When will the Test server gravy train end?

When I first created a character on test it was a desolate place. There was nothing much on the auction house, chat was silent and every zone was a ghost town. But now when I log on I see more and more people and it's beginning to feel like a Live server. There were 3 SK's camping Howling Stones yesterday for the epic drop! Chat has also become much busier around the clock.

Due to the fact Test has double XP, free gold status with all expansions and the ability to /testcopy it is inevitable Test will become the most popular EverQuest server. Being able to hop onto Test and box as many accounts as you want, completely free, appears to be proving popular

So, I wonder what SOE will do when it becomes a problem for them?

If it was going to be a problem it would have been years ago.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure test has been like this for a really long time in some form or another...it's never been enough to keep people playing on the server, though. As soon as they opened up transfers off of it at one point...most of the people promptly left for other servers.

Ive been on test since 2007 when they originally allowed test copies. From then til they allowed the transfers off test during HoT, it had a pretty stable population of about 150 in general channel at peak times. After they allowed transfers off, general channel population was about 50 people. It stayed this way for a bit until free to play kicked in and the population slowly increased as word got out about free gold status. Between a very popular progression guild and the free gold status, general channel population these days is anywhere from 250-350.

Obviously this is just toons in general channel and probably doesn't represent anywhere near the real population, but still its a pretty large increase. My 1 year subs on my 3 accounts are all up in April and I can finally take advantage of the free gold that I've been paying for

A server with a healthy population. SHUT IT DOWN NOW!

test definitely has a higher population than a few live servers, but they're all "special" servers, zek, trakanon and probably vulak. I doubt the population is any where near that of a normal server

Test is pretty close to a single player version of Everquest, where everyone boxes and you can treat General as a random IRC channel.

If you get invited to a group, expect to be playing with someone boxing the entire rest of the group. Most of the time the guy is too lazy to properly control his boxes, or pull properly and it ends up being less enjoyable than soloing/moloing.

Platinum has no real value on the server and the bazaar is kind of a mess. Need something useful? You'll either have to testcopy it, or pay a crazy amount of platinum. Sometimes you'll get some nice people who will give it to you for free.

Earning tradeable items on the Test server is counterproductive, since if the item is earned on a real server, you could copy it over and over, but on Test you're stuck with one version of the item that is very low value.

Expect to hit the max level and seldom ever group with anyone else. Forget about ever raiding current content.

The progression guild(s) on it seem to progress far too quickly. Some of the guilds don't care if you level your character with gear "not classic" to the era, including level in zones not appropriate. Some progression guilds let alts into the guild, who aren't bound by era, contributing to confusion about if anyone is actually following the era rules.

that's how all servers are last I played, I was forced to multibox to get a group going, until I realised that playing by my own with multiple accounts, paying tripple what a regular game costs me, is...well...idiotic

it's not that I don't like the game, it's that you're asking me to jump through ridiculous hoops and costs to even enjoy it half the time

multiboxing ruined EQ for me, EQNext here I come

The only time era rules are followed are during raids, makes things much easier and doesnt require anywhere near as much policing as other progression guilds have required. Officers have lives and cant be on 24/7 to make sure so and so didnt sneak into x zone to pick up y loot. Alt toons are allowed so that people stay in touch and know whats going on. Allows people to run old content very easily and catch up newer members. The current progression guild is in Demiplane now and has been around for close to a year. The fact that people are still complaining about this stuff is kind of funny. If you dont like the rules, dont join. Make your own guild and follow whatever rules you want to.

There was a reason I didn't mention the exact name of the progression guilds I was talking about.

And FV too! Close them all!!

After all, FV has bonus experience and the vast majority of items are tradeable. There are people who pay to borrow the exp potions from others (the 6th anniversary ones which are tradeable) and then they testcopy to test. So bonus exp, plus double exp potions in massive supply, plus probably RAF bonuses for some of those.

What I love is that I played on test for years, and the constant complaint from live players was that the population was too low to test stuff. Now we get people complaining that Test is too popular.

The way I see it, if someone is FTP then which server they do their FTP playing on isn't terribly important. They get some extra perks to draw them to Test, but Test also has issues as well. These occur when a major change is coming and the server becomes unstable and resets frequently. We had times where it would reset once a day as they patched it, and it would sometimes crash on the weekend and not be rebooted until Monday when the dev's came in. That's all fine, it is to be expected on Test. But, that also pushes people away from Test (sometimes just temporarily until more stability returns), but it impacts the population.

There is a core of players there that plays long term. But many others are transient.

And I, for one, am delighted to hear that Test has several hundred players in general chat! Let's hope they can find out why chat is constantly going down

Just to clarify I am not saying I want anything closing down. I made my SK on test and I love the community on the server and it's my home now. What I am saying is that the drawbacks everyone is talking about are disappearing fast.

Let's see:

SOE is getting a large number of people at no cost to them to test out content before it goes live, thus (when the system works) helping keep paying customers happy that stuff works, rather than get upset when it doesn't and take their money to another MMORPG.

</sarcasm on> Yup, must destroy something that is working! </sarcasm off>

Can a Dev comment on this? Seriously? There is no way this can go on forever. Why not deal with it sooner rather than later? The longer it goes on, the more tangled the options for undoing it will become.

well its been 4 months since this thread was created and they've let it go on, why do you think they'd stop now. Server has been free gold for well over a year now.

If there was more time between patches hitting test and then going to live, they could maximize the value of the server, but with only 1 week between patches i dont think its serving as well as it could

Sounds like a good server to 'test' things on to me. In fact I have a /testcopy there from when I was in a couple betas many years ago I think. How do I download the client anyway? I don't see a test option.

/test adn /beta arent hte same fyi. but yo uhave to download a separate launcher for test than live servers. you can recopy todays toon with /testcopy command

The problem with Test is the same that it was before - it's a server people go to, get to max level / gear very easily due to /testcopy, double exp, and rampant boxing / power leveling - and then quit because there's nothing to do - no wealth to collect because plat is useless, no feeling of achievement because it's ez mode, etc.

Take the example of RoF gear and dreadmotes. On Live this is/was a pretty big deal, an industry of hundreds of millions of plat and thousands of dollars built around buying/selling gear, buying/selling Krono, etc.

On Test, people /testcopy all the droppable gear and dreadmotes. You want a full set? Just ask for it in general. It's little different from having /testbuff 95.

So the question is - what do you play for in an environment of this sort? It's what an earlier poster said - you play for what makes you happy. There is no standard progression on Test. There's no economy. There's no stable community.

It's what you make of it, though I do think Test got a huge boost from F2P. I think SoE is keeping it around just to see the amount of $ they're able to get from full F2P instead of the gimped one they're using on Live.

You don't need a separate launcher, but you'll want to use a separate copy of the client (the data is different, so switching between them would require downloading all the different files each time you switched).

In the launcher there's an option to select the game version. (Click the version in the upper left, takes you right to it.) Just select Test and click Apply. Once it updates, log in and go. Simple.

That's the only theory I've been able to come up with too. But, I don't think it would be an accurate representation of what full F2P would generate. As it stands currently, people on Test feel they are getting something for nothing because every other server would be costing them money. This would make people more inclined to throw some of that "savings" towards station cash. But, if every sever were free, it would no longer be anything special and the average view on microtransactions would change.