[Softcore PK]

As a VZ player, I feel that VZ and RZ were the best rulesets. And this is because all the politics were player-driven, dynamic and creative. I don't feel that TZ ever amounted to what it could have because they all went 4-team long before VZ. SZ could have been great, but from what I heard much of the game became PvTrain.

When I first started on Vallon Zek, most of the server seemed to be Elf vs Dark vs Short vs Human, as the rules suggested. We did have some 4-team guilds, and I remember thinking they were bad guys. Dark team was pulling ahead of the other teams, and very quickly the three other teams came together to form "light" team. Or a lot of them, there were still us purists around. "Light" team was really made up of the "anti-pk" crowd we had on Vallon, though they would never admit to it. They didn't kill other lights, just the darks and the other purists. The server was largely light vs dark for a short while, and then the "x-teamers" came to be. Raiding guilds comprised of all 4 teams. The lights saw the x-teams as bad guys, having decided to exp with and even guild with darks. Then end-game was light vs dark vs xteam, and the xteam guilds had a habit of KoSing each other (sometimes on and off).

My least favorite people in the game were lights. How dare my fellow elves join up with the evils of dwarves, gnomes and humans! They were responsible for deforestation and global warming, after all. And when the xteam guilds became major players, these lights had the GALL to call them cross-teamers! Such hypocrisy, and all in the name of being blue.

While as a responsible elf, I was sworn to murder all shorts, humans and darks, I was especially ruthless with these lights. There was another guild that only included elves, Elven Royal Guard. And though they only allowed elves into their guild, they were lights. They happily exp'd with dwarves and attended some raids with them. They sickened me, and one of my favorite things to do was track these exp groups down with a friend or two and kill their exp partners then make them lns. The fallen elves would get so mad :P

This actually escalated into a guildwar that lasted weeks. Though blasphemous to kill elves, these elves had it coming.

Anyway, as I neared 60 I realized how much of the game I was missing out on, because there simply weren't enough elf purists to accomplish much raid content. I wish I had been dark team, they raided until the end. So I did the sensible thing, and joined a 4-team guild so I could continue killing the dreadful lights. Most purists went 4-team, 3-team had arbitrarily decided to disclude one of the teams. The lights were actually always the most progressed raid-wise, and this was because of Defiant. And as a light in any other guild, or no guild, you didn't have to put up with Defiant (or a LARGE percentage of the server, actually) PKing you.

VZ was great accidentally, and all because the devs didn't think to hardcode the teams. I could not have experienced EQ as I did anywhere else. Here's another story:

I once made an alt. A dark elf warrior, and I twinked her a tiny bit (bronze armor, decent weapons). And I took her to gfay because that was my favorite leveling area. I got a bind from a guildie (xteam) and started exping. The newbie lights in the area saw me and of course attacked, but I decided not to fight back. I told them that I didn't want to fight, and that we could be friends. They killed me a lot, but as I never attacked back many of them stopped attacking me, until eventually (few weeks later) I was actually invited into their exp groups. And I did make friends with these lights. Other lights would sometimes attack me, but then my friends would say, "No! Leave her alone, she is nice!" and they would usually stop.

Sort of a Drizzt story, and again something I could not have done on any other server. VZ was the place to be for rp imo, and I liked being creative about it.

Wish I had stuck with that warrior past CB, I could have maybe tried to get into a light guild! :O