Everquest AMA Answered!

Eq tlps are perpetually topheavy, with the majority of players looking to grind max level and do elite quests and/or raid, with extremely few truly casuals and no new players that aren't at least following a vet along. This resulted in a busted up high end and in particular classic and kunark being a cesspool that devs put a lot of effort into easing. They added instanced zone copies to add more camp room, nerfed boxing, and instanced + buffed raid content.

Pvp is the same problen but EVEN WORSE. While tlps have few casuals, a pvp server has basically none. No dev efforts at all can recreate the classic environment of people playing eq pvp just for the danger or the opportunity to maybe pvp or the roleplay elements. Only true pvpers will touch eq pvp. There is no vibrant world of people grinding pve for the most part, no generally ignorant or new folks... and cheating is common.

You can blame lack of attention or mismanaged development but the reality is that the magic is gone across the board in that classic feels sense, and it just so happens to hit pvp the hardest. Any pvp server has to balance not just for the differences vs blue ones, but also for the reality of a 20 year old game where everyone is a wolf with a working seq map too.

Punko said:

Pretty much every other PVP game has solved it by preventing players from griefing others into oblivion.

An EQ server with a few years on it has characters that will 1 shot new characters, and a group of those top chars will wipe any other guild repeatedly, for hours on end.

Compare that to playing LoL, Fortnite, Counterstrike, .. in those the player isn't forced to deal with the same people over and over. Having PVP occur in instances would solve the issue.

You can let people PVP for a ranking and points, as most other successful games on the market do.

Unsure why you think the problems you name can't be solved, a lot of games actually have done that.

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That's really what you want, PvP instances? I feel like that completely removes anything that made PVP in EQ interesting and that all you're left with is a subpar version of those other games you mentioned.

I guess if it was something like guild wars 2 it could be interesting but that requires more resources than DBG is going to spend.

I feel like we did Guild War's at some point early on in Fennin Ro... I think?... Never really settled anything iirc though.

Punko said:

It should be tied into PVE of course.

Have the top tier guilds PVP for a shot at the next raid encounter.

At no point did I mention disregarding what made EQ what it was, it was a formidable base to build on.

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P99 did this when they launched VP, it was a no GM intervention zone , granted it didnt havePVP but it didnt need to with all the other ways to grief people.

It was awful and that was the last time I ever logged in.

Fifey said:

P99 did this when they launched VP, it was a no GM intervention zone , granted it didnt havePVP but it didnt need to with all the other ways to grief people.

It was awful and that was the last time I ever logged in.

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Did you never experience Abacab's pranks? Was such a hate/love relationship. Was grateful to have him in our guild until it was time I had to talk to Rogean about "Who trained Inglorious Bastards?" "Like... Rogean, bro, have you seen the people in this guild? I wouldnt trust a house plant with half these people! I have no idea?!"

Punko said:

Like I said, they missed the boat on it entirely. Now the veterans have learned so much about the game that it simply isn't interesting to start as a new player.

I'm not saying classic can be recreated, I'm saying they missed the boat on the opportunities they had due to their own lack of effort, and that statements based on the (lack of) succes of EQ pvp, given how it was handled, aren't correct and most certainly aren't representative for the current markets view on pvp.

tl;dr: "we tried to let people play Pong PVP in 1981, but since they had 800ms ping they hated it, so pvp sucks", is not quite correct.

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That isn't the problem.

The problem is that the entire fun filled eq pvp worlds that we enjoyed (tz in my case) do not and will not exist, because the new and casual player base doesn't exist anymore. The game is 20 years old, only vets or friends of vets are playing. In pve that meant a massive rise to the top in the form of grinding and raiding. For pvp, that means a mass looking to hardcore pvp. The casual noobs who just shoot the shit doing who cares what ignorantly are mostly gone from pve tlps. The same equivalent, the casual pvpers who just want a challenge or roleplay or maybe dabble in it once every so often but don't take it seriously? They won't be there.

Your server is therefore going to be all wolves. Or at least after a week or two it will be. No sheep. No casuals. This is your problem.


Personally if it were up to me, I would break the pvp ice by doing a tlp with rotating special rulesets. Eg, one day normal then a day where all ow raid mobs respawn at x time then a pvp day with double xp then a double faction and rare day, then back to normal cycled per 4 days. See how that goes. I truly honest to god do not believe a dedicated pure pvp server has a chance of making it 2 months with a population intact.

So it's the maximum amount of fun!

ZyyzYzzy said:

PvP in EQ is as fun as intentionally getting butt raped by a bunch of African mandingos inorder to contract AIDS

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I will bet you there are more people who actively pursue getting gangbanged by black men, and also more bug chasers, than there are eq pvpers. Even flat earth has eq pvp beat.

Locnar said:

First, there were "sheep" on the last legit (not talking garage shitboxes with 3 people) pvp server, red99. There were small casual guilds, roleplaying guilds, anti-pk guilds, all of it. That all got ruined for various reasons we've touched on. So with the right care on BOTH the players and devs part, it can be recreated.

Second, as far as easing into it and killing two birds with one stone: Why not have a server were just raid zones were pvp enabled? No more retarded first to engage, or rotations, or whatever all that nonsense is. Let pvp decide who gets that top end reward. Yet the majority of zones and cities remain safely blue for sheep to grow big and strong and then zerg the wolves when they decide they want some dragons too

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How long did those sheep last? How much of the server was wolves (or trying to be) by a month in?

"With the right care on BOTH the players and devs part" where do I even begin with this? Devs part = human resource costs. That has to be justified, and I have seen nobody even try to justify it by arguing for bigger player sub numbers and/or store purchase potential. Players part, dear god, what tlp world is this supposed to happen on? Every single tlp, every one, when the players are given the choice between "cooperate" or "defect" on the raid mob prisoner dilemma, we chose defect then rolled alts so they could defect too. No server has ever had cooperation for the greater good. Not one.

I do like the idea of a blue server with a few red zones where raids happen. Toss in some double ZEM but pvp flagged "hotzone" ones along the way to let people dip a toe while xping and I think this idea has great potential. It cuts a lot of the issues while removing the gm costs (potentially its less gm need than normal even!) at the mere cost of being kinda pussy for a pvp ruleset.

yerm said:

How long did those sheep last? How much of the server was wolves (or trying to be) by a month in?

"With the right care on BOTH the players and devs part" where do I even begin with this? Devs part = human resource costs. That has to be justified, and I have seen nobody even try to justify it by arguing for bigger player sub numbers and/or store purchase potential. Players part, dear god, what tlp world is this supposed to happen on? Every single tlp, every one, when the players are given the choice between "cooperate" or "defect" on the raid mob prisoner dilemma, we chose defect then rolled alts so they could defect too. No server has ever had cooperation for the greater good. Not one.

I do like the idea of a blue server with a few red zones where raids happen. Toss in some double ZEM but pvp flagged ones along the way to let people dip a toe maybe and I think this idea has merit. It cuts a lot of the issues while removing the gm costs (potentially its less gm need than normal even!) at the mere cost of being kinda pussy for a pvp ruleset.

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It doesn't work. Look at WoW. Warmode is awful. In order to make it solvent they ended up buffing guards way way up. So now there is a safe zone you can use to teleport back to and turn it off. Which had basically made PvP worthless. The ZEM works until a guy dies once or twice then it's useless. EQ will never have the resources to make a PvP server work because they just don't work. It has to do with the mindset of the guys who really want to be special but can't handle dying in fortnite or what ever game is popular now for PvP.

Elidroth said:

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

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What's the point in pissing on the only PvP player in this thread who has consistently defended your position about not opening a new PvP server in the future? And if you'd read even the entirety of the individual post you quoted, you would see that I mentioned that this has already been--for ages--a problem on every PvP server except for Sullon. Not just invulnerable heal bots, but invulnerable selo bots, and so on. The difference between invulnerable OOR (levels-wise) and invulnerable red-blue healers is very incremental. You would know this if you'd played PvP at all--ever.

Not that developers have a responsibility to play the PvP server, but if they're not going to, they should make an effort to listen to the handful of mature, respectful PvP players who have suggestions, not just write them off as lunatics. 100 players, using your number, is still 100 players, deserving of some minimum support, and if you let them cross-team on blue servers, what's the worst that can happen? Blue server PvP is broken, which is a non-problem in light of the fact that you say all PvP is already broken and has been for a long time. Blue players are completely unaffected. As for red players, they can PvP honorably or PvP dishonorably, same as it ever was, except they're at least able to participate in PvE when they're not PvPing.

It's a suggestion which bends over backwards to request the absolute bare minimum of invested development resources, and causes very little change in the PvP ecosystem if you're familiar with that ecosystem, but I'm beginning to see what Punko means when he says the attitude of people who have been on the development side is to reject all possible solutions out of hand, because they've developed congenital defensiveness about all matters related to PvP.

I was never super into PVP, but when I was getting bored with my initial run in EQ back in the old eras, I had a friend from the serverwide.necro community that was on Sullon Zek, I rolled over there and got an SK up to max level and it was actually pretty fun. But a lot of that fun would 100% be impossible to replicate. I didn't even know ShowEQ was a fucking thing back then, and most people I knew probably didn't either. That's just the thinnest veneer of cheating too, more active hacking is even more disruptive to PVP, and it's obvious Daybreak is not willing to police that stuff.

An EQ PVP TLP would attract a moderate launch, based on the number of general chats I saw for Selo and Mangler on launch day, I'd estimate there were upward of 8,000+ people playing between the two servers. I'd guess a PVP TLP would have maybe 1000-1500, and it would have a die off unbelievably rapidly and condense down to probably 150-200 people maximum.