Kind of late to the party here, but figured I'd throw in my two cents as someone who was part of the CSR team back in the day in EQ. OP makes a lot of statements about how the whole KSing and "competition" dynamic was "sanctioned" by the devs and was intended by the devs to be how EQ played. He also mentions how camps were never intended to be a thing and people were expected to just run around all over.
He is correct that camps were never meant to be a thing, because the devs didn't predict that's how players would handle the game. However, that doesn't mean that the game was intended to be a free-for-all kill stealing fest.
If the devs had predicted the way people would play the game, I can tell you for 100% fact that the PnP would have been in the game at launch. There were countless conversations at the time about the state of different servers and the kill stealing free-for-all issues that were arising. GMs across all servers were consulted about what they were seeing and how they had handled various different types of scenarios. This is a big part of how the PnP was created. This whole "well you could kill steal and camp steal, etc. at launch so you should be able to do that on P99" is a completely nonsensical argument. It was never actually intended to play that way and when the devs and CSR realized how abusive online gamers could be, they acted to change the rules to prevent that. A PnP would have been in place at launch if we had known how people would behave.
I'll see if I can find any old convos about it from back in the day. I think I may have sent some to my old AOL email address.
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10-07-2019, 12:38 PM
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