I don't post here much at all. I've been playing P99 on and off for over a decade now, and the highest level I reached is about 46 or 49 I believe on Blue.

I most certainly would be into killing a raid boss just for the experience. EverQuest to me is a nostalgia game. I can pick it up when I feel like playing something. I am unguilded because of my infrequency of playing.

I do believe it would be fun to dabble in raids, but only to experience them. No chance at loot? That's fine, I have no DKP anyway!

Now granted, I don't know if this should be the norm. Raids are kind of aspirational as a player. But maybe an off week every 6 months that real raiders can take vacations and "guided tours" of bosses becomes a thing for us casuals just for the experience. It'd be neat, albeit "not classic." But it wouldn't provide any benefit to those participating other than being part of a fight.

IDK, just wanted to weigh in as a casual on this.

im not sayin its pixels...but...pixels

You're sufficient level to do a few raids. Riot might take you for their Vox/Naggy squad maybe, since those raids are level capped. There are some other guilds that do planar stuff occasionally.

As an aside, I think its probably higher than 5 figures. I would guess somewhere in the low 6 for green, blue might get to 7 given how long its been around.

I had a program I wrote that parsed my log file and uploaded it to a google sheet with the last seen history of each guild character, and Auld Lang Syne had 1590 characters seen by me in a /who over the course of 2017 to 2019 with 203 level 46+. This was much higher than I was expecting given that even at our peak we could never field a raid force over 40 people.

Instances would probably also cause a lot of players to leave, tanking the server populations. The same thing happens on TLP.

People get their loot quickly due to every guild being able to kill the same mobs at the same time. Then they get bored and leave. It would basically be the death of P99.

TLP already exists if you want instancing.

I think ppl don't quit because they get their gear quickly , I think ppl quit because boomers can't handle learning a new system every once in a while

It's the same thing that happens in just about any game with faster loot progression. The faster the loot progression, the faster the turn-around. Once your goals have been fulfilled, there isn't a good reason to stick around.

P99 not having instancing makes it difficult for a player to achieve even one BiS character. This means you will have a goal that takes years to complete, instead of weeks/months.

For a lot of people sure, unless you join the top guild in which case you are constantly getting the vast majority of the targets, DKP prices scale down, and it's just easier in general. You do have a bit more competition in terms of amount of players in the guild, but again DKP prices will go down a bit overall due to the frequency of getting the targets so it sort of offsets.

If you're in any other guild (unless said guild is able to regularly compete and actually win a majority of targets at times) then yeah it's going to take a very long time.

When I was in AM at the height of it's power (with unrooted dragons), it could still take years to get a fully built character. When most individual Vulak items only drop 10 times or less in a year, there is a good chance you just miss the item. It could drop when you aren't there, another guild gets it, etc. You can also be outbid when your guild does get the drop.

Not saying it is impossible, but you would need to play a ton, get lucky on item drops, and get lucky on bids to try and get a single character full BiS in a year or less.

You have said two things
1) With no instancing, in a guild monopolizing content it takes years to get full bis.
2) With instancing people would get bis too fast.

Why not allow instancing for a guild at current respawn frequency (or a bit slower)? Could lock out guild characters who joined the guild less than X days ago if the instance has a frequency of X days. This would prevent shenanigans of a guild splitting into a bunch of copies and characters tag switching to get more instances. If time limits for instances were made, there would still be stakes. Eg if you wipe them there will not be enough time to recover and complete the instance.

Of course implementing the code for this might be a headache and/or large amount of work (depending on the current codebase).