Curious, has anybody here spent any considerable amount of time raiding on Firiona Vie? What's it like with the free trade loot? I'd assume anyone that played there a lot would have the best idea what us first timers can expect.
I stopped playing FV about 5 years ago when phinny went in to Luclin, and didn't start playing there until the later era's so this was just my experience from 5 years ago.
The in era raid loot/previous era loot market gets saturated pretty quick once everyone is able to clear it. For example, I could farm krono for 1 day on a TLP and then have enough to buy a full set of in era raid gear for a box. This was later era's though, I didn't play there during the common TLP cycle era's (classic-pop).
There aren't that many actual "real" guilds on there. Many of the guilds there that you'd see raiding are just groups of people from other live server guilds that use FV as a way to make a little krono on the side to take back to their server by clearing raid content and selling the loot.
Items lose value super fast (a lot faster than what you see on normal TLP's) so you have more of an urgency to sell as fast as possible. Classic and Kunark is mostly tradable stuff normally anyway even the raid loot, so I don't think you'll see much of a difference on mischief from common TLP's until you get to Velious and beyond.
Once you get in to the era's where most things are normally no-trade, you're mostly looking to farm quantity over quality. Since everything will be pretty cheap you make up the difference by just farming a bunch of stuff that accumulates rather than getting a big pay off from 1 item like you would on normal TLP's.
The biggest thing with free-trade is that it does have a very pay to win feel to it. You don't need to put any effort or time in to raiding if you don't want to because you can just buy everything. You could spend hundreds of hours raiding and decking out your char and have someone else make a char and be equal gear to you in 30 minutes. This however isn't entirely a negative thing though. A big reason why people never go back to TLP's in their later era's is because of the amount of time required to catch up. Free-trade basically alleviates that so you might expect to always see a flow of people coming to the server no matter what era it's in. That's essentially what a lot of FV is and why there are so many people on it compared to other live servers because half the people/guilds on there are just there to farm loot to sell to that constant flow of people starting fresh on the server that buy all their gear to catch up.
Open world shit is always fucking dead. All of it. Everywhere. Who is out there killing Gorenaire every respawn? I don't know but she's never fucking up. Nothing is ever up.
From my understanding it's an automated mq script people run. Something like: warp group around to dif zones > check if X mob is up > kill > loot. Not sure if that's 100% the case, but when I played FV and noticed the same thing, when I asked that's what I was told. The main reason people keep the classic-velious stuff dead is because there is no level requirement on that loot. It makes for good twink gear for people starting on the server and sells pretty quick. Some of the classic-velious loot, at least when I played on FV, sold for more than in era loot. They only have OW for the early era's though so I don't expect you'll see the same thing on mischief in its later era's.