Project 1999 - Devs: If you want to keep us casual scrubs on your new server....

You need to give us at least the psychological illusion that we can be competitive at high levels.

Look, us casual types can eventually catch up in levels because levels are capped at 60. But people like me know that we can never progress our equipment at high levels.

So here is what happens. We start on a new server and it's great fun at first. But then we start falling behind. People start spreading out in levels. Some people start getting so far ahead of us that they are completely out of our league.

At that point the game starts to become less fun. Now, as I said already we can catch up in levels. But we (scrubs like me) know that raiding is not a viable option for us and we know that we will never be able to catch up in item progression no matter how long we play. So at that <becoming-less-fun> point in the game there is ZERO motivation to keep going. We know that we will NEVER catch up so what's the point? On the blue server it doesn't matter quite as much but on a PvP server, knowing that you will never again be competitive in PvP (the whole point of the server) it kills the whole thing for you. Seriously, imagine yourself in that situation and see if you wouldn't be overcome with the "why bother" mentality.

That's why your new PvP server will also lose all of it's casual players just like the old one did. After a certain point in the life of the server there just isn't any reason for them to keep going.

I've been thinking about this and the best idea I've come up with so far is this:

Put in one special set of equipment for each class which players can get from a trainer at level 40 or 50. Each item in this set starts out with 0 ac, 0 stats and no procs or clicky effects. But each item in the set can be leveled up.

Ok, have it work sort of like alternate advancement from the live servers. Let the player set how much of his experience will go to the item from 0% to 100%. Only one piece of equipment at a time can be leveled so you would have to do this separately for each item.

As the items level up either let us chooses what stats and so on to add or just have them increase in a predetermined way. But in the end, at max item level, these items should come out being comparable to the best high end loot.

Make it a long slow grind. Even if it's ultimately longer and slower than gearing up through raiding at least it would give us a way to trudge our way up that hill, bit by bit, and at least give us the illusion that we might get there some day.

I know it's not classic but if you care at all about keeping us scrubs around to flesh out the population of the new server you need to do something to give us some reason to stick around.