Quote:
Originally Posted by heartbrand
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EverQuest is a pve game that happened to have pvp enabled servers. Lot of dumb in this thread. Red99 couldn't even hold pop through the end of the first month. Server came out in November, by the end of December Nihilum was already exploiting dragons and pop was sub 200. By the end of January pop was dead. This is not the game to play for hardcore pvp players.
I rolled here two weeks after server launch and encountered maybe ten to fifteen pvp interactions between level 1-50. Most of them involved being attacked while engaged in pve, in situations I had no chance to win ever. The people who claim to love pvp really just love stomping people in scenarios they are guaranteed to win, for Internet ego. That's why you have people like beastagor with a hundred clickies scouting all day in iceclad for advisor wearing newbs, rather than running into Kael and attacking our clerics during their CH rotation. They don't want pvp, they just want to stomp newbs / lowbies.
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Thats Heartbrands take on it. The reason he didnt encounter many pvp fights is because of how the server was set up. It discouraged pvp with xp loss. On Rallos youd find fights at every step of leveling. Crushbone, EK, SK, Highpass, commons.
By adding xp loss in pvp, it turned into a PVE race to 50. If i had to do it again i would probably race as well instead of trying to play it like Rallos, getting bummed out and quitting early because you cant really have fun taking your time pvping on the way or youll eat tons of xp backlog grief. I guess some people would still race to 50 even if xp loss hadnt been in.
The fact of the matter is, trying to present Red99 beginnings as proof that people dont like pvp is incorrect at best and disingenuous at worst. Of course the server depopulated, his crew went around stomping smaller crews with their zergs, making them eat xp loss repeatedly to grief em off the server. If there was no xp loss, dying would have been less brutal and the people who didnt have 4 years experience in EQ pvp (on VZTZ) would have more breathing space to learn how to pvp, gather forces to challenge more established crews etc... There was no space for non-vets to learn the game without eating grievous xp backlog. The GMs and staff couldnt see how bad it was because they werent playing themselves and let themselves get trolled by people who told em everything was golden, either Nihilum because it let them farm zones uncontested or Holo because they enjoyed griefing.
Im not sure if HB never played on Rallos, or if hes angling for something or what, but Rallos was full of PVPers. Every single day youd find tons of people fighting in and around crushbone. That was like the main Flowers of Happiness hangout and where i hung to fight them. Maybe HB is scared about the possibility of another new server that would jeopardize what hes got now?
Those were the 2 main mistakes to me: Xp loss at start corrected way too late, and no item loot ensuring that twinks down the road became way too powerful, ensuring a stale economy, call of duty style pvp (ironically) and no vibrant Gfay trading hub. Yeah blablabla noob griefed out of their cloth gear, patch some no drop gear and solved.
If someone has an actual timeline of when xp loss was removed and group xp patched, things like that, itd be interesting to look at. With pop numbers, would be even more instructive.