You guys are judging this based on the perspective of a hardcore player who is already level 60 and gives a shit about raiding. Those aren't the type of players this server has ever lacked.
Most of my pals who tried playing here peaced out before ever hitting 60. I made it to 56 before I said fuck it during Kunark. Despite being "casual", that was still a 200+ hour commitment.
Which would be fine if there were actually other players around low/mid-level zones, but it's mostly a ghost town. The FFA ruleset makes it worse because when you do run into players, you don't want to kill your chances of getting the group exp bonus. So there's no pvp unless you want to be the guy that attacks them for 5 minutes of fun, at the price of having to spend an extra 50 hours grinding levels by yourself.
This is a completely and utterly different experience than a classic Zek server, where I had hundreds of pvp kills under my belt before I even hit level 30. I didn't have to guess whether I should attack players because attacking light team players was automatic. You fought for zone control even in the mid-level zones and it actually mattered. You could stop at level 20 or level 30 and spent all day fighting other players.
You can't even do that at 60 here. Everyone is lumped into one of two guilds and moves as a 30-man bard speed hivemind to raid targets. That ends up being a two hour Mexican standoff before a clusterfuck of assist-training and abusing clickies that you've been hoarding for this few minutes of shitty pvp. Does anyone actually prefer that hot garbage over the small skirmish world pvp that was far more common on live?
|