Quote:
Originally Posted by Kergan
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I'm going to say upfront that I read the original post and none of the 7 pages of replies.
You just can't flush 2 year worth of peoples time down the drain. Even if it would ultimately lead to a better server, you'd lose a huge chunk of the population that don't want to reinvest that kind of time and ultimately undermine what you're trying to do - boost population.
T99 is the best option at this point. You'll have new people going there for a fresh start, old people coming back to play on it and a huge chunk of R99 that will go there or play on both. R99 will suffer population wise for awhile but ultimately a merge will bring two low population servers together to hopefully make a medium (200-300 prime time) population server.
History has shown a lot of smaller spikes in population tied to specific events (exp bonuses, EQMac shut down, etc) but it seems like over the last 6-8 months you'll see a spike to 200ish prime time players after one of those events then a slow decay to 100ish. You can blame whatever you want but that's just the way it is.
The only way to increase population is to do something that will both bring in an influx of new players and bring a lot of old players out of retirement. I think T99 will do the former, and Velious the later.
I wish people would realize that low population is NOT always a bad thing. Uncontested spawns almost all over the world, if you came in with a crew of 3-4 people you could power through the old world doing whatever camps you want then pick one of the two options at the end game.
I've also said it before in other threads, the devs are not a solution to this problem - the players are. I saw in another thread HB is going to be doing some free JC/gear giveaways and events for new players. That is the kind of thing that kickstarts people through the relative isolation of the 20-40 range and gets them to the point where they can actually interact with the majority of the server and I give him props for it.
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Teams server to me is a really hard sell, because i beleive it is harder to make things work on a team server than a FFA because of how less fluid "team components" are. So if you get into a situation like the mid-life situation i described in my OP, where one guild gets overly dominant, the server is basically done. It could work but requires alot more attention than a proper FFA server one needs. You cant have Heartbrand "break away from the team" with others to try to shake things up, status quo is set in stone.
To be honest now that ive had time to digest my own post and the replies to it, i beleive the rebirth will come from somewhere else, or not at all. Someone might start a server with a ruleset like ive described and annihilate Red99 like DAOC Origins finished off DAOC Uthgard.
I agree that player made events is a really great thing to do, but its never gonna make red99 get alot of population. What you need is a server that gets the pop DAOC origins got, but with everything right straight off the bat so you keep that population around and the thing just keeps snowballing in the right direction.