Everquest AMA Answered!

Elidroth said:

Are you not seeing where I said PVP IN EQ is dead? PVP in EQ was a bandaid at best. It wasn't ever really designed to be a PVP in any way, shape, or form. Trust me, I definitely understand that PVP is a big deal right now, but that's in games that were designed for it. I LOVE the BR games. I play Ring of Elesium quite a bit. I played a TON of Fortnite. I get it. But EQ PVP is/has always been broke as fuck. So to devote ANY resources to it means you have to devote A LOT of resources to it to fix the horrific problems, and then you don't have enough resources to do much of anything else.

"At some point someone decided to stop working on PVP" is factually false. EQ PVP hasn't been worked on reasonably since like year 1.5 at latest.

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I'll bite. As someone who was in beta, then moved to Rallos Zek, my impression was that the inclusion of PvP was a fairly direct result of EQ's sense of itself as the direct commercial successor to UO. At that point in the development of graphical MMOs, it was simply a given that players would be able to interact by attacking each other. Based on my very foggy recollection of conversations with Zelnik, Ozuri, and other people in the know back then, making EQ a PvE-focused game was in some senses an innovation, and launching a PvP server was a way of hedging that bet.

RZ certainly worked out that way; PvP was used to settle differences, and there were a handful of people who did it more or less full-time, (in <Hidden Power> it was about all we did), but most of the server was comprised of people who couldn't enjoy the immersion of the game without the ability to settle disputes in combat, and the danger of that happening at any given moment.

Because PvP was an immersion feature--not the end-all-be-all goal of the PvP servers--modest development resources being dedicated to PvP was enough to keep the servers fun, and balanced enough (not actually balanced, but balanced enough) that people still enjoyed them. The task probably became impossible later on when the PvP scene lost that post-UO immersion hangover, and became more like Quake arenas; EQ definitely was never made to support that kind of intense PvP environment. However, that's different from saying it never supported, by design, a healthy PvP community. It did. Sleeper Kill, multiple BotB wins, Test of Tactics win (I was there), Tryndamere (who invented League of Legends) was a lifelong EQ PvPer, et cetera.

Anyway, there were definitely PvP content updates much later than 18 months into the game. The PvP vendor rewards system with quick-cast pumices and the like came much later, if I recall.

I'm not arguing that more resources to PvP servers would be well-spent nowadays. I'm just saying it's not fair to say it never worked. It definitely did. But that was a different time.

Punko said:

I already accepted most EQ devs were drugged and worn out beyond reason.

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Based upon what? None of us used drugs when I was on the team, and most of us didn't really drink (the occasional beer down the street at the local breweries excepted). So seriously.. WTF are you talking about?

Punko said:

This was fantastic content. Early 2000s e-sport, boat was missed entirely from that point on.

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I was on the team that won the contest in the video you linked. I can certainly appreciate, to a certain extent, the e-sports comparison, since Tryndamere (who founded League of Legends) had his formative PvP experience on the Discord server. The principles of bringing your own elaborately itemized character into a team PvP scenario was heavily influenced by his experiences in EQ.

I stop short of thinking that EQ is meant to deliver that kind of competitive (i.e. e-sports/PvP by design) experience. We were able to win that contest despite being under-geared and below max level because you had to be such an outlaw to survive as a 'PK' (which is very much what we were called) on RZ. On a server where everyone is full-time PvP mode, we never would have developed as a guild and a team in the way we did. I don't much care for present-day EQ PvP, and although I could certainly blame the developers for abandoning it, the truth is that my fellow PvP players are just as much (I would say more) to blame. I don't think any amount of developer attention could have overcome the poor trajectory of EQ's PvP community.

I'm not sure if you saw, but the recent ArsTechnica article on EQ includes a quote from Holly saying she intends to do something about Zek this year. I hope she finds a way to respect the hours that PvP players have put in over the years, and the many accomplishments unique in EverQuest history which belong to the PvP servers in particular (Test of Tactics was certainly one of them). If they shutter the server, I will definitely log back in to see it come down. But I'm not sure the PvP community at present has proven they deserve much more than that. I wish I were wrong.

Punko said:

They have had the attitude Elidroth has displayed here for years, I find it hard to get past.

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I never understood why they didn't remove the cross-teaming restrictions for red toons on blue servers years ago. If red players want to drag around invulnerable healers with them, who cares? Let them pee in their own pool; it still doesn't affect the blue players, and it makes it possible for PvP players to exist on blue servers without being permanently ruled out of most groups. There are a number of (presumably) easy solutions like this that haven't been tried. To the developers, I would say: If you disdain EQ PvP so much, just choose one of these easy solutions, implement it, and walk away. To a certain extent, the more you ignore PvP the more time you will spend fielding complaints about it, and therefore thinking about it.

Locnar said:

I said the same from the very beginning, early EQ pvp was about increasing immersion for all involved. It needed dev support as time went on though to counteract the slowly changing community that gave in more and more to the temptation of being random PKs. Instead it got less support and more players went down the dead end road of becoming a random-PK, which together leads to a toilet flush swirl down the drain.

I blame both groups, then and now (now as in "recent" red99, which is a few years in its grave already community wise, but I watched it go down the SAME WAY I saw rallos and the other pvp servers go down, just at a much faster rate).

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My recollection is that Rallos Zek could be pretty PvP-free all the way until the merge. After <Ascending Dawn> and their allies won the Rebirth War, my guild and the handful of other remaining PK guilds that could field well-geared, maximum-level forces pretty much stopped participating in the server. The remaining PK guilds were all casual griefers and SEQ abusers (<Darkenbane> et cetera).

The merge was the beginning of the end for the Rallos Zek PvP-as-immersion playstyle. Three out of the four servers that merged (and probably three quarters of the players) were teams-based, so they had a culture of attacking all eligible PvP targets, unless you were actively cross-teaming with a specific guild. Early days on the Zek server were RZ rules with TZ/VZ/SZ playstyles.

To give an example of a culture clash: When the merge happened, <Ascending Dawn> issued a whitelist of guilds they wouldn't engage in PvP, but they had to drop it almost instantly after people from most of those guilds ignored the list and randomly attacked AsD members. By that time, the phrase 'Player Killer' didn't register with anyone who wasn't an RZ player; it was a holdover from Ultima Online, and it sounded like something your granddad would say, (one step away from calling someone a 'player murderer.')

Still, there were great individual guilds on Zek, and the server had a few very good years. But once you wind up in a situation where you can't field two reasonably-sized raid forces without one or both of those guilds having to let in every available warm body (including cheaters and anti-socials), the community is finished and there's no reviving it.

Locnar said:

When the wolves don't attack and drive off the coyotes, bears, cougars, etc. and instead everyone just devolves into a orgy of killing the sheep for no other reason then jollies, there can't be a long term community. This is why I judge pk guilds through the years so harshly.

The random pk guild should of had a sense of this, that a server could only tolerate a very small minority of the population being lets say , chaotic evil. The smart pk guild should of concentrated their efforts into snuffing out the other dingle berries (in effect becoming a anti-pk guild). You can't have a city run by the crooks and expect it to last. But then again you can't expect the players to show the strength and restraint to realize this. This is where the developers failed to put in systems to prop up and support the sheep enough as time went on and more and more players fell to the weakness of unrestrained killing.

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100 percent agree. In <Hidden Power> and later in <Facultas Utrimque> as well as with <the Begotten> and the tiny handful of other guilds we cooperated with (<Sinister> <The Regulators> <Covetous Crew> to name a few) during the first couple years of Rallos Zek, we could not be bothered to waste time griefing randoms. The game for us was all about zone control and systematically disrupting the PvE-focused activities of the bigger guilds. We left the server after Rebirth War because the lead GM for RZ made a decision that engaging those guilds in PvP during raids would be treated as zone disruption, i.e. suspendable, at which point the only kind of PvP left was random encounters and we had zero interest in that. If we ran into guys from the random PK guilds, we would smash them especially hard. For us, 'PK' was a label worn with serious pride (it was playing the game on hard mode), and that required picking primarily on people your own size--preferably bigger.

I can't speak for all those guilds, but in Hidden Power if we thought anyone was using SEQ, we booted them and outed them immediately. We were very serious about being recognized as skilled players who didn't want to fall in with the care bears. We were out to do things like win BotBs and the Test of Tactics, and our wins would have been meaningless if people had caught us cheating. I know the game has changed, but if I were leading a guild again, I would tell my members that avoiding PvP or eating repeated deaths without fighting back is better than using third party programs.

I have been, on many occasions, totally appalled at the behavior of the crop of PvP players who stuck around. Someone once informed me that a guild carrying our banner had been started in Eve Online, so I sought out the guild leader and learned he was not only a poser (in fact, he had been in one of the lowbie griefer PK guilds we always crushed on RZ), but he was also an avowed neo-Nazi. He thought I would be thrilled he was keeping the guild name alive. As you might expect, I was less than thrilled.

pharmakos said:

If anti-PK guilds actually existed in EQ, I'd actually play PVP.

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A teams model would go a loooong way toward making this kind of dynamic occur. Unfortunately, the teams models that have been used in EQ before all inevitably lead to cross-teaming because the class mix and geographical zone distribution is tilted in a way that is very unfavorable toward the good team. The player-conceived factions on Rallos Zek were 99.9 percent of the reason it was such an amazing experience from 1999-2001. It really had the best qualities of a giant, internet-based DnD tabletop game.

FacUtr said:

I never understood why they didn't remove the cross-teaming restrictions for red toons on blue servers years ago. If red players want to drag around invulnerable healers with them, who cares? Let them pee in their own pool; it still doesn't affect the blue players, and it makes it possible for PvP players to exist on blue servers without being permanently ruled out of most groups. There are a number of (presumably) easy solutions like this that haven't been tried. To the developers, I would say: If you disdain EQ PvP so much, just choose one of these easy solutions, implement it, and walk away. To a certain extent, the more you ignore PvP the more time you will spend fielding complaints about it, and therefore thinking about it.

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Are you serious? You don't see the issue with an invulnerable heal bot in PVP?

As for fielding complaints about PVP.. Um.. Heh.. Yeah.. You clearly overestimate the amount of interest in PVP in EQ. You act as though it isn't something we (when I was there) examined. It's funny.. there are a vocal few who say how "AMAZING" PVP would be in EQ, yet in truth this amounts to about 100 ppl at most who would come back and pay a sub to play. Certainly not enough to ramp up a server, because strangely, businesses don't like pissing money away for no reason or return.

Design a game for PVP, like a BR, or a MOBA, and yeah.. PVP is awesome. EQ PVP was fun for about 3 classes who could gank the shit out of people and then vanish. As an example, on the very short-lived permadeath server, people would log on, make an SK, group up with other SKs, run around blow their HT on someone to roast them, and then log off. Whoooeeeee.. So much fun PVP.. Not.