I played red as an enc until about level 30. Here's what I thought-
1) I play offpeak hours mostly, can't play on weekends at all for the most part. If you want a group during these hours, it's going to HAVE to be in the main spots: MM,unrest, etc. There are literally 0 people anywhere else. Thus, you'll run into some griefers. Truth be told it wasn't really that bad, but it was just annoying. As a gearless newb (and you will be gearless at first) there's 0 way to kill the SK with fungi, cos, who's assaulting your party. It's not even like a 90% chance that the guy will survive, its' 99.99%. He has to go LD or some crap to die.
Also if you wanna talk about how great the raid scene is on red, doesn't every raid mob spawn on Sundays with 0 variance? For someone who plays offpeak hours, again this ain't no boon at all, although for the majority of people this is prob great if you just join empire.
2) With the exp bonus, you don't even have to try while grouping. I ran into a LOT of bad players who didn't know wtf they were doing, but it didn't matter cause you got exp anyway. There are bad players on both servers, but on red you still get rewarded for being the worst pve'r on the planet.
3) With the fast xp, you don't really feel that invested in your character. He's just sitting there and I feel no urge to play him.
4) Itemization. With 4 years of kunark and now velious, there's been way too much time for people to gear for new people to wanna start. EQ is highly gear dependent, and there are way too many melee's floating around with equipment that would have been the best set on any server at this point in velious on live. This distorts any balancing that we're trying to implement from live (not to say live was balanced,) as very few people were as geared to the teeth as they are here. I really feel like this affects pvp way more than the blue server.
5) of course, the population. Like everyone else said, it's just a network problem that's a catch-22: No people play, so people don't wanna play. EQ is dumb when, like samwise said, you're waiting 2 hours for a bind or whatever. Kinda takes the first M out of MMORPG.
|