Why our group left red.

[Token]

Hello. I recently picked up the game again. I had a 54 warrior on blue that i played a couple years ago, did some raids, had some fun. Gave everything away when I entered grad school.
I rejoined recently and leveled an enchanter to 30 on red. I had a couple friends and a family member (3) join me on red who had past experiences on live, pre-pop. We had a blast for a couple weeks as we slowly made it to around 25. That's where things went sour.

They quit. And I've followed suit.

We were driven to quit by how impossible it became to put a group together and not have it destroyed by some shadowknight/warrior/monk/rog/druid with (to us) a ridiculous amount of gear advantage.
On a single day, I was killed 3 times in 15ish minutes while attempting to do a CR in Mistmoore (one snare, resulting in an xp death). Numerous times we put groups together only for everyone to just give up and say try again later because of the relentless onslaught by twinked pvper's.

Anyhow, I rerolled on blue and the experience is inferior in every way; the xp is slower, the camps and zones are incredibly cramped, and reputations/friendships are infinitely less important. I can't bring myself to enjoy playing on blue, so I am putting that away as well. Red should have more people than blue. Maybe at least a part of the problem is what I am describing.

We were a group of enchanter/monk/druid/necro. We had one good fight (that we lost) but was super fun. The vast majority of our experience beginning around level 15ish was facing overgeared folks. Folks that looted the small amount of coin we carried, every single time.

We made strong efforts to bring groups to upper guk, runnyeye, HHK, and splitpaw. A couple times we were successful, but most of the time it was impossible to get anyone away from Faydwer.

I've read through the forums and its been suggested tons of times that well-established people should refrain from killing "noobs" as it discourages new players from entering the server, but I just wanted to reiterate it based on my group's collective experiences.

It seems like some people get their greatest joy from being able to get people to ragequit, but its probably not good for the population overall or for the non-hardcore.
I typically would message whoever killed me and say something along the lines of "hey, you got me. Can we call a truce? I can't land any spell on you if I tried. We're just xping and Im trying real hard to to get some new folks excited to play and keep them going"

On occasion someone would help us out or leave us alone, but most the time I was met with responses like "better you leave the server now if you can't handle it" or "Call LNS" or something. I get it, I can ask permission to come get my body, but my friends and I have planned for the past 3 days to get together tonight and have an xp group. We spent an hour looking for folks to fill the group, 30 minutes waiting on them to get here, and now we're expected to pick up and move to where? its hard to convince anyone to leave faydwer.

Its a rant and I know its long, but if you've read it - the server lost 4 folks who were very excited about playing here. We do enjoy pvp. We did understand that we would die and be set back. We also knew the risks associated with dying. We didn't know that "Killing Newbs" would be as popular as it is, or that people would try so hard to cause xp deaths or that the 3 casters in my group would never (not a single time that I can recall) be able to cast a spell on the people trying to kill us.

We know that we could have sucked it up and pushed through to higher levels and that we could have just waited till we were all on and ventured out by ourselves, but we're all social people who wanted to interact with others and we didn't want to just hurry up and level. We focused on Sol Ro quests and tried to enjoy the trip.

I'm really just pretty irritated- I love the game and I think everyone here knows how exciting it is when you're able to convice RL folks to enjoy it with you. I'm bummed I couldn't keep any of them on board.