To me that is the main problem with red. "Normals" come and go without being able to reach critical mass so theres enough of these types of players around for them to find their place on the server. There seems to be a recent influx of new people, im not so sure where that will lead.
For sure if i did not have a level 60 already and a couple of 40+ and someone explained to me the toxic dynamic going on on red with alot of the established geared vets, i doubt id start here, though with TMO and velious pop might snowball upwards. I have a feeling it wont last though as griefers just gorge themselves on griefing lulz and make 90% of that new blood quit.
I often suggested during year 1 or 2 that item loot combined with patched sets of no drops would have solved the problem of hard to kill twinks with nothing to lose but that wasnt considered (publically anyway) once the launch was live. We would have had ample time for a wipe with item loot and no xp loss in pvp from the get go, instead of prolonging kunark so much that every neckbeard on the server now has an AON.
I mean with your scenario, you guys could have dropped what you were doing and hunted some twinks for a chance at a piece of gear, which was part of 50% of my gaming sessions back on live. Now what do you have to gain beside learning how to pvp. In itself its not so bad but it gets boring after a while knowing youll lose 95% of fights and for lots of people for whom pvping for hours isnt their thing, they will simply log off instead of fighting back with terrible odds. Even if you win, the twink will just be back as much as he wants. On live when we ganged up on twinks and got ourselves a piece of gear, often that was the cue for the twink to leave the zone. Here fighting back just means you are amusing the twink, you are lessening the chances that he leaves you to your xping in rags. Your best bet is to log off and hope he gets bored or move elsewhere each time a twink shows up, hoping he doesnt follow you from zone to zone with his 8 twink alts.
Now imagine when Red99 launched that on top of all that, you had to eat xp death each time you died in PVP to a twink. You couldnt even go through the learning process of pvping without adding a huge backlog to your grind. So this isnt as bad as it was 2-3 years ago. It took a long time for the devs to realize they were getting trolled by griefers "BUT BIND RUSHING!! DONT DO IT!!" and removed xp loss in pvp. Only when pop reached 75 peak after a 600 people server launch did they come around though. Theres not a whole lot they can do now because theyve backed themselves into a corner. No wipe, ever, and the policies they had for so long empowered the worst types of players and let them be the dominant force on the server. The only thing i can think of that would help people like you is an event that twinks you guys out, like the halloween event of 2001 but hey that wouldnt be classic to do that before the end of velious, as opposed to muting OOC.
Maybe if you find it in you to slug it out till velious you might see an influx of non-toxic folks but like i said i wouldnt bet on them sticking around for long considering whos established on the server.
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