The WoW Nostalrius server is Red and there are 4k people logged on at a time, and by the sounds of it nobody is up in arms about a Blue server not existing. People are signing up in droves. I know virtually nothing about WoW besides the two main factions but I really don't see any way that WoW PvP has incredible leaps and bounds improvements in "balance" over EQ PvP that bloobs hate on so much that would make WoW Red some profoundly improved experience over EQ PvP. If anyone can chime in please do.
I'm confident that TMO went over to Red running their mouths as usual like they were hot shit and seriously insulted and pissed off some people that take the Red server very seriously. They wouldn't stop their spin campaign on the P99 boards and I'm sure that's just a small fraction of the amount they ran their mouths. This isn't about "keeping healthy competition" on a server. This is about people who seriously shitted up the Blue server and went over to Red talking shit like they were going to take over. This seriously upset the hegemony of the Red server.
As we all know, different people who play EQ have different definitions of "fun." For some people its pissing and shifting in bedpans for an 8 hour poopsock with a headset on. For some people its having a legion of nubs that are willing to jump through flaming hoops to get slot-by-slot gear that has your approval and getting them to batphone in at any time of the day just so you and your buddies can take the lions share of the top pixels in the game. For some people its going out and killing mobs in small groups that have lucrative drops with good players and good friends and making fun of all the wannabes wiping to Velketor with 40 people for hours after you talk this big shit all day about how awesome you are and have had a year to practice on Beta when really you're just a giant asshole.
"Fun" for Red players is finding the new guild that comes over onto your turf talking big shit and pissing you off then completely obliterating them to the point where they don't even want to come back. This is precisely what happened to TMO on Red. All these quotes you see from Empire apps saying "TMO is a bunch of bluebie retards" is not a false statement at all whatsoever. I personally am tickled pink that a Blue guild that held a bottleneck on Trakanon which in turn created a 4 year bottleneck of entry to VP which was the only thing keeping them a "better" guild than any other finally "got what is coming to them."
I will give TMO credit that they actually took the giant leap of trying out a Red server rather than creating a culture of Lawyerquest and creating rules that are supposed to foster "competition." Really at the end of the day you're just creating rules that fit right in exactly with your "playstyle" and you end up "winning" solely because you're playing a game that you created the rules for. TMO knows what "losing" feels like now and I think many groups of players on this server could really use a deeply humbling, humiliating experience.
Regardless of the reasons for TMO getting their shit pushed in on Red, P99 Red is now past the point of no return. It was desolate enough having 300 people spread out over Old World and Kunark. Now with Velious being launched and the population remaining stagnant its even worse. 300-500 people in just Old World would be a ton of fun. Nobody wants to go Red now that there's blue Velious with tons of new content and a healthy server population.
If P99 released ONLY a new red server (which would never happen) everyone would sign up and shut up because we're all EQ addicts. The question is - if there were 1000 people playing on Kunark steadily and the population was healthy for the entire life of the server, would there be only one huge guild with 750 people on at one time? The Red veterans never complain about only one guild having 70% of the server population on the old Red servers, I just hear about good times and fun.
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