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

Elderan said:

At this point I think Atabashi has some serious mental illness. I really starting to worry about him.


He counts 5k people on Aradune when there are 2k people. He see 3 navy seals when its just a 12 year old handicap kid.

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Since you're here though, lets ask some questions. If your numbers that you like to push aren't just completely made up, you should have some legitimate and meaningful replies.

1. You claim that Mangler was 2x more popular than Aradune. Lets use velious as an example, another era where you claim Mangler was 2x more popular. The question is, if Mangler was 2x more popular, why did Aradune have 2x or more raiding guilds with higher average raiders per guild? In velious, BT and M&M were manglers two largest guilds. BT sat at about an average of 100-120 players throughout velious and M&M had around 100. These were the 2 largest guilds. TEB alone had more than BT and M&M combined. There were also a handful of other guilds who had 100 or more members. How is this possible? How is it possible that Mangler had about 15 guilds in velious and Aradune had 30+ with higher average players per guild if Mangler had 2x more people?

2. Auto-Kick. Mangler removed auto-kick very early in classic despite it being a true-box server. Auto-Kick is STILL enabled on Aradune despite it being a 2 box limit server. Obviously that doesnt mean everyone on Aradune follows the rules, but relative to other servers there is a very low number of people who box more than 1 character at a time so there are far less boxes clogging the server. I spoke to Ngreth about this and asked him two questions. I asked him why it was still active on Aradune when other servers got rid of it in classic and I asked him if auto-kick was based on population. To the first question he replied that it still being active on Aradune in PoP was an oversight. They wanted it for the PoP launch though it was less likely that it would be needed by then, but it was supposed to be removed in the June patch. To my 2nd question regarding if auto-kick being active is based on population,
he replied "

Ngreth — 06/07/2021​

it's a server setting
[5:31 PM]
so, we defenitely have it for launch when there are more people than the servers can handle trying to log in, and we don;t want people "holding" their place.
[5:32 PM]
We want people who want to play to be able to log in

As I've always said, it's only logical that auto-kick is based on a servers population, and Ngreth confirms this. So how is it possible that, according to you, Mangler had 2x higher the population but auto-kick was removed during the first half of classic and never returned? While Aradune has had auto-kick in EVERY expansion. How does that make any sense at all especially when dreamweaver confirmed that Mangler/Aradune/Mischief all share the exact same server cap? To my knowledge no other TLP has ever had auto kick enabled in any expansion outside of Classic. Again I ask, how does your numbers make sense? Maybe a better way of judging classic populations on TLP's is how long it takes before auto-kick is removed?

inb4 your non-meaningful response that dodges the questions.

Atabishi said:

The question is, if Mangler was 2x more popular, why did Aradune have 2x or more raiding guilds with higher average raiders per guild?

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Number of guilds and or raids does not always translate into increased overall population.

Atabishi said:

Auto-Kick. Mangler removed auto-kick very early in classic despite it being a true-box server. Auto-Kick is STILL enabled on Aradune despite it being a 2 box limit server

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I am pretty sure I have been over this before. But the reason why the queue on Aradune != the queue on Manger is because the server had different server max thresholds at the time.

Here is the breakdown

2020

• Mid Feb Daybreak moves the servers to a new datacenter
• Mid Feb Pop release on Mangler with a cap of 3500 (A queue returns for the next few days)
• Feb to April Mangler crashes every 36-48 hours
• Mid April they fix the crashes. However the server still has extreme lag nightly, just does not crash.
• May Aradune releases with a cap of 3500 (There is a queue)
• First week of Aradune extreme lag makes the game unplayable for most. Cap is reduced multiple to 2000 (There is a queue)
• Second week of Aradune Cap is raised to 3500. The extreme lag returns making the game unplayable. The cap is reduced back to 2000. (There is a queue)
• Third week of Aradune Cap is raised to 3000. The extreme lag returns making the game unplayable. The cap is reduced back to 2000. (There is a queue)
• July Aradune is still at a 2000 cap . The server still has bad lag nightly but not extreme like before. (There is NO queue)
• Around this time they finally fix the lag issue. Aradune population cap is raised to ?? assume 3500. The server reaches more than 2200 people in a night after this point.

At some point in I believe was August the AFK kick was removed from Aradune because it was averaging about 1500 players a night. Once it was removed the average went to about 1700 a night and the server starting lagging and so the AFK kick was turned back on and never been removed since.

TLDR: Aradune had a lower population cap than Mangler because of the datacenter move causing issues. This is why Aradune had a queue for longer than Mangler. Ardune has had the AFK kick on for so long because they simply forgot to remove it after the population decreased enough in about Aug of 2020.

Elderan said:

Number of guilds and or raids does not always translate into increased overall population.



I am pretty sure I have been over this before. But the reason why the queue on Aradune != the queue on Manger is because the server had different server max thresholds at the time.

Here is the breakdown

2020

• Mid Feb Daybreak moves the servers to a new datacenter
• Mid Feb Pop release on Mangler with a cap of 3500 (A queue returns for the next few days)
• Feb to April Mangler crashes every 36-48 hours
• Mid April they fix the crashes. However the server still has extreme lag nightly, just does not crash.
• May Aradune releases with a cap of 3500 (There is a queue)
• First week of Aradune extreme lag makes the game unplayable for most. Cap is reduced multiple to 2000 (There is a queue)
• Second week of Aradune Cap is raised to 3500. The extreme lag returns making the game unplayable. The cap is reduced back to 2000. (There is a queue)
• Third week of Aradune Cap is raised to 3000. The extreme lag returns making the game unplayable. The cap is reduced back to 2000. (There is a queue)
• July Aradune is still at a 2000 cap . The server still has bad lag nightly but not extreme like before. (There is NO queue)
• Around this time they finally fix the lag issue. Aradune population cap is raised to ?? assume 3500. The server reaches more than 2200 people in a night after this point.

At some point in I believe was August the AFK kick was removed from Aradune because it was averaging about 1500 players a night. Once it was removed the average went to about 1700 a night and the server starting lagging and so the AFK kick was turned back on and never been removed since.

TLDR: Aradune had a lower population cap than Mangler because of the datacenter move causing issues. This is why Aradune had a queue for longer than Mangler. Ardune has had the AFK kick on for so long because they simply forgot to remove it after the population decreased enough in about Aug of 2020.

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You can find in the posts that I have linked earlier in the thread that the server cap on Aradune was removed to try to and stop the queue, and the lag caused them to lower the server cap. It is never said what the cap was raised to or lowered back down to, but several postings on those threads speculate that the cap was raised to 5k and then lowered from there. There is no posting that ever confirms that the cap was lowered under 3500. Again, all of your information is based on fake numbers you yourself came up with.

The lag on aradune stopped at month 2. Lets pretend everything you say about server caps is correct for first month of Aradune. Why is auto kick enabled in all other exp[ansions?

Face it, not even the server settings agree with your BS lol

Atabishi said:

Why is auto kick enabled in all other exp[ansions?

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Because they forgot to remove it..

Elderan said:

Because they forgot to remove it..

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Ngreth disagrees. It was supposed to be removed the june patch after pop launch, as he said. No time before that. Think ill trust the server settings and Ngreth more than your BS.

Love how Elderan has actual facts and numbers for his side while Atabishi's posts like a Loose Change style conspiracy theorist who argues by asking irrelevant questions

Ambiturner said:

Love how Elderan has actual facts and numbers for his side while Atabishi's posts like a Loose Change style conspiracy theorist who argues by asking irrelevant questions

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Actual facts and numbers? Where are these facts and numbers confirmed? No where. No where has it ever been said that aradune cap was reduced to 2k lol. He claims they forgot about auto kick while ngreth says it was supposed to be removed the patch after pop launch and THATS where they forgot to remove it. They intentionally kept it on in other expansions due to population. I can't anymore, you guys are actually just too retarded for communication.

Since its now past midnight I can post the June 2021 numbers

Aradune averaged high pop was 824 people a day
Aradune averaged low pop was 242 people a day

Average high time was 21:55
Average low time was 04:57

Those aradune numbers are either scary or make no sense. Assuming you still leave all your bots in general channels, 200+ of those would be you guys exclusively at the low time.

Or did you stop leaving 200-300 bots in generals on Aradune?

I spend a lot less time with "join general channels" ticked than I did on previous TLPs, suspect I'm not the only one that's checked out of that shit.

Can't really make assumptions of population based on chat channel numbers IMO.

Yeah, it's imperfect, but are we expected to believe Atabishi routinely tracks down the numbers of every guild who clears content for every expansion on a frequent enough basis to track population? There's merit to some of his points but I don't think anyone has a really great handle on true population numbers.

Atabishi said:

Since you're here though, lets ask some questions. If your numbers that you like to push aren't just completely made up, you should have some legitimate and meaningful replies.

1. You claim that Mangler was 2x more popular than Aradune. Lets use velious as an example, another era where you claim Mangler was 2x more popular. The question is, if Mangler was 2x more popular, why did Aradune have 2x or more raiding guilds with higher average raiders per guild? In velious, BT and M&M were manglers two largest guilds. BT sat at about an average of 100-120 players throughout velious and M&M had around 100. These were the 2 largest guilds. TEB alone had more than BT and M&M combined. There were also a handful of other guilds who had 100 or more members. How is this possible? How is it possible that Mangler had about 15 guilds in velious and Aradune had 30+ with higher average players per guild if Mangler had 2x more people?

2. Auto-Kick. Mangler removed auto-kick very early in classic despite it being a true-box server. Auto-Kick is STILL enabled on Aradune despite it being a 2 box limit server. Obviously that doesnt mean everyone on Aradune follows the rules, but relative to other servers there is a very low number of people who box more than 1 character at a time so there are far less boxes clogging the server. I spoke to Ngreth about this and asked him two questions. I asked him why it was still active on Aradune when other servers got rid of it in classic and I asked him if auto-kick was based on population. To the first question he replied that it still being active on Aradune in PoP was an oversight. They wanted it for the PoP launch though it was less likely that it would be needed by then, but it was supposed to be removed in the June patch. To my 2nd question regarding if auto-kick being active is based on population,
he replied "

Ngreth — 06/07/2021​

it's a server setting
[5:31 PM]
so, we defenitely have it for launch when there are more people than the servers can handle trying to log in, and we don;t want people "holding" their place.
[5:32 PM]
We want people who want to play to be able to log in

As I've always said, it's only logical that auto-kick is based on a servers population, and Ngreth confirms this. So how is it possible that, according to you, Mangler had 2x higher the population but auto-kick was removed during the first half of classic and never returned? While Aradune has had auto-kick in EVERY expansion. How does that make any sense at all especially when dreamweaver confirmed that Mangler/Aradune/Mischief all share the exact same server cap? To my knowledge no other TLP has ever had auto kick enabled in any expansion outside of Classic. Again I ask, how does your numbers make sense? Maybe a better way of judging classic populations on TLP's is how long it takes before auto-kick is removed?

inb4 your non-meaningful response that dodges the questions.

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Nowhere in Ngreth's reply does he say it's based on population. He said it's a server setting that is on for launch to handle the initial load. You want to read into it that it's automatically based on population and adjusts over time but can simply be a on/off situation that they never turned off after the initial launch (which makes sense considering they have to turn it off manually).

DickTrickle said:

Yeah, it's imperfect, but are we expected to believe Atabishi routinely tracks down the numbers of every guild who clears content for every expansion on a frequent enough basis to track population? There's merit to some of his points but I don't think anyone has a really great handle on true population numbers.

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It's actually quite simple. You just find all the guilds that have over 100 members by looking at their dkp sites and get a total number of active raiding mains. For DZ guilds I generally only counted those above 50% RA and for OW guilds only those over 30% RA. Sometimes, although rare, guilds on their DKP sites give alts the same rank as mains so you just don't count them at all. Then you find the 3-4 smallest guilds and do the same thing. You just average the high end and the low end and all other guilds will fall somewhere between those 2. To err on the safe side, you assume all guilds in the middle have an average closer to the low end rather than doing a middle average between the 2 so that you can only under estimate the population size rather than over estimate it. You do it like once in the first month of the expansion and once in the last month. So you're not really monitoring all the guilds, just the high end and low end and then giving it a lower average to under estimate the actual number. I like to do this because I think finding numbers of REAL players is important. It's not a perfect system, but it's about the most accurate I can think of considering the vast majority of people are in a guild and raid.

Interestingly on Aradune for a couple expansions I didn't have to do this at all. TEB for some reason had just an insane amount of very good coders. In classic and kunark we manually tracked everything, nothing was automated. The big reason for that was because guilds would often poop sock in zone or form raids in obscure zones while 1 person watched a spawn so that they could attempt to mobilize faster. One of our members started working on a Python script that fed data to a heat map during classic to help against the poop socks although we never ended up implementing it in any meaningful way and just continued to manually track. It was still a pretty crazy and very interesting program he made, and fun to watch.

The python script basically did a /who every minute and injected the data in to a heat map program that he had made. If a person was anon, it would /guildstat them. If they were not in a guild, it wouldn't count them. So you put a system of char's in every zone of the expansion and it would constantly do /who's and you could not only see where every guild was in the game but how many people of each guild in every zone. Every guild had a different color and you could sit there and watch in real time as individual people or raids moved across zones on the heat map. Whenever more than 40 of the same guild were in the same zone, it would trigger an alarm. He also found every guilds raid schedule and programmed it to where it wouldn't set off an alarm for each guild during their DZ raid times. One of the most interesting things that we found in kunark after having an entire complete list of all guilds from his program was that there were more than a dozen guilds raiding that weren't on the Aradune progression site at all.

To give an example, my estimate of REAL players who were guilded during classic on Aradune was about 3k. This doesn't count boxes and thats more on the low end estimate. Now 3k real players who were guilded might sound low especially when I claim it was such a large population, but to put that in to perspective that would be the equivalent of 30 guilds who had 100 man rosters. Aradune in classic had about 35 guilds that raided content with anywhere from 25 members at the low end up to 300 members at the high end. The average guild on aradune had a raid force of about 60 members. The 6 largest guilds on Aradune in classic were made up of nearly 1100 players. This is just another example of why Elderan's numbers are so retarded. For his numbers to be even close to being accurate, it would require the average guild on mangler to have OVER 200 members. My estimate of total REAL players who were guilded on mangler during classic was about 1900. From my experience of tracking it on Phinny/Mangler/Aradune, your average guild having around 60 members give or take seems to be pretty consistent. The only things that really change other than the total number of guilds, is the number of very large guilds (ones with over 100 members) and number of small guilds (ones consisting of between 25-40 members). I guess another thing that could change is number of people not in a guild who don't raid. I would assume Mischief/thornblade has a higher than normal amount of these people compared to prior TLP's but it wouldn't be such an insane extreme amount to justify the population claims.

Atabishi said:

Actual facts and numbers? Where are these facts and numbers confirmed? No where. No where has it ever been said that aradune cap was reduced to 2k lol. He claims they forgot about auto kick while ngreth says it was supposed to be removed the patch after pop launch and THATS where they forgot to remove it. They intentionally kept it on in other expansions due to population. I can't anymore, you guys are actually just too retarded for communication.

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This is why you're a laughing stock in your own guild

Ambiturner said:

This is why you're a laughing stock in your own guild

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Do you project this much IRL or only online?

I've read all these walls of text.

I still don't care.

I have no idea which server was more popular and when, and nor do i care. All I care about is continuing to raid through the expansions and finding a guild that can provide that experience without a bunch of drama, or being forced to carry mouth breathing retards.

If people are serious about riding Aradune to the end we will need to learn to get along because at some point we will probably all be in the same guild.

Some dead weight being pruned along the way wouldn't hurt though.

Rali said:

I've read all these walls of text.

I still don't care.

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That sig, reminded me of this

Greyman said:

I have no idea which server was more popular and when, and nor do i care. All I care about is continuing to raid through the expansions and finding a guild that can provide that experience without a bunch of drama, or being forced to carry mouth breathing retards.

If people are serious about riding Aradune to the end we will need to learn to get along because at some point we will probably all be in the same guild.

Some dead weight being pruned along the way wouldn't hurt though.

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I could be wrong, maybe I am... but I think the base ruleset of aradune is about the worst for making it through the 80+ game. Inability to box 3+ means that nobody could knock down a lot of the more tedious quest content on their own barring a few clutch duos. Even if YOU don't want to box 3+ it hurts that you can't get carried by someone else that does. On selo for example, where they did make it through all the expansions, a great deal of the nonraid requirements got carried by a few of the 6boxers who repeatedly grouped different people through or ran things for excess taskadds to make sure everyone was set. On aradune you have to break the rules to do that.

People have been openly defying the 2 box limit on Aradune for months, without repurcussion, it may as well not exist

And it's not just kronospergs doing it, pretty much every guild has members in good standing that box 3 or 4 occasionally more. They made a half assed effort at enforcing it for the first 6 months as they said, then basically abandonded ship.