot without having outdated focii. Furthermore, most of the decent group content in POP requires raid unlocks to access.

Agnarr's choice of era to lock permanently is not conducive to the playerbase having a stratified layer of raid guilds. It's an all or nothing stopping point, really.

People are currently raiding VT casually on Phinny...

I want: "Mines of Gloomingdeep, you can never leave".

Seriously though, I like PoP, could go for GoD as well.

I like lvl 65 and expansions without epics, I hate it when 95% of people have the same weapon.

Back before free to play EQ this is what you had to do if you wanted to play for free...

How about 4 perma locked TLPs at different level caps (65, 70, 75, 85). Every server is tuned to fully unlock after a year and you can always transfer to a "more advanced" TLP than your own.

2017 launches the 65 cap server
2018 launches the 70 cap server
2019 launches the 75 cap server
2020 launches the 80 cap server
and so on

Every year you have an opportunity to get in a new TLP community. If you ever get bored of your locked expansion then eventually you can transfer and experience a few more.

Want the TLP experience but you missed the last one? New TLP every summer.

Want to stay locked in a specific era? There's a server for that

Want slow progression? You decide when you want to transfer forward and "unlock" more expansions.

Want fast progression/racing/competition? Treat these as event servers where you conquer the last expansion before starting over on the next server.

Everyone wins in this design.

I'm gonna roll the dice and predict at some point Agnar is opened for transfers off or allowed to proceed beyond LDON. It would really screw up Ragefire/Lockjaw and damage Phinny if they announced Agnar as Phinny with Ragefire exp. In other words, heres a better version of your server Phinny players. They had to throw in a curveball to differentiate Agnarr from the last three TLPs.

Announcing it is pop-locked will keep more people on Rage/LJ and phinny. However in two years or so when Rage/LJ and Phinny are ghost towns(very likely)... Maybe they do something with Agnarr to support another TLP, I really have no idea of the end game here. All I know for sure is, if they just pushed back Ragefire and Lockjaw a year and released both with instancing they'd have two super awesome giant servers right now, instead of 3 TLP's all on different timelines with different rules and a 4th one on deck... smh..

lol. Quite the hindsight expert here. If only they'd hired you 2 years ago then all our troubles would be avoided.

Now back to realityville where those of us who experienced the actual launches of these servers live. We understand that nobody knew how popular they would be or what rules would be best (hint: NOT 6 month expansions) or how much demand there was for instancing (hint: a lot since people like Darth exist) or how big of a problem mage-boxes would be. It took 7 months to figure these things out, implement instancing, implement truebox, and launch the correct TLP ruleset.

But please, continue, tell us more about how back in 2015 it was so obvious these features were needed.

Not sure you understood my post, I didn't say anything about casual guilds going back to do lvl 60 content at lvl 65.

I was in full agreement with your assessment that the final expansion in each "level tier" is the logical thing to do, I just think that the problem with Luclin on a server with instances is that the end zone of the expansion is really the only worthwhile lvl 60 content - even for "casual" guilds.

LDoN is a good choice, imho for the reasons outlined by the OP. I remeber a significant power jump when GoD launched so I'm good leaving it out. I like the idea of a Velious locked 2nd best but things to do may be too limited to sustain the population.

If you were looking at gameplay, locking at a L65 cap expansion, Gates of Discord, makes a lot of sense. If you look at it from a story point of view, it would be better to lock it at a L65 expansion where the storylines don't need to match up to make sense. On that, If they were to add Gates of Discord, I would want Omens of War as those two expansions tell a story together. To have one but not the other you are only getting half the story. Which is one reason I would think if there was a locked server after PoP it would be Omens, to tell the story between the two expansions.

Up through PoP I don't think the stories really mattered as you progressed through expansions. But after PoP you start to get stories linking expansions together. After Omens of War I think the stories are split between expansions but the story continues 2-3 expansions down the line. You have DoN and DoDh not seemingly connected except by a single point. Which is also connected to TSS and completely skips the Story of PoR, which PoR and DoDh connect directly with Buried Sea. Not done anything beyond Buried Sea so I don't know how the stories of later expansions connect together, but PoP is the last expansion (Or Ykesha I guess?) with stories contained solely within that expansion. LDoN leads to GoD which seems weird to have it on PoP-lock server, however it does sort of make sense in a way to give more options at the of the progression lock.

Rain of Fear

Do I really need to link every thread in the TLP forum asking for instancing in classic months and months before Ragefire launched?

Good try,

Anyway permalock isn't sound, they'll park it at LDON yes, but I can see them at some point offering a way off or advancing Agnar. Just like they said they'd never instancing classic

House of Thule or Rain of Fear

Lock progress server at the expansion determined by vote.

Make next expansion have content for (that expansions upper level) to max. Next expansion to add to level cap.

Progress server takes up with this new expat but not anything in between (not needed)

Now you have an EQ server with fixed content and none of the content people didn't like.

There was a significant group of people against 6 month expansions back then, for all the reasons that people know well now. We're lucky that Phin and Agnarr gave people a second chance in avoiding those travesties after the comically bad RF/LJ votes (although the 4 month Luclin/Velious and 6 month PoP thing is still pretty bad to suffer through).