[heartbrand]

I don't play on blue, but on red we have lots of people max level who only log on for raids / occasional pvp skirmishes, there's just no other reason to be online there's nothing else to do. This makes it a ghost town for new players who come, no groups, empty zones, etc. If there were AA's suddenly everyone's online again grinding out AA's, groups are plentiful, newbs don't feel like everything is a ghost town, there's more PVP since there's more people online, higher pop begets even higher pop, etc.

I am very much in the camp that Velious doesn't give much to the non-raider to do camp, since unlike on Live where many of us weren't even level 50 when Velious came out, the majority of the playerbase here is already capped out, instantly making irrelevant / obsolete a great portion of Velious. What do VP / Planar / Kunark geared chars need with most of the stuff from CC / Velk / ToFS, etc.? Even a lot of the skyshrine / kael armor are only slight upgrades over end game Kunark gear, and a lot of NToV shit is garbage. Maybe I'm completely off base, but I foresee NToV being full cleared week one, if not day one, and everything being farm status rather quickly. This is not the case in Luclin where the difficulty gap is much greater, you have the grind of bane weapons for Seru / Emp, and the key grind to VT, etc, and completely not the case in PoP where there's a meaningful progression from PoD / PoJ to PoV / PoS on to HoH / BoT / RZ to Sol Ro Tower to Plane of Fire to other Elemental planes to PoT, and then you have GoD that also has a deep and difficult, meaningful progression. I really think Velious is going to be on farm mode day one here with the exception of ST which obviously requires keys, but the difficulty of ST from what I vaguely recall is below that of NToV anyway. You have AoW in Velious but if you guys can straight up tank the Bee queen who currently puts out more DPS than the AoW, than you can do AoW as well.