Everquest TLP - Aradune and Rizlona Servers (Now with real customer service)

Mrniceguy said:

Mangler wasn't the most successful TLP.
Aradune has less botting then Rizlona.
There is tons of people that don't care either way, but it's only a few people running all the bots and less then 100 accounts. Botting definitely drives away more people then that.

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I'd trust that Zaide is probably telling the truth here:

Zaide said:

A member of DPG staff confirmed for me today that Mangler was the most popular TLP server ever. This surprised me personally as I expected it to be Phinigel.

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There was also a comment in Discord from Dreamweaver about Mangler being the most populated, but there's about zero chance of me trying to find it now. Now, maybe you could argue populated =/= successful, but I think it qualifies.

I have been keeping numbers since agnarr. Obviously different eras have different populations and different rules for each server but overall this is the list I have as most popular to least.

Its Mangler, Agnarr, Selo, Aradune, Rizlona, Coirnav, Miraguel

Elderan said:

I have been keeping numbers since agnarr. Obviously different eras have different populations and different rules for each server but overall this is the list I have as most popular to least.

Its Mangler, Agnarr, Selo, Aradune, Rizlona, Coirnav, Miraguel

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In what? Classic or when they released?

Bobbybick said:

In what? Classic or when they released?

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Average of each over each expansion. For example Mangler during luclin averaged 1550 players at night 10pm est. Aradune has averaged 1030 players at night 10pm est.

I also estimate that DPG has made significantly less with Aradune than they did with Mangler. Besides the population difference the main issue is on Aradune people generally have 1 alt and not more because its 2 box limited. However on Mangler there was no such limit. A large number of people boxed at least a group on Mangler and those additional 4 alts to gear would have generated a significant amount of extra krono bought not just for subscriptions but also for gear they bought off the market.

At what point do people stay on a TLP? Or is it just never going to happen until they say "it's the last tlp"? Any idea what % rerolls each launch?

WorryPlaysGames said:

At what point do people stay on a TLP? Or is it just never going to happen until they say "it's the last tlp"? Any idea what % rerolls each launch?

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IMO there are 3 general types of TLP player.

• The player who remakes every TLP and loves classic to pop (25%)
• The player who remakes every OTHER TLP and loves classic to pop (50%)
• The player who plays one TLP ever (25%)

Elderan said:

IMO there are 3 general types of TLP player.

• The player who remakes every TLP and loves classic to pop (25%)
• The player who remakes every OTHER TLP and loves classic to pop (50%)
• The player who plays one TLP ever (25%)

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There's also the people that would play on 1 tlp ever but will reroll on another one if enough of their friends also do that. This was a not insignificant portion of people i knew on Phinigel for example.

Los_Necros said:

Now that I definitely believe. Someone above definitely is training the GMs or telling people to train the GMs in such a way that these people can get around them

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Always been the case.

Several people in your guild about to be banhammered for cheating? Broadcast how easy it is to trade nodrop items using bag within a bag exploits? Good thing your one bard officer who never says anything is the wife of a Sony VP, or the enchanter who pops in every so often to raid with you, has max aa, and never actually does xp groups anywbere is an EQ developer and thought nobody knew that her irc handle was the same as her Dev alias. Now you arent getting banhammered but "try not to do it again!". Wheeee.

Barraind said:

Always been the case.

Several people in your guild about to be banhammered for cheating? Broadcast how easy it is to trade nodrop items using bag within a bag exploits? Good thing your one bard officer who never says anything is the wife of a Sony VP, or the enchanter who pops in every so often to raid with you, has max aa, and never actually does xp groups anywbere is an EQ developer and thought nobody knew that her irc handle was the same as her Dev alias. Now you arent getting banhammered but "try not to do it again!". Wheeee.

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Hell, I would call my self an old school conspiracy theoricist but y'all are hitting flat earth levels of hilariousness.

Seeing as how 95% of this forum seems to be hardcore trolls, I'm surprised youre not suspicious of this being a person pretending to be said EQ developer to ruin their name and spread lies.

"Shrug"

Vanessa said:

Biden voter I take it?

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There you go. That was GM Narlee who was tasked with bot busting. There's more to it, but this is from July 2020.

Interrrrrresting

These were big botters too?

I know a big issue for all of this is automated detection is basically impossible. Everquest won't risk trying to run a local watcher on the client due to legality issues that are a nightmare since people put a lot of money into the game and lawyers are the spawn of evil.

P99 can get away some little stuff but they are hardcore about no money whatsoever which is what protects them from all kinds of things.

Id be curious what the GM was catching on these videos. I've been told by several people that they submitted tickets with videos of the botters before. I got to see some of those videos and honestly it wasnt definitive enough, not to mention most are extremely raw and unedited. The shit I gave to DPG caught them doing it all and you couldn't even begin to second guess it....though I'm still waiting to be 100% sure they got banned as I still have doubts DPG acted that fast and/or the botters are just trying to hide but it's looking more and more likely as the days go by.

Ive worked in the software realm for a long long time and my job nowadays is high level Ops so I know intimately just how much you have to hand hold dev/support. To give them some credit though, if you get a complaint, bug, ticket, etc with very little information for something is going to be hard to get definitive data for, it's a giant pain in the ass.

And ontop of that, if someone's a dick ( which seeing as Narwhal is posting here in general.....no offence if you are actually cool boss ), and is constantly submitting shitty evidence, I could see CS telling them to fuck off.

Another factor that could be in play now is the new management....but my gut is telling me the burden is on the community to go above and beyond to provide a solid case if folks want to get results. So make sure you get TIMESTAMPS, thems the keys.

Xevy, if you got any more info, hit me up. I've turned this into a fun project and am having fun

If you don't think there are legit whales buying massive quantities of Krono all the time you just haven't played EQ enough.

On Agnarr I ran the very popular open plat Vex Thal. The third week a guy shows up who drops Krono like crazy. Then the next week. And so on until I stopped running them. We're talking 20+ Krono every week. This was during PoP so VT wasn't even current. I asked him one week where did he get all his Krono. The guy bought them from Daybreak. He made a lot from his job, but his job required him to travel all the time so he couldn't really spend it, and this also made it hard for him to join a raid guild on a schedule. He could, however, make one raid a week where he got to basically pick what he wanted. And this was on Agnarr the prison server.

Long live Modsiw, The Whale.

Doop said:

Hell, I would call my self an old school conspiracy theoricist but y'all are hitting flat earth levels of hilariousness.

Seeing as how 95% of this forum seems to be hardcore trolls, I'm surprised youre not suspicious of this being a person pretending to be said EQ developer to ruin their name and spread lies.

"Shrug"

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If I wasn't there for those things happening, I might think "that doesn't happen", but I was.

It was really not a secret a lot of Sony and EQ specific staff raided with top end guilds.

Bonus, she webcammed with a few of us during VT raids. Hard to deny you're that person when you're sitting in your apartment and are who you are.

As a person who loves doing Epic quests, I've sold a handful of MQs. I know exactly how crazy some people are about buying stuff in video games at the drop of a hat.

Legit play with middle eastern royalty at the moment, people got lots of money.

Botters on the other hand don't pay for jack shit, it's all about making money and optimization :/

DBG knows exactly who is running MQ and who's MQ build you have. Some of the info that came to light in the latest suspension wave was the mq2ic plugin sending in-game mail to GM's announcing who you are. It was originally baked into mq2 to prevent its use on TLP from what I understand, but its been also doing this on live and rizlona and for who knows how long. Speculation is that they also get a report that includes what plugins you have actively loaded. Who knows what else it's doing, no one has access to it besides eqmule.

DickTrickle said:

I'd trust that Zaide is probably telling the truth here:


There was also a comment in Discord from Dreamweaver about Mangler being the most populated, but there's about zero chance of me trying to find it now. Now, maybe you could argue populated =/= successful, but I think it qualifies.

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I'm not confident in DPGs ability to read at a 5th grade level. But i will say this Phinny was gaining a ton of players in the Classic-SoL era when botting is typically a problem. On the other hand I know Mangler started out with a massive population but lost a ton of it's player base. If were using these servers as some sort of case study on if botting is detrimental or not i would think whichever server had better retention during Classic-PoP would be the indicator too look at. I'm very confident Phinny is the winner in that regard, it was definitely the only TLP to grow rather then contract in the Classic-PoP stretch.

Metalhead said:

DBG knows exactly who is running MQ and who's MQ build you have. Some of the info that came to light in the latest suspension wave was the mq2ic plugin sending in-game mail to GM's announcing who you are. It was originally baked into mq2 to prevent its use on TLP from what I understand, but its been also doing this on live and rizlona and for who knows how long. Speculation is that they also get a report that includes what plugins you have actively loaded. Who knows what else it's doing, no one has access to it besides eqmule.

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This is on the redguides compile which is why they are trash shit bags. MMOBugs compile doesn't do this.