A bit part of the problem with 1999 is everyone wanted to relive their something they did 10 years ago, but, and this is the key point, just a bit better. The people that just got to 40 wanted to be 60 and explore some new zones. The people that got 60 and were in casual raid guilds wanted to be the hardcore badasses with all the pixels they never got to have. The people that were in hardcore raid guilds usually didn't come back as they had already beaten the game the first time around. I met a new Ranger today (low 20s or something), and what did he say "Oh yeah, I played on live, gonna be 60 in a few months".
Plus content is released more slowly (we'll probably have 2-3 years of Kunark on this server, compared to 8-9 months on Live). I'm not blaming Nilbog here, but it's a fact. In addition we don't have any AAs in classic to waste people's time.
Finally everyone knows all the strats exactly. So the epic quests are released and we have someone finish a rogue epic within like 24 hours instead of weeks. I've read the text for stuff like the warrior epic (give me 4 gems, and if you give me the wrong ones you're fucked). It would have taken months just to figure stuff out. And that effect just snowballs, because when your group has two epic rogues and monks and an enchanter with stacked charisma and a pet with tash/malo and so on your xp rate is pretty good, even in the Kunark levels.
Put those three things together and suddenly you have a server where the hardcore players have 2-3 max level max geared chars (hell, I have two. Zeelot has an epic SK and an epic SK alt) and even the 'casual' players have some char 50+. So suddenly we have a server with a world designed for players spread out over all levels where a huge fraction of the population is close to max level. So everyone follows their biological programming and fights over the scarce resources.
It's funny listening to Miley talk about her days in FoH. For most of classic they were literally the only guild on the server capable of killing stuff. So they just crawled around 'oh vox is up. Cool'. Unfortunately I don't have a good solution. Instances/spawn tokens would be nice, but then people would get tired and leave when they maxed their pixels. Banning account sales would probably help but would hardly be a panacea. Getting Velious would be great, but tbh I think it'll be more of the same: I'm already on record as saying Velious will be a giant clusterfuck as everyone abandons stale Kunark content. Probably the only thing that would really 'fix' the server from a population standpoint would be the simultaneous release of Velious, Luclin and PoP
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It'd suck for me but I think it would be great for the server to just limit people to 1 char over L50. It might also be interesting to see some sort of minimally effective but hugely timeconsuming set of AAs. Perhaps a set of AAs which each increased any particular stat/resist by one. Not classic so obviously it won't happen
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] I'd also be curious to see a 'purple' server: something with pvp in dungeons only. I think there are a lot of positives to pvp (much less retarded than variance) but the potential for griefing and annoyance is just too high when there are no safe zones at all.