Returning player-What classes does p1999 need?

[gloine36]

It seems to me from comments my guildies have made that classes aren't the problem. It is players. They're not finding groups in many zones except at the peak times due to the low population. Really need about 600 players on to get good grouping based on my observations over the past year.

[finalgrunt]

Originally Posted by gloine36 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It seems to me from comments my guildies have made that classes aren't the problem. It is players. They're not finding groups in many zones except at the peak times due to the low population. Really need about 600 players on to get good grouping based on my observations over the past year.

Even on live you had to /tell across zones to try to build group. I receive many tells, but sadly can't often honor them due to my RL occupations, but it's still nice. The only issue I admit, is that most players have taken the bad habit to play in /role or /a for raid purposes, so it's hard to know the level and class of people around.

[nilbog]

Originally Posted by gloine36 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It seems to me from comments my guildies have made that classes aren't the problem. It is players. They're not finding groups in many zones except at the peak times due to the low population. Really need about 600 players on to get good grouping based on my observations over the past year.

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?

[Namegen_Isterrible]

No, ideal groups did not instantly materialize in any zone you happened to be in on live. But if you deny that it is often very challenging to put together any group at all, let alone a solid group, on p99, then you're just being silly.

[Namegen_Isterrible]

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

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?

Fudge the server numbers and let's find out!

[nilbog]

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

Fudge the server numbers and let's find out!

Lol I'm not gonna fudge any numbers. I'd like to know the results of the experiment though. Interestingly, this would be achievable from the player's side with no interference from administration.

Just having a science moment I suppose.

[Austrianna]

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

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.

I was playing back when the change occured and at the time I seemed to have read/gotten the impression/been told/whatever that it was to do with competition and hiding their server numbers. I think others were trying to get in on the MMO pie and they didn't want to freely advertise how big their player base was at that time.

I could be wrong, it's been a long while!

[hdawg06]

There are a lot of classes that I would love to play, but due to the low population over the last 4 months it makes playing a lot of hybrids or straight melee very difficult. If you cannot solo well and finding a group is difficult say 20-40, then you really cannot do much. Albeit, if I was uber twinked that might change, but I am not...

[Danyelle]

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

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?

I had actually made this suggestion before.

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

........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.

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.

[Namegen_Isterrible]

All I know is it drives me nuts when server numbers aren't actually given. Back in the day on live my friends and I actually picked low pop EQ servers (Saryrn was our first and main) on purpose to avoid running into as many people trying to camp/xp where we wanted to.

Nowadays on WoW it's terrible. I was starting up the free account with a friend (until I realized two starter accounts can't form a group.... oh well) and the low/medium/high/full listings on their server list are not remotely close to accurate. "Full" server census info that I did myself in primetime for that server found like 500 players. Meanwhile a "high" pop server had thousands of players during primetime.