OTHER Ideas

[Dullah]

Originally Posted by MrSparkle001 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

To be honest nothing is going to affect pop that much. People don't want to play classic pvp. People barely want to play LoZ.

Content isn't the answer. It will help but it won't bring that many long-term players. The server just won't have anywhere near blue's population. We just need to learn to play with low pop.

(I'm also dead set against the hybrid XP penalty. Always was. Sony - or was it Verant - wised up and removed it but we're stuck with it here. Not everything classic was ideal.)

This could be true, or it might not be. Hard to say.

I think if a lot of the problems would have been worked out before the r99 launch, the player retention would have probably been 2 or 3x higher. Guard assists, classic resists, and some bug fixes would have restored a lot of faith in r99.

At some point, the population hits a mark (under 150 or so on a no-boxing server) where, aside from being discouraging for a potential player, the server can no longer perpetuate with new players because its too hard to level up or find something meaningful to do. Thats been the biggest hurdle here since as far back as February.

Now, all they can do is just throw some stuff up in the mix and see if it helps. Stuff like yt and hot-zones could potentially provide a boost, but its just treating the symptom, not curing the problem. I'd like to say theres something else that can be done in classic to "make it better", but there just isn't. Its classic, which was like an EQ tutorial. Was great in 1999, but in 2012 its offers 3 or 4 months of content - tops. Thats 3-4 months of player progression, and meaningful reasons to log in and pvp. Without fighting over xp camps, item camps and raids, you have to either add item loot, or manufacture a reason to pvp like YT or leaderboards. On top of that, to say classic wasn't the greatest era for pvp would be a huge understatement. Kunark-velious introduced true progression and improved pvp by leaps and bounds. More to do (like 10x that of classic) as well as introducing skills and balancing to classes and weapons that made it far, far more fun.

Beyond that, the next biggest issue was that the pride levels among the r99 crowd are off the charts. They play the game like its permadeath, where if they aren't able to win a fight or be box champions, they just /wrist and try to pretend it never happened. Which wouldn't be so terrible, but then they've tried to bring the server down with them.