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.
You can choose not to believe them but then you're left with your feelings and memories. You can believe something like the EQ resource listing of population levels (which has shown Mangler consistently as the TLP with the highest percentage of "High" population ranking), but then I guess you'd say DPG coded that status listing wrong too.
At least 18 guilds cleared DoDh in era on Mangler, possibly 20. And, in fact, that's actually been largely consistent for a while now. Granted, some guilds have dropped splits. From what I've seen, that guild completion rate is comparable to Phinigel. Mangler benefitted a good deal from Coirnav and Selo refugees (the current top guild on Mangler's core 20ish people are from Coirnav), covid-19 work from home, the FREE TLP period while in PoP, later starting TLPs and the poor Aradune launch. I don't think any other TLP has had the benefit of circumstances like Mangler. If botting was really that harmful to most people, I don't think it would have sustained and grown through PoP and LDoN when the bot armies were clearing open world elemental targets. All those people who were coming from other places got to benefit from the kronos being able to buy a bunch of twink gear, so I honestly think it's a wash.
I mean, I guess you could try and make the claim that a Mangler with botters quickly banned would have even more, or that there's less real people behind each character on Mangler, but there's no metric where you can say Mangler wasn't very highly populated with paying accounts throughout its lifespan. It didn't lose a "ton" of its player base, at least not in comparison to other TLPs. In PoP, Mangler crashed something like 30 times in 45 days or something ridiculous, and yet the population grew. Most people like to bitch about botting, but
very few people actually quit over it, imo.
Also worth noting Mangler started when anniversary bonus XP was active and Phinigel started out with poor XP rates that were eventually increased and then ran into the anniversary event after only a few months, so there would be a natural skew resulting from that.
