So... I was wondering a few things about the TLE server concept after chatting with other players online. I was told that it would most likely be shut down shortly after release of AoD due to the mercenaries. Have there been any TLE servers before Kaladim? If so, how long did it last? When did it shut down and why? How long will the Kaladim server be up?
I learned my lesson the hard way... never going to another server for incentives. I'll stick to Maj'Dul. So I have an orphan on Antonia Bayle, having been on the Stormhold server. I decided to leave him at (5) adventure, and capable of earning sp at the Anchorage in Cobalt Scar... he can fly, and he is in a guild. He has two rooms. He wrote a book about his experiences. It lies on the floor as you zone into Augustus's inn room in Halas on the housing leaderboards. You can see for yourself how desolate the server was, how difficult was travel, how even dead guilds with glorious pasts, gave visitors their benefits but only for 72 days at the most until the rent ran out. Desperate times. It was obvious that most folks had left.
Having been on the Stormhold Server. I wasn't in on the beginning of Stormhold… you could tell people had good times participating in guilds, questing, decorating their homes to perfection. By the time I needed a guild's amenities however, the server had aged, waned, not much happening on the broker. You could type in /who all and there were anywhere from two to sixteen players, on a good day. Those of us who waited for the devs to transfer us to AB as promised, had to wait a year. I'm happy to be on AB. I'll be able to visit houses and vote.
No, AB was never a TLE server. AB is the server where the characters from event servers and closed TLE servers are merged to if the player of those characters does not use the transfer token given to them and select a different server. Each TLE server released has had a different rule set or incentive. Personally, I do not know if Kaladim will see the activation of mercenaries as DPG may not feel that the mercenary feature is what is in the best interest of the server. They have already stated that Kaladim will never have Guild Halls, so they can make the same determination about mercenaries if they haven't already. I honestly do not remember from the FAQ that were posted a year ago, wait, here is a link: https://www.everquest2.com/news/eq2-kaladim-tle-server-faq-2019 It states mercenaries will become available after the launch of Age of Discovery, which should be approximately August of 2021. That being said, Stormhold, the first TLE was launched on July 21, 2015 and was merged into AB on September 4, 2018. Fallen Gate, the second TLE, was launched on June 27, 2017 and merged into Antonia Bayle on June 5, 2019. These were the two PVE servers, technically Deathtoll, the TLE PVP server launched when Stormhold did, but died much earlier. Both of the TLE PVE servers had different rule sets and incentives. And Fallen Gate had the added misfortune of having the Kaladim TLE launch. When Kaladim launched, Fallen Gate became a ghost town. You learn very quickly in this game, you cannot determine what you play, what server you play on, or how you play your character based upon what people in General Chat say, if you do, you will become unhappy or disillusioned quite quickly.
Kaladim will maybe last to DoV, like Fallen Gate did. Everyone will be transferred to a live server when Kaladim shuts down, and you can decide whether to continue with your guild on live, like a few guilds did, or start on the next TLE, like most TLErs did. Old EQ2, even messy and poorly itemized, is less painful than current EQ2.
To add/clarify what others have said, nobody knows how long the Kaladim server will last. The company will keep the server open as long as a decent number of people are still playing. If we were to base it solely on the other TLE servers, one would expect that Kaladim would last until Sentinel's Fate or Destiny of Velious. Stormhold had population issues starting in KoS due to overtuned content and lack of itemization. Basically, it was almost impossible to kill anything, and random treasured gear was often better than gear you got from raid mobs. They started to fix these issues in TSO when they hired a Dev to work on TLE issues. But it was too late. Eventually, in SF, they released familiars, which basically a pay to win mechanic that killed off the rest of the server. Fallen Gate was rife with Pay to Win from the start, which caused a lot of people to quit the game or not play at all. It always had a better population than Stormhold, but not by much. In DoV, the company announced two new servers (Kaladim & Nagafen), which effectively killed off the rest of the population. Though Kaladim seems to be doing better population wise than Stormhold and Fallen Gate, it already has its own issues. For one, there is a long gap between expansions. An expansion comes out every 4 months on Kaladim. If you compound that with the fact that the content is extremely easy and you can have a fully well-geared character within 12ish hours of gameplay after hitting max level, people are running out of stuff to do extremely fast. People are bored and it's only EoF. As such, I don't have a ton of confidence that this server will make it past SF.
not everybody has such a easy time on this servers , if you can't find a group to do the more difficult instances and you one of those squishy classes it will take you much longer . And some people have a live and can not spend hours to level up . In my opinion I am happy we got a little more time , but I think 3 months is probably enough.
I was actually there right as Stormhold started out. Holly Longdale (alias Windstalker) herself even appeared sometimes to chat with players, it was the first TLE server after all, fresh & ripe, everybody was feeling excited, or pretended to be. It held out for a bit, it was fun and slow when most of everybody was still low, but yes it started to gradually die quickly, with KoS it was more a ghost town already than anything else, at least in General chat. And they crashed it hard when it was announced, that Stormhold will be merged together with the live Antonia Bayle server. Population which remained still, dropped dead within few weeks after that. There was also the "sibling" server of Stormhold, called Deathtoll, which tried to revive the early days of Everquest II low-level PvP. It died much faster than Stormhold population could utter "damn", and most people forgot about it quite successfully. It had too many problems and less than a half of a skeleton-crew to work on the game to be anything but a disaster. Fallen Gate, I kinda tried as well at the beginning, but it didn't last. And it didn't feel as exalted at the start anymore as with Stormhold. One or two devs appeared rarely, no sign of Holly anymore. As Chrexx above me already said, it had much more streamlined P2W strategies than back in Stormhold, and added to it people's general awareness of what's going on with the game, it started to fail even more quickly than Stormhold. I guess other people didn't like that oatmeal either. Kaladim, I didn't even bother anymore. Though it sounds like it was slightly more successful than Fallen Gate at least. But what could it have offered that would be any different from previous TLE servers anyway.
And not everybody on the server rushes to level cap, tries to rush to level cap, or intends to rush to level cap the day a new expansion is released. Some play through all of the content, that is why they are on the TLE in the first place, if they want to rush, they can play on live.
