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

Rajaah said:

Yeah, the 70 era is murder on TLPs. One of the good things about Vaniki is that it rolls the entire 70 era up into what is essentially a single expansion's timeframe. We'll see how that goes.

There are 3 major points where the population of TLPs gets hammered:

1. LDON (Since they usually give it its own unlock and extend PoP which is completely goddamn pointless)

2. DoN through PoR (Since most guilds keep doing OOW for all that time, and two of the four level 70 expansions don't even have AAs)

3. COTF through TBM (Post level 100 is a bit of a rough patch with COTF, Darkened Sea, and Broken Mirror all being subpar expansions in a row. COTF and TBM in particular are just not that fun. At least TDS between them has some really cool zones. However the worst thing they did here was make it so that once you're 105, pre-COTF expansions suddenly give like no AA exp whatsoever, to force you into COTF+ zones...which happen to be the dullest zones at that point. Eventually you get to EOK which is a lot better, but either way, that entire 105 stretch where they obsolete previous expansions seems to put the nail in the coffin for a lot of servers)

It's also worth noting that OOW on live was the highest population EQ ever recorded. The mythos at this point is that PoP was the game's high point and then LoY/LDON and GoD killed it. The population actually coasted through LoY/LDON without any issue, then suffered a drop during GoD, then massively rebounded during OOW launch to pass the previous highs set by PoP. At least for the first month or two of OOW, then WoW came out and the population began to slide.

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Rajaah said:

Yeah same here.

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I bet this does indeed describe a lot of people here, including me to an extent.

I was in the top guild on Prexus/Rathe for five years or so back when I was reading the drama, so slightly better than 71st. However my guild had a monopoly and thus lacked any real competitive drama. So it wasn't until TLP that I got to engage in any real pissing contests like the pros did when I was growing up.

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yerm said:

I think this comment describes the selo drama? Given the timing of everything? He'd be talking about the celebrity videos?

Those were paid for by two people, Krim and Drill. Krim's past record is fine and I'd argue his leadership decisions ended up helping roi become the success story that would totally dunk on triality. Drill was IN triality.

These guys dominated after everyone left for wow and promptly lost when people came back for tlps and caught up to them. Fun dudes in my experience, probably a lot of great individuals all around, just too big of a collective ego though. Did they even win any aradune expansion races before the demise of atabishi?

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First said:

That's a funny history. The story of RoI and Triality is pretty much one of Triality having much of it's core retiring over a period of time. Many had been playing for quite awhile and were starting to lose interest in the game - combined with having checked off most of their bucket list items in Triality. Going from 2x expansions to 1x in a year also is part of that IMO - the tempo change was rough in terms of the high raid tempo that the guild was used to and there were some other changes to game fundamentals. Despite this the record is still pretty impressive thru HoT.

There are also other intangibles - it's hard to compare apples to apples in EQ raiding between guilds that peaked in different eras. Here's an example - let's look at TSS (beltron) - it took guild #2 19 days longer than Triality to beat the expansion - it took guild #5 53 days longer to beat it. With the most recent EQ expansion, it appears it took guild #5 under 1 hour to beat it after RoI. You can also point to things like VoA having about 25 guilds beating it as TSS having about 125 guilds beating it, let alone the ~200 who beat Vishtimar in any remotely similar time period. It's hard to see expansion to expansion, but it's clear that both the game and the competitive scene have clearly changed over time.

What insight does this give us? I'm not sure exactly, but it seems to suggest each guild being dominant in some different eras (with some overlap). It doesn't make much sense to me to talk about CD/DH/Triality/Assent/RF curb stomping AL/FoH/LoS/etc for similar reasons. There's a reason for some collective ego, and that doesn't necessarily go away because of some twilight years while the game's raid scene (and dev headcount) has declined.

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Zaide said:

MFW when Triality lost it's top spot to a guild fresh off a TLP server.

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alavaz said:

Lol, are we seriously debating whether the Triality collective ego has merit? I give points to anyone who posts funny EQ updates. That was once a major part of the culture and seems to have died out with TLPs.

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