Originally Posted by Tradesonred
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Now stick with me for a moment, try real hard not to think about your pixels at stake, the time youve invested, but the words im gonna type next, and the sense they make. Try not to call me an idiot, or a faggot (i know how hard this will be, but try buddy) and instead if you dont agree with me, argument against what im saying.
Moderators could practice doing what they would be doing were they GMing a healthy server and ban people who are trolling a thread that is trying to be this constructive.
Origins of the decline of red99:
600 players at launch. This could have snowballed up like DAOC Origins instead of down. What happened?
- Guards not working
- Xp loss in PVP that made zergs more powerful than they needed to be, leading to situations like Holocaust locking down Guk and making it hard to try to convince people to assault the fort" (Beleive me, ive tried) Zergs will always be there, but this made them excessively powerful. Holocaust and other established crews running gank trains on casuals and new people dipping their toes in to see if EQ PVP could be their new thing. Which could have been a learning experience, but made into a 90 degrees learning curve cliff because of how punishing xp loss in pvp was to mess around and figure it out. Not everyone had spent the last 4 years playing Everquest on VZTZ
- This also made the gameplay focused alot more on PVE than Rallos. Rogean and Sirken say what you want about "This isnt CoD" but the fact is that its not a coincidence that Crushbone was full of people "Call of Dutying it out" on Rallos. Its because it was fun. Gfay was a core location of Rallos, so you had on one hand the main trading hub of the server (because of item loot), so where alot of players with money would hang and on the other the main newb starting zone and lowbie PVP central in Crushbone and on the Kelethin decks. So you had a synergy there to make a great vibrant zone that never happened on Red99. Newbs could sell batwings and stacks of bones for plat for great starter money. Crushbone was lowbie PVP central. I could PVP in crushbone all night on my wiz, mingled with PVE and go back there after sleeping on saturday afternoon and people would still be at it PVPing. That was all missing from Red99, it wasnt half the fun that Rallos was.
- Xp loss was detrimental to casuals and people new to EQ that were prevented from learning PVP mechanics because the penalty for dying in PVP was excessively griefy. All those new people we could have kept around i think we lost in part because of what i outlined in the last paragraphs. The devs didnt listen to feedback that told them that this was gonna happen, and predicted that this would lead to smaller guilds not being able to contest dragons later on.
Mid-life decline of red99:
Nihilum outzergs Holocaust, they are now the ones who are locking down zones by default because no one wants to eat the griefy excessive xp loss in PvP that is a deterrent to fun, continual PvP. Deterrent to smaller guilds trying to slow down the gear progress of bigger guilds and having fun in the process. Most guilds give up trying to contest
Nihilum. This is explained to devs in and out repeatedly by persistent annoying people like me, with no action taken for a year+ to correct the situation, leading to a scenario where its basically join Nihilum or dont see end game content.
The ruleset made it that this toxic situation self-perpetuated like a perfect storm as nihilum recruited more and more people into a humongous zerg vortex. Because PVP was slim and so punishing, forcing you to do alot of PVE when (for me, and i beleive alot of people who quit as well) you roll on a PVP server to mainly PVP. You do PVE to gear up for PVP, not PVP to get access to gear to PVE, in my mind.
NIhilum now dominant, and even people like me who tried hard to get people to challenge them give up. People like Agatha, the force crew, probably had the same reasons than i did for joining Nihilum. I join them to experience the raid content i never saw on live because i was too busy having fun pvping at the lower brackets to care about grinding PVE fast. I join them because the pvp scene on red is dead because of ruleset decisions made by devs, not because of griefers or because of Nihilum. Because its something to do before quitting the box for good.
Late-life status of Red99:
Population spikes: When Rogean boosts xp. When xp loss in PVP was removed. Props to Heartbrand from breaking off from Nihilum and trying to gather up forces to challenge them.
Misdiagnosis of the causes of the population decline (The griefers caused it) where the real cause is xp loss in PVP that griefed off casuals (which was an explicitely said
goal of alot of Holocaust members, grief em off the box was heard often) and that lead to the situation where Nihilum was put in that dominant position. Not because they are neckbeards, not because they are nerds, because devs let the xp loss situation unattended for a year+. Misdiagnosis leading to the god awful era of rule lawyering PnP.
What are you guys fighting for now? Wouldnt it spice things up if you guys could win and lose some of that gear that you buy and sell? Wouldnt it make rolling alts more
exciting? Bringing me to the end of this long post.
Why wiping or a new server is a good idea:
- Awful crooked start that messed things up badly and leading to one guild being overly dominant because of a bad ruleset
- Excitement of a new server that brings an influx of population. We saw an example of this with DAOC origins, what good word of mouth can do to a playerbase that is still excited about old school MMOs because new ones are shitty as fuck cash grabs.
- Excitement of a new server launched in parallel with Velious
- Everyone starting at level 1, leading to new folks not logging in to a ghost town and a pop that stays stable on the way up and stable as new players that hear about the box are enticed to log in. Not in a ghost town.
- Fresh start on proper foundations. No xp loss in pvp, meaning zergs can never accomplish what they did on Red99. They would to have actually fight to get access to raid and camp content now.
What i think would make a great EQ PVP server ruleset
- Think eve online, think sandbox (No PnP)
- Item loot:
Its less griefy than no item loot. Why? Because twinks cant run around with 0 chances of losing their gear. If they want to go after newbs and lowbies less equipped than them, they will have to put their gear on the line.
Or: Be on an equal footing as the rest of the noobs by using the custom no drop gear that needs to be added into the game to offset the harshness of item loot. Which brings me to my next point.
The rebirth of Gfay as a trading town and lowbie PVP central: Item loot will make low level items desirable again. Will make lowbies salivate at the thought of selling the
loot they just got to twink prices when they move that shit to Jita. I mean Gfay. It will make the fun economic mini-game of Gfay mules, buy low, sell high be possible again.
- Variance. We all know what i mean by this, no need to go into specifics.
- Events, custom gear:
The blueprint for this is the Halloween event of 2001. Werewolves spawning in WC with a purple sky. Wraiths or whatever in EK. That undead dragon in Rathe. All those event mobs were dropping no drop gear that had players in a pixel frenzy of PVPing over event mobs. Put some of that no drop gear, having maybe 3-4 sets in total on the way to level 60 on regular mobs so that casuals have a chance and dont break their faces on a cliff-like PVP learning curve. Make it shittier than gear that drops but better than being naked. Do some work before launching the server of a couple of events like this that will be either recurrent on a variable basis or something that GMs can easily switch on.
- Keep GMing simple and focused on positive stuff like piloting events. If youre not using 3rd party programs, not bugging out mobs on purpose, you can do it. I would rather have training be allowed but i know this wont be popular. Its the one thing im willing to say "Allrite, whatever, no training" on PnP. Everything else PnP should go. Let the players have control of the sandbox.
- Xp rate at 2.0 to 3.0 Weve all done the grind before. No insta 60s but loosen up the grind a little.
Some of the end game loot needs to be made droppable. Thats my weak point, i dont know end game well. But brakes need to be put on deleveling a toon with uber gear on. Im not saying to not let it happen, just keep an eye on it and try to make it balanced.
Yeah, all of this means new work both from the player side and devs, GM side. But what a pay off. On this server setup, i can imagine a guild like Red dawn Merc'ing a guild like Dentists for zone line security while they raid a zone, just like in eve online. This could be serious fun.
This is my last hurrah, my goodbye post to trying to steer things on red99 in the right direction. Ive said my bit, i will not waste any more time giving my input on this
anymore, will use forumquest strictly for entertainment. Im sure theres loopholes in what im proposing. There are alot more experienced players than me here. Dont call me a faggot. Make it work. For the rebirth of a Rallos style EQ PVP sandbox. I know its hard, that some of you invested alot of time on this, but ultimately this is a game. Wouldnt a fresh new box with a healthy pop and all ive described better than a slow box death on red99? Think about it.
My 2 cents for devs: Feedback given in a whiny, or excessively complaning manner can still contain valuable nuggets of feedback. Its in the servers best interest that you can muster the professionality needed to put rubber gloves to dig in the shit to take out those nuggets.
TLDR: Wipe red99 or start a new server with a good ruleset that de facto will wipe red99
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