Everquest Mangler Server - DOING IT ALL AGAIN, AGAIN!

My wish would be:

no boxing (never happen)
Pay 1$ for a private instance of any zone for your group, similar to the raid instance thing but with respawns and no lockouts. Instances last x amount of hours or can be extended by putting another dollar in. No raidy stuff of course.
Old zones (never happen)
Yerm's idea of starting at a higher expansion but with time locked level limits?

Kharzette said:

Pay 1$ for a private instance of any zone for your group, similar to the raid instance thing but with respawns and no lockouts.

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I have not played on any TLP before Mangler, but it seems to be very active currently. They'd be fools to cannibalize it by starting a similar server now.

Lambourne said:

They'd be greedy misguided fools to cannibalize it by starting a similar server now.

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There you go.

Xevy said:

Mangler population most likely the highest TLP pop ever. Fucking like 800+ people in just the bazaar pre-PoP launch waiting to click the door to PoK. Potranq has a pick up there's so many people loitering at a given time.

In terms of guilds if you want to rush to time there's probably ~4 or 5 that will be in Time within 4 weeks of launch. If you're more casual and just want to group/AA with people in like Bastion or Tactics or whatnot, there's easily a dozen+ guilds. Mangler tends to lean more PST for raid times if that matters to you.

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Not sure if you played on Phinny but they had 22 raiding guilds during Luclin. 21 of them cleared VT in era.

I feel like there may be more casuals on Mangler then there were on Phinigel

Phinny was massive.

There were seven general channel chats at some point during pop release this past week. Take away the people who leave those channels and that seems like a huge amount. If phinny was bigger than that, that's insane.

Sterling said:

Phinny was massive.

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Ragefire was so ridiculously huge it gave birth. Even it's spawn, Lockjaw, was goddamn massive. Unfortunately the nature of winner-take-all Everquest raiding really threw a bucket of cold water on the whole thing. By the time LJ was in Kunark and Phinny was launching there was still this massive group of players that really wanted to play the game but couldn't.

Also Phinny exp was terrible. I know a mountain of people powered through but it's still fucking awful.

Boxers killed lockjaw for me. Nothin like calling camp check, fighting down to deadite ghosts in the hole to see 30 pets swarming everything controlled by some one that doesn't speak english.

Kharzette said:

Boxers killed lockjaw for me. Nothin like calling camp check, fighting down to deadite ghosts in the hole to see 30 pets swarming everything controlled by some one that doesn't speak english.

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The week or so of Ragefire prior to the addition of LJ was enough time to demonstrate to everyone what the best strategies actually were in the new TLP meta and a ton of people took that knowledge with them when they rolled on LJ. It was the smaller server but if it had a larger percentage of boxed accounts relative to humans I wouldn't be surprised.

The craziest thing about the massive Phinny population was that it was that large even while RF and LJ maintained a few hundred additional players a piece. It may have been the high water mark for TLP as a whole.

I believe I recall DBG saying Phinigel was their most popular server ever, and that they had an improved infrastructure to enable a larger concurrent playerbase without crashing the server.

All of this while P99 still averaged like 400-500 players a night “without boxing” too.

The community was really thriving.

Speakin of boxers, sort of related:

Looking at the old websites, Phinny actually still maintained 22 active raiding guilds clearing PoTime even when Agnarr had launched and was fielding 17 of its own raiding guilds.

EQ Progression as a whole during 2016-2018 had an incredibly healthy population.

There was a moment in time where there were 45 TLP raiding guilds clearing content across 4 servers spread between Classic and Gates of Discord. Even while who knows how many players were farming Velious on Blue/Red 99.

Phinny was fun. I had a dorf paladin and got lots of groups and did new places (for me) that I hadn't in the past like mistmoore. I think I might have had a job at the time too so I didn't super sock and burn out like usual.

how fucked up are the TLP servers compared to P99?

Big Flex said:

how fucked up are the TLP servers compared to P99?

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The differences are practically innumerable but suffice to say ordinary content is far easier at the group level. Raid content is more challenging in the post 2015 era when TLP raid mobs boast a series of buffs MoTM, MoTOW, and PoTM.

Nothing on TLPs is as contested as P99 because of pickzones(there can be 2, 10 or even 20+ Lguk zones open at once) increased respawns (both global and mob specific, for example Nagafen spawns roughly every 24 to 30 hours in open world) and Agents of Change (once a week you can spawn a private instance of any zone with raid mobs to to kill said mobs with your raid, ensuring literally every player can access all raid content even if the resident hardcore guild bothers to batphone all 5-6 classic targets every day).

All of this results in a server where you will hit max level pretty quickly, you will rapidly get best in slot gear and the economy will be massively inflated because there are 50 Frenzy camps around the clock dropping FBSS.

This increases burnout so after just 60-90 days of classic most players are terribly bored because “finishing” your character is so simple.

That said, I encountered a lot of odd non classic shit on P99 Green/Teal. I was amazed to see during the server first Nagafen/Vox raid that we could straight up walk into the dragon rooms without aggro. On TLP you will typically have Nagafen aggro the moment you open his door, and Vox will usually aggro you from just inside her rock.