Swish's time frame is off. PoP may be the last expansion that is highly regarded by people in general remembering EQ, but for raiders it will go until OoW at least. Only after the release of DoN will population in the raiding sector start dropping. Before that, some guilds will be noticing the applicant pool getting smaller, and after that the less successful and less dedicated guilds will start seeing problems getting the numbers to get stuff done. The top end will probably be able to cannibalize people leaving those guilds for a LONG time, maybe an entire year, even more for the top one or two. The server in general will be a small fraction of the size by then, but the guilds at the top will endure for much longer. Even Fippy still has one guild going after all.
Those people who want to play PoP and earlier EQ will just jump to the new server when it releases in the summer. I can tell you one thing - they won't come here. The amount of people who have tried P99 and left is insane, every group seems to have a few expats who left for all sorts of reasons and others who simply never wanted to bother with emulation.
It's a possibility more people should consider - Sirken leaves the endgame as awful as possible simply because if it was actually any good, the server wouldn't be able to handle the number of people who would play it.
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