[hotstud]

Here's the sad reality guys...

Almost everyone who played EQ before, currently has a life. Jobs, children, relationships, and so on. That doesn't leave much room for MMORPGs.

There's no adjustments that can be made to exp or anything about the servers that will increase population.

The only way to increase population is proper advertising and marketing of Project 1999. There are literally millions of people out there looking for free video games and MMOs specifically. Stop trying to draw EQ players, that has already been tapped, instead focusing on gamers in general who may have never even heard of EQ but want free games to play.

There is one major problem between this huge market of potential players and Project 1999.

Project 1999 does not have the rights to distribute the client, they have to tell you to go find it yourself. The average person is not going to think, "Hmm.. maybe I'll try this game out.. Oh, it says I need to buy it? I'll go download it instead..."

The average person is going to think, "Hmm.. maybe I'll try this game out.. Oh, it says I need to buy it? *clicks back button and goes to the other 10,000,000,000 free games available where you can click play and it just works*"

I've said this before and I'll say it again...

The only way to increase population is if someone not associated with P99 creates a website where you can download the client or at least link directly to a torrent, preferably a custom created torrent for an EQ install that already has the required changes and launcher preinstalled, and then advertises that website instead of project1999.org. This creates a legal buffer between Project 1999 and the customer which allows the "one click" option to get people started here.

No one who hasn't heard of EQ wants to download a torrent, download two patches, extract them into the install directory after completing the install, create an EQEmu forum account, create an EQEmu login account, edit the host file, and then create a shortcut with a -patchme option in it. Are you fucking kidding me?

Resolving this down to clicking a download link and extracting an EverQuest folder that has all required changes and the P99 launcher that automatically updates the required files and then a SINGLE account signup process and then doing some basic advertising like posting a link on gaming forums would cause the population to skyrocket.