A tale of Green's opening and a request

[jolanar]

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

I played on Tallon Zek. Teams PVP was really fun but suffered from a couple flaws.

Even though it was teams based, the server stratified basically into light races vs dark races. What inevitably happened is that the light races, due to having druids and bards (mainly bards due to stacking mana regen and haste), were able to progress PVE faster than the dark races.

All the other issues aside, like OOR healers and such, what really broke the server is when the guild Pandemonium decided they were going to totally ignore the teams pvp concept and just go full PVE, all races under the same guild tag. Due to skill and numbers, they came to dominate the server, bolstered by their progression advantage (gear), OOR heals and the like.

What followed is the realization by the other guilds that in order to compete, they too, would have to abandon the "teams" ruleset.

All that said, I would love to have a teams pvp server, and would likely roll there. I have very very fond memories of EQ pvp on Tallon Zek (however unbalanced it can be). However, major issues do need to be addressed based on the above experiencs. A classic "teams" server will not work, some of the classic elements will need to be addressed around oor healing, and other pvp balance issues, covered in many past posts (and likely already addressed on Red, from the little I know). A guild vs guild concept would likely work best.

I played on TZ also and this was a pretty good summary. Although I would add that the reason it quickly turned into light vs dark teams was because the dark races were overwhelmingly dominate early on. Not just in numbers but skill. Just like in WoW where all the pvpers roll horde, the best pvpers rolled evil races.

So you could hard code no cross teaming, but all that would happen is one team would just dominate the others.

I will say that having a teams server was the most roleplay like gameplay I've ever had in an mmo.

I would never play on another PvP EQ server though unless some serious balancing to PvP was done, or maybe they just got rid of corpse runs entirely when killed by a pvp opponent.

[AenorVZ]

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

I will say that having a teams server was the most roleplay like gameplay I've ever had in an mmo.

Hammer, meet nail. This is why the Teams PvP server should be called Purple. We already have Blue (PvE) and Red (PvP). If you hand in your book your name turns red. If you type /roleplay your name turns purple. Back in the day there was a message board at EQRP.com where we discussed our ideal ruleset on live to encourage roleplay. The general consensus was that roleplay isn't possible without PvP, but the PvP has to have context. There has to be a reason for the conflict.

Tallon and Vallon Zek provided that context. There was a war among the races. The combination of having an in-character reason to fight and having relatively safe starting areas (compared to Rallos Zek) made these two servers the best RPG experience I've ever had. I ran a roleplaying PvP guild on Vallon. We sought out PvP every time we logged in but we always stayed in character. Longtime P99 lead GM Sirken participated in one of our server wide events and he always raved about how unique an experience Vallon Zek was.

Secrets, a long time contributor to EQEmu, was recently interviewed by Everquest developer ALovingRobot for his YouTube channel. He mentioned how he stopped trying to develop PvP servers and one of the biggest complaints he got from players was how hard it was to make it out of the starting areas. The teams concept I've developed over years addresses this in a way that I think is better than Tallon/Vallon, Sullon or Rallos. I'm not ready to reveal the secret sauce just yet. Still need some help getting set up first.