Originally Posted by Buhbuh
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I'm going to go ahead and bite on this subject, even though I know for the most part anything I say isn't going to be absorbed by anyone, which is ironic because it's the exact thing I'm going to talk about.
Any population growth you hope to see on this server can't be forced with a hot fix, i.e. ideas like variance, boxing or some other sensational idea that you think and will fail to immediately garner results.
The reality is, we aren't going to see an increase in this server's population without changing how we act fundamentally.
Any real increase in population here happens slow and steady, not in huge waves of "Oh my god, they have boxing and variance? Now it's worth my time!"
Now that Nihilum's gone, it's actually the perfect time to change the culture of the server. Top guild leaders in the past, for some unknown reason, or probably for some sense of teenage glee they wanted to relive, would not talk or interact with each other. Lite, Nizzar and whomever else in the annals of Red99 history hardly, if ever, spoke with one another, and they certainly never tried to control their members. I know this because I was in pretty much every guild worth a damn on this server, and every guild leader had a strong suit, but what they all seemed to lack was order.
I get that we're all 20-40 years old and the idea that guild leaders have to put leashes on people is ridiculous because they should know better than to act like children and be completely ridiculous in-game, but it's pretty clear that most people don't know any better.
What I'd suggest, firstly, is to stop being such vitriolic, hateful morons so publicly all the time. Leaders need to muzzle their members. It's actually quite simple to change the culture of this server. If you're in a position of leadership and someone is shitting up ooc in your guild (first you have to actually give a shit about this), then you can punish them. If they don't like it (this is where you stop giving a shit), they have the option to leave. Guess what happens 99% of the time? No one leaves.
Do you know why no one leaves? Because they want pixels; because they have friends there; because they'd be playing alone or starting from scratch if they did leave.
It's not really about being super anal, it's about having standards set in stone for the members of your guilds and holding them to those standards.
Do you understand what happens when new people see other people being nice or courteous or not complete fucking assholes?
This is like 101 for how churches recruit and proselytize people. It's essentially the same concept but applied to Red99. Especially when you're trying to convince blue players that our server is better. Yes, I don't understand either how people can find blue even remotely intriguing, but they do. They haven't seen the light apparently (or in this case, darkness, which we need to change).
For mass PvP battles, when one side wins, it's a nice courtesy to rez one of their clerics after you've secured the zone, dropped the raid target and are about to leave. It's like a symbol of goodwill.
As a sidenote, I'd say that almost all of this server's players who came from Sullon Zek would call all of these ideas "care bear faggotry," but the reality you all need to let settle in is that Sullon Zek had the most heinous community of people on live, the lowest population of any server and, most importantly, the most uninviting population. You can certainly argue the merits of the word "heinous" based on your opinion of what makes a good server, which some people are wont to do here, but as general point of contention - corpse camping, item loot, bind camping, horrendous global ooc, training, hacking and guilds that treat each other like absolute garbage are antithetical to population growth.
Probably several players the community respects as PvPers are from Sullon Zek or very much pro all of those things I just mentioned, but if you want to see the server grow, that mindset can't be at the forefront of how this server operates. It just isn't feasible with server growth. We don't have the luxuries of EQ live anymore. It's essentially up to us to make something work.
Guild leaders need to stop letting their members run hog wild and make real punitive efforts for them when they do stupid shit.
I'm aware that most of you feel like this server is self-sustaining and that the GM's are supposed to be in charge of sorting out the people who act like complete dog shit, but that's not how this server works. We know that know because... look at the population. We've retained no one. It's been an ebb and flow of 100 to 200 people for years.
Like two weeks ago, Sektors left his stream up, implicating his own guild leader (Lite) in a train he deliberately dropped on us in the pillow room of VP. That shouldn't be how these PvP fights go. Guild leaders are supposed to be at the vanguard, acting as an example for everyone else. Nizzar was no better (worse, even), I'm not here to point fingers.
The point is that every guild on this server has, at best, a very loose set of rules when it comes to interacting with other people outside of their guilds. It's just a "They don't have our guild tag? Do whatever the fuck you want" culture we've built.
You've got to have order. There's really no other way to say it. And we're all guilty of lacking it.
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