I fixed that for you.

I do all those things except play 12 hours a day - also it takes minutes to kill a monster, not hours.

When staring at video game monster placeholders (tracking), we are usually shooting the shit in Vent or multitasking, stuff you'd be doing with your free time anyways.

This is pretty much why there aren't more people here, I think. From what I hear most raiders don't last more than 6-8 months before they quit. I can't really blame them.. you level a main to 60, then park it at the next available raid target. After that you're basically just rolling alt after alt and parking each one at a new target once they hit 60. Even as someone who enjoys alts, that seems unappealing.

Then after a certain point you can afford Chardok AOE spots which means you can fast forward from 50 to 60, and have even more level 60 alts to park at raid targets! Hooray!

Chardok AE is a huge part of the cancer the keeps people away, having successfully supplanted the selling of accounts and resultant character farming that used to be permitted here. Account selling & Chardok AE are the evils that have made 5 years of Kunark so horrible. Without the creation of hundreds (thousands?) of surplus level 60s, enabled and encouraged by character farming (which still happens with shared "guild" accounts, especially for magicians and wizards) and then Chardok AE, you wouldn't have the ugly overcrowded shitfest that has been the raid scene on p99 for the last 3+ years.

Without the twin evils of character farming & Chardok AE we'd have a less ugly, less overcrowded, less shitty shitfest, and we'd still bitch about it all the time.

Just going to point out that 2000 people on a single server on all at the same time is a decent population. Remember back in the day EQ had DOZENS of servers with 2-3000 people on at a time. That is how they had so many subscribers.

I miss the days of cities being populated 8(

I don't personally have anything against Chardok AOE.. if you want to spend your money & time there, that's your own prerogative. It's classic game mechanics. That being said, I do think that it existing ruins the levelling experience after 55. 50-55 are actually relatively quick due to the abundance of groups in KC. After 55, moving to Sebilis or HS is ideal, but there are usually very few groups in these two zones.

For a server of this population, this doesn't make any sense. Sebilis should be packed almost 24/7 and HS should see much more traffic.

Instead, HS is basically only pet groups and soloing Shamans, and Sebilis is mostly guild groups and people farming NG/crypt/king.

Why? Is it just because caster mobs are so brutal on this server?

I'll tell you why my friends don't play (that played EQ with me back in the day)

1) Doesn't play games at all now. He thinks they're a waste of time

2) Is bored with the content. He played here at one time. He laughs that it's still in Kunark.

3) Attention span of a gnat. He played here, then he started another game - then another, then another.

4) Wants to start, but hates that the server has been around for so long and that he'd be 'so far behind' and 'relying on my charity'

5) (not an original Eq'er) - Played here until level 51. Leveling was so slow and repetitive they called it quits.

Take my exemple, I've played a lot of mmos in the past 15 years (EQ1 was my first one), lately I was bored on WoW and was looking to play something else.

Then I heard about the Ragefire hype, and how a lot of old EQ players are coming back (had no idea TLP servers exist before). So I did launch a twitch stream to see how it is and if I want to play it, and the answer was no. (I really dislike multiboxing)

But while I was on this stream I saw some people in the chat saying how p99 was much better than TLP servers (no multibox allowed, more classic), so I did inquiry about it and here I am playing here for almost 2 months now, enjoying it a lot.

So yeah I am sure a ton of old EQ players have no idea.

If P99 opened two new servers one for PvE and one for PvP Teams as "Beta/population test/trial" servers it would potentially generate significant interest. If you couple that with the new interest generated from daybreak, add some incentiviced forumquest, anything is possible.

Dare to dream.