If i forget about friday:
Heres what i think created big problems for red99:
Staff not realizing (or not acting upon) that letting a zerg guild a free reign into farming raid zones for months was a bad idea, and not realizing or not acting upon that xp loss in pvp made the server in practice a PVE server with 5% of your time spent pvping. I dont play pvp games to pvp 5% of the time. More casual/less knowledgeable people like me didnt give a fuck that item x was put on farm status by an exploit by some player whos grinding them levels hard and way beyond to the level point where i was at. What i did give a fuck about was not alot of people were pvping, making it a boring server compared to Rallos.
Having devs who dont play the server, its especially important to listen to player feedback, and that means unfortunatly trying to weed out what is genuine feedback and fake feedback intended to give yourself an advantage (IE Nihilum saying that xp loss in pvp was not a factor in why they were allowed to sit on raid zones for so long, when in fact it meant them being able to put raid zones on farm status for months/a year+). Now that the main zerg guild has farmed raid zones for months on end, people get discouraged that they will never be able to bridge that gear gap. It was too little, too late.
If there is ever an intention of wiping the server, or starting a new one, heres what i think would have gotten a chance of having numbers close to blue (back in autumn 2011, now that weve burned part of the potential pop, im not sure what numbers can be brought around again):
- 4 lvl pvp, FFA
- Either item loot with patched in custom sets (especially for melee) to offset the harshness of item loot, letting players have at least a couple decent pieces they could never lose. That or an opt-in "deep red" system where you flag yourself for item loot (with having to wait a week or so to turn it off) and can then loot and be looted by other "deep red" players. Most of the damage would have to be done by a deep red for the body to become ready to be looted.
The reason for this is because it gives a purpose to pvp, beyond that "its fun to pvp". 4 noobs with no gear can down a hard twink thats been pissing them off for the last 2 hours and get a really nice piece of gear as a victory prize. It will create an economy for low level items, letting noobs be able to sell the stuff they get along the leveling path.
- No xp loss in pvp
- Custom events, like the Halloween event of 2001, that spawn special mobs in zones that drop no drop loot. Not just level 60 mobs. It creates excitement, it creates fun pvp. Ideally these things can be coded just once, and they are usable an unlimited amount of times by GMs. OR, it can be a quest that doesnt even need GM involvment, like say, gather 20 items of this type, bring it to that NPC, and it spawns event mobs in that zone over there.
- Guards that work
- Resists closer to classic
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I dont think i will ever play EQ1 ever again after being burned on red, for the record. I will probably mess around with velious when it comes out. I would only entertain the idea of playing on a new P99 server if the xp was shot through the roof to accelerate the leveling, and i mean like 10 times+. Sometimes i dont think the devs realize the amount of time thats needed to be put in for you to level up a character if you dont box a PLer. Thats the people who this slow xp grind advantages. The ones running virtual private networks. It was fine the first time around, but i would not be going through that again, gambling that all these hours put in will pay off in the end, and not end up in a dead server. Im pretty sure theres alot of people on the same boat.
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