EQ TLP - Oakwynd (Evolving Ruleset Progression Server)

Arbitrary said:

I still think it's possible Vaniki moved enough merch in the store to warrant tinkering with something like it again but the real story is Mischief holding on to the big numbers for this long.

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Not likely, but I can tell you what is most likely.

Devs hate TLPs, they are boring to them. But the devs that worked on vaniki saw it as something interesting and non boring. So now they are convienced that it was a great idea and want to force it on normal tlps so its interesting to them (the devs) but not to normal players.

If they go wild, they will lose a ton of money this year.

I could also believe that Mischief is successful enough that they don't yet want to introduce another server with similar rules for fear of cutting in to its playerbase. Maybe that gets us another gimmick server.

Yelinak is doing better than I would have thought.

How come Mischief has the big numbers and Thornblade is standing dick to dick with Vaniki?

Arbitrary said:

I could also believe that Mischief is successful enough that they don't yet want to introduce another server with similar rules for fear of cutting in to its playerbase. Maybe that gets us another gimmick server.

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Mischief is very successful for a server at that stage for sure but its still far from where a new server would be on average players per night.

Simply put any server that does not start in classic or kunark and or has some weird level restrictions will be a massive failure. Now put that as a weird 2nd server sure go for it, but as a primary server I hope someone talks some sense into them.

Jasper said:

Yelinak is doing better than I would have thought.

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POP is the most popular expansion after release by far.

Arbitrary said:

How come Mischief has the big numbers and Thornblade is standing dick to dick with Vaniki?

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I think its more a lesson of why you should never split servers.

Elderan said:

I think its more a lesson of why you should never split servers.

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I guess everyone really should have learned from the WoW TLPs that people naturally gravitate towards the server with more people with the effects increasing over time.

Elderan said:

POP is the most popular expansion after release by far.

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PoP is my least favorite so far. The first couple weeks are fun, but after that... meh...

Arbitrary said:

How come Mischief has the big numbers and Thornblade is standing dick to dick with Vaniki?

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Mischief was announced first. Thornblade was tacked on as a spillover server. So Thornblade has always played second fiddle to Mischief. I found this thread and going by a quick count, as of September 2021, Mischief guilds outnumbered Thornblade 17-9:

Old guild list


I wanna say Thornblade maintained a pretty healthy population for a while, but over time lost a lot of people (and guilds) to Mischief via server transfers. Now Mischief has 20+ raid guilds and TB might have less than 5.

Elderan said:

Not likely, but I can tell you what is most likely.

Devs hate TLPs, they are boring to them. But the devs that worked on vaniki saw it as something interesting and non boring. So now they are convienced that it was a great idea and want to force it on normal tlps so its interesting to them (the devs) but not to normal players.

If they go wild, they will lose a ton of money this year.

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I got that vibe a lot from the EQ team. They'll make changes from outcry but I think they loathe players to some degree. I mean, people are awful, but I think they're too defensive about their ideas.

Or they have weird priorities. Like Absor talking about how important story is to everything they do and how much time they spend on it. Like, it's cool to have something coherent (which they often fail at) but most players would put it far from the most important thing.

I told my neighbor that we wouldn’t play because it would probably ruin his good life and he laughed and agreed. My original pitch was ‘would you like to try a relaunch of one of the games that started it all?’ He’s only 30 so he missed the boat.

A few minutes later when our wives were distracted he said ‘I’m fuckin playin bruh, it’s happening!’

I can still be the better person and just let the idea slip, but it would be fun to run it up again with a RL bro for the first time since 99

Rod-138 said:

I told my neighbor that we wouldn’t play because it would probably ruin his good life and he laughed and agreed. My original pitch was ‘would you like to try a relaunch of one of the games that started it all?’ He’s only 30 so he missed the boat.

A few minutes later when our wives were distracted he said ‘I’m fuckin playin bruh, it’s happening!’

I can still be the better person and just let the idea slip, but it would be fun to run it up again with a RL bro for the first time since 99

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Do it!

Tuco said:

Old Freeport looks like something artists lovingly did while high on adderall and having to model a hundred other new zones while being highly constrained by a busted 90s PC gaming engine.

New Freeport looks like some high school modeling shit.

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New Freeport has never felt good, but it can be hard to put in words why. I studied in detail that video and a few things stood out to me.

1. New Freeport has drastically high verticality that kills your sight lines. Losing your sight lines forces you to open your map and once your map is open you only focus on the map and not the game world. So all the complex detail of New Freeport might as well not even be there, because all you are doing is moving your -> to zone line Y.

2. The new wall-brick color palette is not pleasing to the eye. It looks better close up, but when you view it from a distance it hurts your eyes.

3. I wouldn't call old Freeport simple, but compared to the complex maze of New Freeport, it certainly is. I would say Old Freeport budgeted it's space far better, whereas New Freeport feels overly large and complex for the sake of being overly large and complex.

4. All the charm and personality of Old Freeport is lost in New. The New Freeport just feel like NPCs are just static vendors, where in Old it felt like NPCs where going about their daily lives.

5. Old Freeport has basic square geometry. Simple, precise, and it all fits together. The New is all over the place. It feels like a random level generator vomited it out.

It was a worthy experiment, but it failed. Instead of admitting defeat, they rode it out which is unfortunate. They should have created a V3 or just gone back to V1.

Zaide said:

View attachment 463473View attachment 463475

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It's a sex swing. Newest TLP is an X rated RP server.

I played an emu at some point that turned new FP into a custom zone w/ high level quests etc. It was actually pretty cool in that context fwiw

Fight said:

New Freeport has never felt good, but it can be hard to put in words why. I studied in detail that video and a few things stood out to me.

1. New Freeport has drastically high verticality that kills your sight lines. Losing your sight lines forces you to open your map and once your map is open you only focus on the map and not the game world. So all the complex detail of New Freeport might as well not even be there, because all you are doing is moving your -> to zone line Y.

2. The new wall-brick color palette is not pleasing to the eye. It looks better close up, but when you view it from a distance it hurts your eyes.

3. I wouldn't call old Freeport simple, but compared to the complex maze of New Freeport, it certainly is. I would say Old Freeport budgeted it's space far better, whereas New Freeport feels overly large and complex for the sake of being overly large and complex.

4. All the charm and personality of Old Freeport is lost in New. The New Freeport just feel like NPCs are just static vendors, where in Old it felt like NPCs where going about their daily lives.

5. Old Freeport has basic square geometry. Simple, precise, and it all fits together. The New is all over the place. It feels like a random level generator vomited it out.

It was a worthy experiment, but it failed. Instead of admitting defeat, they rode it out which is unfortunate. They should have created a V3 or just gone back to V1.

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The sight lines thing is huge, not even just the walls but it also has very few other landmarks that stand out. It looks the same everywhere making it hard to learn the layout.

I learned this the hard way when I used to make maps for FPS LAN parties in the 90s. If it looked the same too much people just got lost, couldn't find weapons/health pots, and ended up just running around randomly and usually tired of the map quickly. Once I started making sure each area had a distinct look to it and had connections that made sense people quickly learned their way around and could play the same map for hours on end. It doesn't even need grand design, you can do a lot just using different room shapes/heights, light levels, wall textures and asymmetry. Old Freeport had plenty of sight line blockers in it (probably to keep the framerate from tanking on 90s hardware) but it made sure to make each corner distinctive by having each building be a different color, large signs, open/narrow layout etc. Wasn't the greatest even then.

I feel like many later EQ city zones overuse symmetry which makes things look the same everywhere, even PoK is guilty of that to some degree. Plane of Tranquility is a very well done zone in that respect, it's a very easy zone to memorize and navigate.

Elderan said:

People love classic to pop....

Poor vaniki, and to think they want to implement Vaniki ideas into normal TLPS. Its like the person who made new coke trying to convince themsevles it wasnt a total failure.

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It wasn't a total failure, nor was mischief a universal success. It would be crazy to think EVERY part of vaniki was bad or couldn't work just because the sum total bombed. It had a very advanced start, expacs unlocked in sets, double loot, gap/hardmode levels, and resist changes which altered balance. Are ALL of these bad? The double loot seemed to be so overwhelmingly loved that I think they'd be crazy NOT to put it onto a non-fv-loot server. The GOD start, probably not such a solid idea.

Think about mischief. It had fv loot, random loot, and extra loot. What would a fv loot server with NO other changes be like? Every assumed massive monopolization and toxic play. With random loot, you mitigate that. With random loot, though, it makes it harder to get items you really want or camp things though... so there's wildly extra loot, so that's mitigated too. End result is a good server. A random loot with only 1 loot table per kill and no fv rules? Fucking AWFUL idea. FV without anything else? Probably bad. Now, think about vaniki again.

So yeah. I don't think it's so wild to try to "fix" vaniki by saying the CONSTANT drudgery of being difficult could be offset by "catching up" between each wave, by having staggered content then level then content then level. By starting in classic (or at least no later than velious, much as I personally dislike this) so that people don't nope from day 1. Or, perhaps, by just taking whatever people liked most (eg double loot especially double quest item camp drops) and just bringing that to whatever comes next.

Tuco said:

Old Freeport looks like something artists lovingly did while high on adderall and having to model a hundred other new zones while being highly constrained by a busted 90s PC gaming engine.

New Freeport looks like some high school modeling shit.

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New Freeport was the brainchild of a higher up at SoE who didn't even play the game iirc. And they busted the entire zone out in like a weekend because they wanted some new content for an upcoming patch. So it doesn't surprise me that it looks pretty shit.