You know, I grouped/leveled along side a lot of RD members in CoM in my late 40s/early 50s and found them to be very quality people. Mostly the Sharknado crew...Pyrokinetic, Kilbur, Brea, etc but also most the shaman in RD most likely as we were all there for grinding epic faction.
I also decided that despite my ties to Nihilum before I started here (I was guildmates with OJ/Johnny and Thrilla on RZ/SZ) that I would level up on my own, pretty much untwinked/plvl'd and experience what it is like to "grow up" on R99. I did this so I could form unbiased opinions on people and guilds. If the PVP board was still up you'd see I ate deaths from both RD and Nihilum.
I think I can say honestly that nobody here is as bad as the other side makes it out to be. People portray Nihilum as a bunch of no lifers and I don't see that at all. Most of the chat in TS revolves around non game related things except during raid times. Sure, Nizzar will tell people to pipe down and bark out orders, but that is so we're not there wasting time and people know what is going on. Nobody wants to waste 3 hours on something you know can be done if executed properly in 45 minutes.
I've also found people to be extremely helpful and generous when they have very little or nothing to gain from it. Tune, who some people make out to be the biggest asshole on the server, took 2-3 hours of his time (along with Walk and Shrimp) to help me take down the reavers and used a scale he had to spawn the epic mob for me. When we ran into some PVP against Brea and company we were able to rally together 5 or 6 more people to help guard us while we took it down. I'm about 99% sure Tune didn't get a single pixel from any of that. I was really the only one that benefited and I had literally been tagged for about 5 hours at that point.
As for RD, I still think for the most part they are quality people. When I was leveling they were very new or non existent, and maybe because of that they were for the most part very friendly. However, my brother has been leveling a monk and has been under near constant attack from RD members. He is in his upper 40s at this point. He doesn't actively seek PVP and has probably gained 98% of his exp solo. I don't say this to point fingers at RD, merely to point out that the main difference between RD and Nihilum isn't a bunch of white knights vs a bunch of no lifers...it's just time spent and pixels earned. The attitudes aren't really different at all. If Nihilum had a lot of people in the high 40s/low 50s he'd likely be taking PKs from them.
We've become more or less a teams server at this point. And the teams are split up EQ2 style. You have Nihilum vs Red Dawn vs randoms. The amount of venom being spewed in both directions is just retarded. If those teams were hard coded we'd fuck each other up, maybe post some smack talk on the boards and move on. But something about choosing to fight gets peoples blood boiling. The trash talk here is toxic. It isn't "hey newb you need to learn to dispell"...it's "hey faggot you are in a wheelchair". Seriously, what the fuck?
I played SZ for a long time and Sirken once called it the most toxic playerbase in EQ history. Sorry, not even close...
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