After reading this entire thread and hearing people focus on increasing server population as much as possible as a fix for the server's woes I'm just not entirely sure the server is or ever will be fixable.
There are no new people looking to play Red99. Nobody is Googling "classic EverQuest PvP", finding Red99, coming to these forums and going "that looks like fun!". To think otherwise is pretty delusional.. it's 2013.
I don't mean this as a blanket statement, I mean it more as a generalization. I'm sure every now and then someone who has ZERO knowledge of p99's existance finds out about it and decides to roll red, but it's such a rarity it's not really worth discussing.
So how can we increase the population of red? The only viable alternative is to recruit from blue. You cannot inject entirely new blood into red without pulling it from the blue servers. It's not out there, it doesn't exist. There isn't a group of 500 players sitting around waiting on certain changes to happen on red before they play.
So let's talk about recruiting from blue, as some of you already have. As Motec pointed out, I believe he and other blue players that would possibly be willing to give red a shot are your current target. The things those players want to see fixed are pretty simple/obvious. They don't want to solo to 60 without ever seeing anyone only to get 60 and spend the majority of their time PVE'ing. They can just do that on blue and have a better time doing it because soloing is not 100% neccessary.
Without theorycrafting or elaborting too much on it, the only way those players are coming over is if they have people to level and group with. It's not as simple as a population issue. For instance, if this server had 150 people on it WITHOUT Kunark expansions there would be a lot more PvP and grouping. Kunark allows people to spread out a lot more.
If red99 were to implement "the perfect solution for players who play on blue but have been wanting to try red" there is still not going to be enough people on the server to make things feel like they do on blue.
There's always a chance I'm completely off base, but I think there are not enough people interested in playing Classic EverQuest PvP on either red/blue or anywhere else to create p99 red server that is as successful as a live PvP server was or even as successful as p99 blue.
That doesn't mean the server can't do what's best for itself and make the changes neccesary to keep the largest portion of the players content and happy, but I think that if what the GMs/devs want to do is to make it a "success" numbers-wise like blue is that they're going to have a hard time and it's never going to happen.
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