New Players Galore!

Faugaun

I rolled a new sorcerer and was running around bleakrock doing the first few quests and was surprised how many players I bumped into last night. It reminds me of April last year (minus the bots). It seems this btp is bringing lots of old players back and lots of new players. Hopefully, we can make them feel at home and keep them. I stayed at one spot and must have seen 6 players pass me in under 30 seconds and several other instances where I was at a boss fight and several other players joined in simultaneously.

It felt that more often than not there were always players in my vicinity.

@ZOS_GinaBruno you guys may want to consider increasing the respawn rates a tad (maybe 10-25% faster) in the early zones for the next month till the influx population gets spread out more (please don't over do it as too fast a respawn can cause problems also, especially if mobs are spawning before I've killed the next two mobs).

The reason is I went through several quests

Spoiler

(like the cave with the frozen man) and fought minimal mobs (in the frozen man quest I killed 1 polar bear throughout the entire quest...

.now the missed exp is probably unimportant to someone like me with 110 champion points but to a newbie that extra kill exp over the first areas could change the level of difficulty to something different than intended.

Also @ZOS_GinaBruno the

Spoiler

bat in the cave at the very start of bleakrock (like second quest I think, it's a level 6 named mob, you look at the corpses outside the cave and it ambushes you)

is a bit too difficult (level 6 when you're level 3)...even with 110 champion points I died 2 or 3 times and needed other players to show up and help me to complete the quest. I was a sorc. I mentioned it to my wife (who is an alt-a-holic) and she said that bat is always a pita. Not sure if the intention is to wipe players right out the gate but it was the experience I had.

That said I really miss the old difficulty levels from launch but this mob is very inconsistent with the rest of the mobs in the zone.

Nestor

Heck, its even better in the VR zones. Last night, rather late, I was doing some World Bosses in Eastmarch (4th zone in that alliance). A few months ago, it was rare to see anyone else in the VR zones with you, and if did, they were running off to do the thing they were there to do.

A approached two of the nastier bosses that I had been saving as they are difficult to solo, and low and behold, there were other players there. Every Dolmen now has 2 or 3 people at it when I show up, where before it was spamming zone chat "XXX Dolmen is Up" and hoping someone else was around. However the VR ranks have been busier since 1.6, probably due to the CS, more so than the next wave of players we are getting now.

So it's busy all around.

Faugaun

Now that you mention it the cadwells silver zone I did over the last few weeks seemed busier also than it did in January when I did silver last. I guess I just thought in January I did full completion of 5 zones and this time I did full complete of the first zone and just the required silver line for the other four zones....so dismissed it as "main quests" vs more off the beaten path content....

Robbmrp

Faugaun wrote: »

Now that you mention it the cadwells silver zone I did over the last few weeks seemed busier also than it did in January when I did silver last. I guess I just thought in January I did full completion of 5 zones and this time I did full complete of the first zone and just the required silver line for the other four zones....so dismissed it as "main quests" vs more off the beaten path content....

I think one of the reasons that people don't like Cadwells Silver and Gold is due to the minimal faction population you see there. Hopefully this will help that out and more and more will be doing those quests. They are a great source of XP and if you don't already have a high level alt that's been to those areas, they are fun to explore. With having more populated zones it may make making a new character a lot more fun for those that previously had no interest in it.

Time will tell.....