Green/Red99

[Vexenu]

People always talk about how EQ is not a game designed with PvP in mind, and yet if you ask anyone on Blue who also played on TZ/VZ/SZ back in the day they will tell you flat out that EQ with Teams PvP is by far the better and more memorable experience. I literally have not met a single person who actually has a lot of time on a Teams server and a Blue server (and who can therefore make a fair comparison) say that Blue EQ is more fun. Not a single one.

Red even at its best was far inferior to the Teams servers and its low population isn't a good argument against a potential p1999 Teams server. The great irony of it is that most of the diehard Blue players would probably enjoy a Teams server more than Blue anyway, because the things they like about Blue EQ (socializing, guild camaraderie, acquiring meaningful loot, competition between guilds) are greatly amplified on a Teams server by necessity. A Teams server would do more to breathe new life into this project than anything else by far. And it could be done with a ruleset that was 95%+ classic (meaning more classic than current Blue).

[Kirdan]

+1 to SZ ruleset, SZ was amazing (and required no customer support staff!)

[Thomacles]

Except what inevitably happens is that one team surges in numbers, and the whole thing turns into a gang mentality. With one side always winning, and the other always losing, interest in continuing fades fast.

WoW has encountered this now for several years. Just look at the imbalance with Hoarde vs. Alliance. They have tried MANY diff things to try to balance it out, and none so far have worked. Thats why they kinda killed off the PvP seasons that used to occur years ago.

PvP in EQ was NEVER popular. Not on live, not on p99. Just because Red USED to have more players than now, that didn't make it popular. The numbers were never even close.

There simply isn't enough interest in it to warrant the vast resources to provide it.

Quit kicking a dead horse. That horse died long, long ago.

[port9001]

In my opinion, the flaw of EQ PvP is it's a game that allows for vastly increased power through twinking / deleveling / MQing / etc. It's really hard to convince people to keep playing when every popular grouping zone gets routinely shut down by unkillable twinks. I'm sure it's extremely fun for the twinks to take on whole groups of people with little risk but for the new players it ends up just not being worth the time. It's not healthy for 9 out of 10 people to quit because they can't make progress in early zones.

I don't really know if you CAN solve this since it's pretty fundamental to how EQ operates. Guess you could make everything NODROP but I doubt that'd be well received.

For what it's worth I had a lot of fun on live on Tallon Zek (Teams PVP). At least there you often had counter twinks around from your own team so there was at least a chance.

[Osprey39]

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

Except what inevitably happens is that one team surges in numbers, and the whole thing turns into a gang mentality. With one side always winning, and the other always losing, interest in continuing fades fast.

WoW has encountered this now for several years. Just look at the imbalance with Hoarde vs. Alliance. They have tried MANY diff things to try to balance it out, and none so far have worked. Thats why they kinda killed off the PvP seasons that used to occur years ago.

PvP in EQ was NEVER popular. Not on live, not on p99. Just because Red USED to have more players than now, that didn't make it popular. The numbers were never even close.

There simply isn't enough interest in it to warrant the vast resources to provide it.

Quit kicking a dead horse. That horse died long, long ago.

Man, where to start with this post. Well first off, WoW pvp has just about zero in common with EQ pvp but I'll address what you said anyway. It's apples and oranges. WoW pvp had 2 teams whereas EQ team servers had 4 (VZ and TZ) or 3 (SZ). While it's true that the Good team was a little undermanned on SZ, things were pretty even on VZ. I never played on TZ so I can't speak for that one but I've heard it was pretty even too.

On to your second thing you were factually incorrect about, PvP seasons in WoW. I can only assume you are referring to arena seasons here as that's the only thing they had seasons for. You imply that Blizzard "kinda killed off the PvP seasons that used to occur years ago" due to population imbalances between Horde and Alliance. Well first of all, when I last played WoW about a year ago, arena seasons were alive and well. Unless this murder occurred sometime since then, which I doubt, they are still alive and well. Secondly, population imbalance has exactly jack squat to do with arena. It is possible and quite common to have a Horde vs. Horde arena match or Alliance vs. Alliance.

Lastly, in answer to your last factually incorrect statement which is that PvP servers were not popular on live. When I started playing on EQ around the time Kunark launched, I started on VZ. Back then, they showed the actual population of servers on the select screen and VZ and TZ were always up around 1500 and I want to say RZ would peak out about 1200. They weren't the most populated servers but they weren't the least either. They were kind of middle of the pack. I started on Sullon after Luclin came out and even though the server had been up and running for awhile, it was still very busy. Almost every zone had people in them. So yeah, pvp servers were popular in live. They all had healthy player populations.

I will wrap this up with this. Who died and put you in charge of deciding what does and doesn't warrant use of resources? What difference does it make to you if they make a pvp teams server? It's not like it would take anything away from your experience on the pve servers.

[Osprey39]

Originally Posted by port9001 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

In my opinion, the flaw of EQ PvP is it's a game that allows for vastly increased power through twinking / deleveling / MQing / etc. It's really hard to convince people to keep playing when every popular grouping zone gets routinely shut down by unkillable twinks. I'm sure it's extremely fun for the twinks to take on whole groups of people with little risk but for the new players it ends up just not being worth the time. It's not healthy for 9 out of 10 people to quit because they can't make progress in early zones.

I don't really know if you CAN solve this since it's pretty fundamental to how EQ operates. Guess you could make everything NODROP but I doubt that'd be well received.

For what it's worth I had a lot of fun on live on Tallon Zek (Teams PVP). At least there you often had counter twinks around from your own team so there was at least a chance.

EQ pvp is full of flaws, there's no doubt about that. I think all of us that played on team servers will testify however that despite the flaws, it was fun and exciting. The more you have to lose, the higher the stakes are, then the more tense and exciting each fight is.

[Cen]

I only played PvP servers and only up to luclin. All four of them were amazing. I only played on PVE but it never stuck. I never felt like PVP was his imbalanced more problematic is some people seem to think. I felt like every class had something they could do well even if there were more PVE focused

[port9001]

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

I only played PvP servers and only up to luclin. All four of them were amazing. I only played on PVE but it never stuck. I never felt like PVP was his imbalanced more problematic is some people seem to think. I felt like every class had something they could do well even if there were more PVE focused

People naturally gravitated towards the classes that could hold their own in PVP. It is somewhat of a self correcting problem. Itemization for melees helped a lot later on too.

[pink grapefruit]

Playing VZ was literally the most fun I've ever had in a video game. EQ pvp was not at all balanced, which was fine really. It's not like classes are balanced in pve either, with warriors able to solo on par with shaman or whatever. But the pvp aspect of the game really heightened the community aspect, with certain players and alliances of guilds being KoS to others. When x guild was around you knew you had some allies in the zone to xp with or help you fight off others, and when y guild was around you knew you had to watch your back. As you got to higher levels and it came time to choose a guild, you were really deciding what role you wanted to play in the intricate scene of server politics. I've heard this happened on RZ too, with the whole PK vs anti-PK thing.

It created incentive to RP, and I can't even imagine how dull RP would have been on blue servers. When I play blue99 the game feels very watered down from what I remember back on VZ. On blue it doesn't really matter who you interact with, as you have no enemies or allies to assist you against said enemies. I really miss the days of /guidstating every new player to enter a zone to try to figure out if they were friendly or not. PvP really makes you more interested in the in-game community and other players you meet. On blue you're so limited in the ways you interact with other players that it makes most of the people you run across largely irrelevant.

I'll never understand why bluebies largely don't want to play on red, and it makes me kinda sad to think that most people who have nostalgic feelings about this game never got to fully realize the community aspects that we pvp players did.

[Squire]

idk why people think cloning existing servers is so much more laborious or resource consuming when pvp is enabled, nor do i get why said people believe they are the arbiter of what gets said resources.

there is a demand for a teams server, i dont think thats lost on anyone in this thread, but idk if thats on the table atm, i mean how long has the discord server beta been on the front page?