I’ve been thinking about “what if Tequatl was converted into a hybrid encounter in order to handle population issues?” (Disclaimer: I have no credibility as a game designer and the following are just my non-technical musings.)
Phase One (a pre-Tequatl event involving fighting its forces or shooting it out of the sky, or stopping an initial attack) would be open world and scaled to the current population so that if people are actually fighting it’d be pushed into Phase Two, where it opens up a limited time boat or portal (like dungeon unlocking events) where you can “chase after” or set up for the big Tequatl encounter — maybe the dragon’s retreated to a mountain top to drench Sparkfly in a miasma, or is attacking some nearby inhabited island. During Phase One the battle would be more of a warm-up so that people can group up, raid up, whatever, and prepare for the “real” battle in Phase Two. AFKers, explorers, and otherwise non-participants would be left behind as the dragon slayers travel to a dragon-specific “battleground” (or high-population instance/ controlled overflow) with grouped/raided participants being moved as a single unit to the battleground then partially-grouped & non-grouped people filling in the population holes. Unless trolls are creating full-sized groups, this could actually lessen their influence on a battle since it would spread them across multiple instances as “fillers” and a raid-sized group of trolls will have less other people to “troll” outside of themselves. Low-population server groups would be merged automatically. Then the groups/raids fight Tequatl’s new-and-improved battle in this Phase Two battleground. Perhaps, if a player dies, (s)he is sucked into a bog then transported to solid ground by triage quaggan where players can be revived by them (like the Coddler’s Cove JP), or pay to instantly revive at the battleground’s WP. If players win, they have 5 or 10 minutes to loot and escape before Tequatl’s body explodes in a player-killing miasma before expelling the dead players back into Sparkfly; if they lose then it’s 2-5 minutes minutes before Tequatl’s unleashed “ultimate attack” also instantly kill-expels players and spreads to infect Sparkfly, eliminating the ability to camp this instanced area.
To prevent a constant “trolling” of the turrets, the turrets would have a 10-15 second usage timer and a 5-second player-specific cooldown between uses — those crazy Hyleks deal in some potent potions, after all. Players would have to cycle as turret users, increasing the chances for individuals to get their achievements and to prevent a troll from camping a turret. While a troll could still try to get back on, it’s no longer a guaranteed lock-down, especially with 2-3 people standing by to use it while (s)he is on cooldown.
Also, even though Phase Two is instanced, it could have a real-time effect on Sparkfly where said Island or Mountain is covered by an ominous cloud, flashes of magic, muffled voices shouting if you’re relatively near it, etc. The lasting effect on Sparkfly would be determined by whether the 50%+1 of the native server’s population succeeds in driving off Tequatl. This last part is a bit of a stretch, but with the way the open world fight is currently, most of us are pushed into overflows, anyway, and our success/failure in overflows don’t affect the server’s outcome.
That said, I don’t know if all of this is technically feasible or even an improvement at all. Also, when the popularity of Tequatl falls, all of these ideas may be moot since who knows how many people will still be flocking to Sparkfly after the Living Story moves on to “bigger and better things?”