What's the chances on getting Fellowships sooner?

You're also assuming that the other 4 people are also in the same fellowship. To further explain; if 5 pug chatracters are in separate fellowships you increase the probability of one of these characters being a fellowship leader.

You see, a fellowship is a party itself. This defacto-larty does not require direct contact nor does it require visibility of status bars to conduct itself as a company.

The leader can also re-assign leadership, without democratic vote, on a whim.

The downside is that there is a cool down timer on the reallocation of a party to a fellowship. I believe it was at least 24 earth hours which should not be an issue for a typical casual pugger.

Plus there is a cooldown on swapping fellowships isn't there?

Well, currently you need 3 players to belong to the same fellowship being at the spot you want to gather at to even place a campfire.

The first move is fine, but there is a 24 hour period on moving a second time. So, you can drop your fellowship to join your pug, but you'll have to wait 24 hours after that to get back into your original fellowship.

That's an interesting counterpoint, and I appreciate the input. The one TLP I did have campfires in, I would say did fit the "it bolsters cliques" notion, but I cannot say that hurt the pug game. If I typically run with a group that fills 4 or 5 I still need pugs... and if I typically ran with 6 in the past then pugs never were part of the equation.

In particular, I had one friend who I firmly believe played EQ more because they had a campfire option and knew their time would be "well spent." That's a net positive for the server that I did see for sure.

Perhaps they could tweak campfires to allow pugs to campfire... make it costly, like 500pp or something, and basically it functions like this:

• 4 members in a group must be present to put down a campfire. (This is less of a tool for small boxers to simply move around alts)
• The player laying the campfire must have a consumable purchased from that NPC in POK (make it stackable to 1,000).
• The campfire has a shorter duration that typical so that it's not seen as a throwaway cost, but more as a "let's get this groupmate replaced so the pug doesn't collapse since it's 2 am."

A campfire such as this would absolutely promote pugs by both prolonging existing pugs (can get reps easier) and making it far easier for a pugger to find a group (the removal of travel will make groups far more likely to just snag someone, and it will also allow the pugger to quickly get a group and be less likely to log out due to limited play time).

Some good thinking there though the 500p per campfire is counter-productive, and I think keeping it at 3 players is fine.

The higher cost would be to protect the interest of coth and ports -- we shouldn't trivialize them even moreso if it can be mitigated at all. So, maybe some cheapskates will still opt for ports and hoofing it, and also mages' coth wouldn't be totally neutered in the sense that you'd still get a coth rather than flippantly throw down a campfire.