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Originally Posted by nilbog
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To add to this, there are a lot of players who choose not to log in if they witness a low population at that time. EQ Live later changed their servers to display UP or DOWN. For this reason? I'm not certain.
What is interesting is that if the players who declined logging in due to low population actually did log in.. there would be much higher population. Paradox time.
An experiment that I'd like to see is if people left their characters up in an area while they weren't actively playing (East Commons for example).. would it statistically increase the amount of players who choose to log in, solely played on loginserver player count.
Would 100 afk players = 20 logins that wouldn't have occurred without them?
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I had actually made this suggestion before.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Danyelle
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........I personally think EQEmu should do what Live did. Replace the pop numbers with UP, DOWN, and LOCKED (although since DOWN servers just get removed from the list, likely to prevent flooding the list with inactive test servers, it would really only ever show UP or LOCKED. Also LOCKED already displays. But whatever.) to get people to shut up about the exact numbers and focus more on what you see in game. May stave off some of the doomsayers.
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I believe there was a reason they changed this on Live (like there's a reason they changed/added many things) and I think what you described is that exact reason.
Doing this would affect the LS so it effects more than just P99 but I think the change will be positive. Not only will it fix the issue where people don't wanna log into P99 (or another popular server) because the population is unusually low, but it will likely fix the issue where people avoid new servers, even if they sound interesting, just because it's new and has no population.
Servers devs/GMs would still be able to know the stats of the players on their servers, and the Devs at EQEmu would know the stats of players across all servers, and that data could be publicly released if need be, but it'd prevent the average player from seeing population numbers and getting encouraged/discouraged based upon that alone.
The DOWN stance is also useful. Servers get removed from the list if they go down because so many servers get put up every day (test servers, servers where one guy wants to play with GM commands or explore zones etc) and if they remained on the list after disconnection it'd clutter the server list up. But perhaps if they put this change in they could also set the Yellow/Green servers to still remain up on the server list even when the server disconnects, and simply display DOWN. Since not just any server can make the Green/Yellow lists anyway, and the servers on those lists usually have large(er) populations of players that could log in and see the server is down as opposed to just missing from the list. Hell it may even stop the flood of "Server DOWN!" posts since anyone with the lowest form of literacy would know that. :P White servers would still just get removed from the server list if the server disconnects.