How to save red

[loramin]

I know this is a crazy idea, but maybe Red didn't fail because it lacked character transfers, or because it lacked *your personal pet PvP rule here*. Maybe Red failed because it's toxic community scared away most people who tried it, and many of the people that continued in spite of it were the types that enjoyed/increased the toxicity, making it more toxic over time.

Maybe that prevented the population from ever growing beyond the people who enjoyed/could tolerate that toxicity, and so maybe the way to save Red isn't to imagine new server changes, but rather to figure out how to make the community itself more inviting. And not just in the "this is Derubael's pet project for the week" way, but in a way that sustainably discourages players from just making other players' lives miserable and instead encourages respectful/competitive (and in my book, fun) PvP.

Maybe ... but I'm sure the kind of people who enjoy griefing (which I would guess is a big chunk of Red's current population) will tell me why I'm wrong and why what Red really needs to grow is MORE grief.

P.S. For the record no I didn't play PvP on EQ in classic, except for taking a toon up to like level 20 on Sullon Zek. But I did play mainly on a PvP server in WoW (and played tons of battlegrounds on my non-PvP servers), and I enjoyed it, so I'm not some MMOG PvP hater.