Says the guy who wanted two versions of the same server. Hmmmm boxing to farm for RMT on multiple servers possibly

Clearly you weren't there. It had nothing to do with instancing, and everything to do with having a server where the "competitor" types weren't present (because none of them wanted to miss out on server firsts by leaving Green).

As a result, for a few beautiful months there was a server where if you just wanted to play a game from 20+ years ago with a bunch of other people doing the same, without the usual drama you run into here ... you actually could.

Er no it was literally created because the lowbie zones were so swarmed with people that people were camping individual trash mobs. The staff literally said this was the reason. And once the population spread out from the lowbie zones they merged back.

As usual you state your own opinion as fact

Bunch of non-raiders or just people with selective memory here who think that Teal didn't have competition, was less toxic, etc. Green's raid scene was very tame compared to Teal. They had to add an FTE message to Phinny because 3 guilds were fighting over him on spawn on Teal. Back on green, we were rotating fire giants amicably.

Sorry that your other manastone farming server was shut down. The vast majority of Teal's population was from people farming both servers at the same time.

Kingdom dominated Teal. There was no competition. Black Lotus killed FGs like once every other week. Teal was instanced. But it was also beautiful.

That's a great observation about the "accidental" nature of the server; so while we can all agree that there were all types of players on both servers, generally, on Teal you had a lot less of the "Compete versus Player" types which meant a lot more fun for people who wanted to enjoy the game.

We actually got to do dungeon crawls 20 years later. Ironically, these occurred in zones that were much more populated on Teal than Green, so the "instancing" comparison really falls flat.

We also didn't get "free pixels". Most people were just happy to finally be able to just be at some of those camps in gear and levels that made it challenging/fun. And if something dropped people actually did NBG a lot of the time. But most of the time nothing dropped and we just moved along because it wasn't "farming", it was just adventuring and reliving some great memories fighting iconic mobs.

cheers,

Astuce

Stretch. The basis of being able to not come and go as you please brings it closer to a classic mmo experience than instancing though since the first server merges happened after velious, not technically our form of classic

At least this much is true. On pre teal green I remember single mob camps. It was actually surprising to realize how few spawns are in actual EQ. Still teal was a blessing and the fact that you *seem* to know why it existed means maybe we can compromise

As I said at the start (emphasis added):

They created it to split the population, but what they (perhaps) didn't realize was all the "competitors" would choose to stay on Green to compete, and all the "casuals" would happily go to the new/less-competitive server.

But again, their intent is irrelevant: what they wound up creating was a better server.

P.S. We both know the real reason for this unwarranted Teal-hate post is that you're just jealous you missed out on the best server P99 ever released. ;)

This game is not only about end-game raiding ... especially in the classic era. Teal was beautiful largely because of the quality of people you met while leveling up.

But also, even if you wanted to make that argument, A) having one top guild per server is classic, and B) Kingdom is absolutely the far more "casual" top guild. That's not to say they can't or don't compete, but personality-wise they are made up far less of the "competitive type" vs. Seal Team (which is basically defined as the guild of "competitor types".)