Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuljin
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Much of Red's population struggles really have to do with when it was released and its inability for the population to snowball.
Nostalrius Red sits around 10k users and Nostalrius Blue which came way later hangs out around 3k. So many Red Nostalrius players wanted a Blue server and they got it - yet Red is still packed full of Chinese gold farmers and tons of other people still grinding away without a mass exodus of player base.
P99 Red's release in comparison to Blue doomed the server from the get go. Also consider this - - P99 was released in 2009, when WoW was still very much in full swing. As the years have passed much of the P99 player base has become former WoW players who had heard so much about EQ yet never played. The Red server is a ghost town, they go Blue.
Also, EQ is infinitely "harder" (i.e. not nubby) than WoW so all the WoW nubs are reluctant to join Red and they come right over to Blue and warmbody for poopsockfest, accepting it as absolutely normal behavior and "fun"
The "raid" cabal says "sure, more warmbodies for us, more loot for us, win fucking win, we don't give a flying fuck about the spirit of EQ and we don't give a single flying fuck about this server with absolute WoW nub shitheads"
After years of Petitionquest and Lawyerquest, it has become evident that the only answer for the shitshow that Blue has become is PvP, like it or not. Lawyerquest sucks. Poopsockquest sucks. Someone FRAPSing you in fucking KC for "training" them and petitioning a GM fucking sucks. Back before FRAPSquest people would "PvP" each other by KSing, training, and randomly buffing and weaponizing mobs all the time. Its part of the game.
If you talk to anybody from a live Red server they always talk about how much fun it was. Because it fucking was.
If P99 Red had come out before Blue, it would probably have a similar population pattern to Nostalrius. People would roll Blue sure, but so many people would have all their loots on Red and wouldn't want to leave them behind. Also consider...no Chardok AOE which completely ruined the game by filling the top level player base with absolute nubs that shouldn't have gotten to 60 in the first place, and no lawyerquest.
People might say there would just be one massive zerg guild killing everybody else, but I doubt that too. There are enough different neckbeard factions that have come and gone on P99 over the years were there would likely be several guilds battling each other constantly for loot and drops. In a server population of 1000, would 500+ players at any given time be in one guild? I find that hard to believe considering how "ambitious" some of these neckbeards are.
My point is, everyone who knocks Red sounds like a bunch of nub crybaby bloobs, because thats what they are. PvP is the answer to Lawyerquest and its never going to happen. I elect not to poopsock and join a guild full of nubs that can't hack dungeon content and just sit at the entrance of ToV every weekend waiting for durgins. Been there, done that and it fucking sucks.
Blue is far more of a dumpster fire than Red 99, and that is tough to dispute.
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Back on live, one of my friends on Xegony was a transfer over from RZ. Played a necro there for a long time. He enjoyed the extra dimension it added to some extent, but in the end he preferred the blue interactions. Red makes everquest different, and not necessarily better.
I think it's a different dynamic than WoW because you generally played WoW for the pvp. The pve was never very engaging, except maybe at the beginning of vanilla and close to the level cap, when people were still struggling for the blue dungeon sets, and places like Stratholme and Scholomance hadn't been nerfed. (Let's not speak of Molten Core, which was a boring raid instance in a long tradition of boring raid instances.) I loved on wow when I had to fight some opposite faction guy for the rights to a gathering node, or when I bumped into some red named dude in the middle of a boring quest series. Because the open world pve especially was incredibly dull - a bunch of single player content with super easy mobs and mindless quest grinds.
I played blue eq, and red wow. I even left a blue server on wow to go red, and did not look back; rolled on several red servers after that. Wow pvp is just better, a lot better, and the open world pvp was engaging and fun. So I don't think these comparisons are particularly valid.
The top end raid scene may well be a clusterfuck here on blue, iono, ain't got time for that. But it's not anywhere close to a dumpster fire from 1-59. I'm having more fun on here than I did on live, because I selected a good grouping class this time. And I enjoy exploring dungeons with my group and not having to worry about random pvpers wrecking me while I'm doing something on the bubble of my abilities.
tl;dr: eq was made for pve, wow for pvp, so comparing the two games is kinda silly.