Email to 3000+ ex VZTZ players

[Avon Barksdale]

Originally Posted by Tr0llb0rn [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

so true

solo ranger gets to 40+ np

vile and others get gear and PL and do not break 21 and /cry


xp not the problem, player motivation and a lack of appreciation for true classsic red EQ is

I wouldn't call it "np." I grinded my ass off and my job didn't have a whole lot going on in winter months (whereas I put in 27 hours this week already by last night and I'll be on overtime Thursday-Saturday).

That being said, the biggest problem as I saw it was how GMs handled drama. The fact that this was (I hesitate to say "is a server") a PvP server should have made it so much more enjoyable for them to moderate than blue. Don't want to deal with players crying and shit? Ignore it and they'll learn to shut the fuck up. PvP makes everything essentially fair, other than class balance/lack thereof. One person trains? So can another. In a raid situation you can spam pumice/CC that fucker before he drops a train on your raid and just get him killed. As a GM, if you don't want to read a bunch of crying and pore through fraps and SSs and whatever, then just don't police training. People will learn to adjust and deal with it. What they did instead was throw themselves into situations they were adamant about not wanting to deal with, how the fuck does that make any sense? They're "volunteers" right? They said it so many times. They must be "volunteering" because of some sense of satisfaction they thought they would get out of it. Amelinda, for example, I'm pretty sure was in it to help people with rezzes after server crashes (a noble cause), put on GM events (which also would have been fun for BOTH players and GMs), and just generally interact with the player base, show up and toss illusions on people or whatever. Instead she got sucked into the drama. Fucking stupid. Ignore drama, do the things you "volunteered" to do. And because GMs were so pissed about dealing with drama, and players were so pissed about how GMs dealt with drama, there was a distrust between the two parties which resulted in features requested by the player base to be largely ignored/written off. The only thing they ever did afaik is increase xp, which didn't help anything. If more than 50% of your population wants yellow text, yes/no on xp loss, leaderboard, whatever, give it to them. It won't be the "perfect" server in all likelihood for any one person, but if you can keep the majority of the people happy with your features, then everyone will stay because they have things they want and a healthy population of other players who have things they want with whom they can play. I remember Lazortag making some retarded analogy about "If I'm selling lemonade, don't tell me to sell Iced Tea" or whatever. And being the brown-nosing nerd that he is, the GMs ate that shit up and loved it. So let me explain why that shit was retarded. Nobody was selling anything, it was being essentially given away with tips accepted. Why would someone give something away? The only way I could rationalize that is out of a desire to make people happy. So then if a large percentage of the people enjoying your free lemonade brought up that they would further enjoy a little more sugar, how is "FUCK YOU" a reasonable response? Not to mention if P99 red actually were a lemonade "business," congratulations, you're broke now cuz you ran that shit into the ground.

TL;DR: GMs made the server a bad experience for themselves by complaining about having to deal with drama, yet dealing with it anyway instead of letting PvP handle that. Because the server was a bad experience for GMs, they made it a bad experience for players and it died.