What fetish said is 100% accurate. Ive said this a bazillion times before. EQ2 was NEVER a pvp game. It was a PvE game with pvp enabled. And boy, besides the few imbalances across the classes, this was the best pvp system ive ever encountered. Tanks that could actually taunt lock you, classes that had advantages in different terrains, crowd control classes, healer, damage dealer, we had EVERYTHING. Theres a reason why Nagafen was the most populated server back in the day. And it was not because Nagafen, or pvp in general sucked. Theres many reasons why pvp died, and imho the major fault lies with SoE. Not because they couldn't fix the imbalances, but because they made tactically wrong moves. Battlegrounds for example should have never made it into this game, especially not on Nagafen. I mean why did you have to give an alternate route to gain the best armor ingame with no risk? BGs killed both pvp and pve. On nagafen people preferred to BG to get the armor guaranteed with no risk. And on other server people used stop doing heroic instances or raids because it was easier and faste to do BGs. Then the whole neglect from SoEs side for nagafen gave the rest. A real shame.
Your perspective is either that of someone who wasn't there...or is a "misinformer". It became unfun because the game was changed...the proof of this is in the history. It is readily viewable on archived forum posts. People loved the "gimmicky" nature. They flooded the red servers and stayed there until SOE changed the game to take away the risk. That was fine for the blue servers...nerfing overland ^^^'s, making insta-travel anywhere easy, making stat choices simpler for bluebies. Taking risk away from red servers is what made them unfun, taking away the need to experience content with that risk is what made them unfun...and that is why BGs stink. There is no risk at all...you could just /autorun at a wall and get your rewards...it isn't a coincidence that you can insta-travel to them. It wasn't the blue players enjoying the red server that caused people to leave...they were welcomed openly. It was the blue players who stayed on the blue servers, yet cried about how they wanted BGs and even PvP rewards for playing BGs that caused the pointlessness of playing on a red server. The risk was taken away...simple as that.
I'm the CAREIEST of Care Bears, & even I know this is utterly false. Granted, I only got my Dirge up to level 20 on Naggy, & granted I didn't stay -- because I'm not that much into PvP -- but during those 20 levels, I had a LOT of fun. Once, I got ambushed by a Ranger while I was out questing ... we kited each other around in circles before I finally killed him, but then, seconds later, I got jumped by someone else who took advantage of my recovery time & whacked me. Another time I chased an Illy all the way across Commonlands before I finally tracked her down & killed her with the help of a couple other wandering players. That was several years ago, & I still remember those incidents more fondly than most PvE experiences. Yea, PvP was fun, back in the day. SOE ruined it by listening to too many Care Bears. These players in this thread are right: Battlegrounds & other such "closed world" PvP gimmicks never should have been implemented at all on Nagafen. I'll even say that any kind of "token farming," whether through writs or what-have-you, was a bad idea, & IMO so is any notion of having separate "PvP tuned" gear. Players should be gearing up through PvE, while killing their rivals from the other factions for constant PvP. If I were a SOE dev & seriously wanted to revamp Naggy, I'd eliminate all of the things that make the world too comfy for players & allow players to avoid each other: fast travel abilities in guild halls, etc. I'd get rid of the Battlegrounds & Warzones, too. Get people out in the world where they'll be more likely to run into each other, & PvP will return. But, I have grave doubts that SOE is ever going to care, & in fact I think SOE stopped caring about EQ2 PvP a long time back.
There aren't enough players for a standalone PVP server in a game without proper PVP or the potential for proper PVP. Saying you "had fun" on PVP doesn't make the PVP fun in the long term, and the long term is what MMOs are about. I had fun in Kindergarten finger painting, taking naps and putting glue in people's hair. But I wouldn't spend the next 11 years doing that. Change is necessary to keep things interesting. Some of those changes will scare people away, but PVP has always had major problems in this game. Any honest person will attest to that, and many of those problems did much more damage than battlegrounds did.
Caving into Blue Player wants for fast travel and more instances cause it takes to long to get to where I need to get to and then on top of that someone else has already killed the mob and now I need to sit and wait for it to respawn only to have someone else grab it before I can get a hit in and get my update. This is what killed the PvP server Blue Players wanting an even simpler easier game and then wanting their PvP lite ( BG ) on top of it. The best PvP on Naggy imo was at the end of ROK start of TSO we had PvP gear about the right number of instances PvE gear and PvP gear needed to be combined to be optimal. There were overland quests for items that were worth it in PvE and PvP. Then came SF and the start of fast travel, more instances, dumbing down of stats and BG's. Once that started the PvP servers started to die. All changes that occurred due to Blue Player wants. Yes this is a PvE game with PvP enabled and SoE did a great job until then keeping it balanced until changed things that did not need to be changed. I seriously doubt that SoE would have lost a single cust by not putting in BG's but they did loose allot because they put them in.
I dont lay blame on soe. They gave us exactly what the vocal majority asked for. I blame human nature. There was only ever just a handful of pvpers that pvpd purely for the enjoyment of pvp. The rest wanted fast, easy rewards in uber gankfests while using every cheap tactic and outnumbering their foes. Ganks, godspells, evacs, fear procs, broken t5 pieces. The reason nagafen has a low pop, imo, was because the pvp playerbase asked for gear seperation forcing the last of the raid guilds off the server. The reason pvp sucks right now is because no one is playing purely for pvp. If there is 100 people online why is there only 4 players max out looking for pvp in overland zones? Truth be told. Pvpers always complained. Even when we had opponents to fight. Every day I heard in vent this is awful Im gonna quit all the way back to kos. Its funny that everyone gets rose colored glasses lookin back. The only thing that really, really, really bothered me was the LAG.
Maddest knows what's up. PVP people have always been wildly variant on what they want. The loudest of the complaints were answered, some of it was good, some of it was bad, and some of it made people quit. The fact is, battlegrounds were absolutely awesome for non PVP servers. It enabled PVP to be what it should be in an MMO: A minigame. Maybe the option for people to PVP in that manner is one desired by much of the Nagafen population, and the idea of overland PVP is only appealing to a minority. Mostly people who spend many hours in overland zones and contested dungeons, aka casual players. And of course, the people farming the casuals for lulz in between raids. The question is this: Do you think Nagafen players would have been happy to find out that Battlegrounds, a cross server PVP setting, would NOT be allowed for use by Nagafen players as a means to preserve overland PVP? Do you really think people wouldn't have been furious about that? I promise you that Battlegrounds were a positive influence on this game. They are very much worth the loss of the few Nagafen players who are simply desperate to place blame. Not to mention, PVP was "dead" before BG's even launched. PVP has been "dead" since EQ2 as a whole has been "dead". Since ~RoK.
Implying the rewards from battlegrounds are why everyone does them. In fact, the only reason anyone I know cares about the battleground rewards is because they offer you an advantage in battlegrounds. Remove the gear, and with it goes the necessity to OBTAIN THE GEAR. The gear is not useful for non-PVP. Unless you're referring SOLELY to the red players who have switched to battlegrounds as their PVP choice, abandoning the Nagafen server's overworld PVP. In which case, again, the population suffers naturally and exponentially more than other servers. Less players = less content for PVP-centric playstyles. Imagine if raid mobs started disappearing with every raider that quit the game. Guess what raiders would start doing? Quitting. That's what. Which results in more raid mobs disappearing. Less content for your playstyle = less desire to play. This isn't just an analogy either. It's a reality. Every expansion the hardcore raid content shrinks as the hardcore guilds collapse. This expansion was a small exception, and the casual raiders have suffered. I'm sure there will be some adjustments going forward. Catering to the remaining people is an unfortunate necessity, since it's easier than bringing people back. It also means you will alienate those that sympathize or share similar taste and desire to those who have already left, which results in them leaving also. In the end, after the dust has cleared, you have a game with one or two primary facets of gameplay. It becomes extremely niche, and the population becomes smaller and more stable as the direction solidifies. For EQ2, this will be the solo questing, casual group/raid (maybe) house decorating population. Not PVPers. Not raiders. If something can be done with minimal effort to appease and appeal to the non-core groups, it will be done. If not, welcome to how MMOs age. It's not graceful.
Tough to make heads or tails of that post maergoth. It seems deep and analytical but its over my head. Just an fyi not an opinine. I got bored off nagafen and went blue. With about 10 pieces of pvp gear I started raiding and placing about 5th on the zw parse on a chanter. Plus I dont dies to the aoes due to the sta of said pieces. I am the most survivable mage in the group. I aint saying the pieces are desirable cuz they aint. Just what I had as a consequence of being one of the last pvp holdouts. Battlegrounds doesnt feel like pvp to me. I only go there for the daily and havent done so since I left a pvp server. A blues motivation will be quite different from a red. BG aint my style and was only a means to an end. Which definitely wasnt for more gear to do more BG's. In fact most pvpers, that I know on a personal basis, only did the dailies for the same reason. There are definitely guilds,who have a large portion of members which stay in there for long periods of time, but I was never a member of one of em. BG feels too confined. Like hunting a tiger in a cage. Ganak can be fun if the raids are fairly equal, i.e. challenging. They day I logged in and saw that wf wasn't supported I said pvp is officially dead. It was the carrot on the stick that kept the last of the 100 or so players interested in overland to keep logging in. I played on venekor long after it was fashionable and can tell you 100 active pvpers is plenty to stay busy.
Was thinking to myself. 100 pvpers prolly isnt enough to pay to keep the lights on let alone dev time. If having two decade old games with pvp wasnt braggin rights, i.e. street cred, I think they'd pull the shutters on this one. I wouldn't blame em for one second.
You grasp most of my post then. TLDR; Game gets older. People leave. Devs focus on the most profitable / popular / easiest demographics.
You truly are unbelievable in what misinformation you parade as truth. The red servers were among the most popular. They crashed from the load of the players on them. Nagafen required new hardware to even stay up. Their long term was only shortened by horrible choices made by the ones at SOE allowed to make horrible choices and get away with it. The "change" was obviously uninteresting. Any "honest" person, as you say, would be able to attest to how the red servers were ridiculously popular when they were allowed to be red servers...before they were linked with your bluebie servers by way of bluebie BGs. You can spin it how ever you want that things needed to change, but your words will always be painted false by history...by the tragic wasting of the best MMORPG PvP environment to ever had existed. Doesn't sound like a profitable change to me at all...those changes drove thriving servers full of people away. But yeah, Mowse is right, merge or transfers should be done...currently the only people who even think about Nagafen are those who have fond memories of what was lost, or those like you, who think the changes that made the red servers die are good.
It is speculation from either of you. No one knows what wouldve been. The only real measurable difference I noted was that the losing side in the WF would often hide in the BG giving the winning side an even bigger advantage. The winning side didnt seem to mind much and turned out in force regardless cuz they liked their free tokens while they had to contribute very little. So half of half the pvp pop on the server hid. While half of the winning side was afk in the water or dead under the tower and the rest continued as normal. The people that bg could be on blue or red it dont matter much. They are non entities in the discussion imo. The people that hid were probably terrible. The people that layed dead under the tower were also probably terrible. None of which really had much of an effect on the outcome or contributed to active pvp. Afkers and BGers had little effect on me. What did affect me was that very few if any wanted a good honest fight. Displaced, Transcend, Google hacks and possible Bugs had about 20 to 30, total, dedicated pvpers that wanted high quality fights. There is maybe 10 of those players left atm due to limited availability of overland pvp rewards.
For the record, although a number of people on Naggy did cry for BGs to be put in here too back when they were first announced in 2010, most of the other changes went in regardless of what open PvPers thought. We just got automatic PvE dumps like level locking, the AA slider, flying and leaping mounts, tons of instanced dungeons etc. It wasn't SOE misjudging what open PvP servers wanted or PVPers crying for the wrong thing, it was that SOE wasn't considering how all these blue server modifications to the game would impact the open PvP servers when they instituted those things. Most of the servers are blue, therefore, they are who SOE is thinking of with each expansion, period.
It's funny, because talk to ANY blue players with any knowledge of mechanics, internal development decisions and the people making the decisions. You will quickly be reminded of how many awful PVE decisions were made with preserving PVP in mind. It really doesn't matter why you think PVP died. If you think it's Battlegrounds, you're hilariously wrong, but whatever. The solution is more important. Invent a time machine to relive your glorious high school years, quit the game, transfer servers, or wait for a fix. Take your pick. I'm not in a hurry. SOE doesn't have the resources to touch PVP yet. That's all there is to it.
Show of hands. Who remembers contested Veeshans Peak? having non progression raid zones contested would make for some interesting evenenings. lol.
