Please: Fix Zek, or shut it down and replace it with PvP (or hybrid PvP/PvE) progression.

Already, this’ll be TLDR (1000 words; two pages of your term paper), and I’d like to be concise, but want to preface: there are two active guilds on Zek, and both of them—their leaders, their members—support this request.

1.Why EverQuest PvP merits the careful attention of EverQuest Developers:

Although the PvP playerbase (and PvP servers) have always been a minority in EverQuest, they have been responsible for some of the game’s best-known and most interesting moments. Foremost, the killing of The Sleeper on Rallos Zek, which remains the achievement in EverQuest’s player community history most frequently discussed in the mainstream gaming media. But also: Fansy the Famous Bard, the improbable triumph of Rallos Zek’s under-geared (and under-leveled, in fact) Test of Tactics team at the game-wide 6v6 PvP tournament, and so on.

These moments constitute some of the best ‘emergent content’ EverQuest has been able to offer its players over the past 17 years. PvP players have always demonstrated a remarkable determination not just to conquer the content developers offer them, but to make of it something more—and more meaningful to their server communities—than the developers initially intended. I think it’s important the significance of these moments not be lost on the development team, particularly because ‘emergent content’ is the focus of most contemporary MMO development—including EverQuest’s previously-planned third installment, EverQuest Next.

The evolving, dynamic experience offered by the PvP servers was the direct result of the immersive gaming culture and intense interpersonal bonds that formed when players were allowed to impose consequences on each other in addition to cooperation. That’s something worth preserving.

Of course, ‘emergent content’ is not always good, and PvP players must take responsibility for making some (not all) of the servers they’ve inhabited unnecessarily unpleasant. But developer decisions can influence these outcomes, and have not historically been good ones on Zek (PvP leaderboards and serverwide PvP kill announcements have fueled the poorer elements of the server’s culture, and done nothing to address the problems with EverQuest PvP that genuinely need addressing).

2.Making a substantive improvement to PvP in EverQuest would not require extensive changes, and would be meaningful even if significant problems remained:

PvP gameplay mechanics primarily suffer from one category of flaw: burst DPS has wildly outpaced player character hitpoints and mitigation abilities. A dramatic improvement in quality of life for Zek players could be achieved with the application of PvP modifiers to activated DPS-boosting (and DPS-producing) abilities. Game management has addressed these issues in previous eras, to good effect, and another generation of similar review and modification—even if nothing else were altered—would change the server for the better.

3.Sunsetting the Zek server in favor of a ‘stock’ progression server, with little to no development resources dedicated to modifying the current package for a PvP playerbase, would present potential PvP players with a vast improvement over Zek:

Even if the server developed severe imbalance issues of its own, it would not initially suffer from the burst DPS problems which make PvP on Zek so difficult to enjoy.

The overall improvement in PvP mechanics likely to result from simply moving the PvP community into a server based on earlier content is so desirable to Zek players that every active Zek player I know would be glad to repurchase each previous EverQuest expansion in order to keep playing on the new server as it unlocked new content. Not only would this offset the loss of expansion sales revenue from moving a live server to a progression ruleset, it would likely result in a fairly durable revenue increase from the PvP community, making the launch of a new PvP server a net contributor to game management’s bottom line, even after the initial wave of returning players subsides.

4.A hybrid PvP/PvE server with a novel ruleset could balance the interests of both PvE and PvP players in a way that would potentially attract a large playerbase:

The presence of two types of player made Rallos Zek the vibrant, dynamic community that produced the Sleeper kill: a majority of players who embraced occasional PvP primarily because it offered a greater sense of immersion, and a minority whose playstyle revolved around deliberately seeking PvP encounters. Over time, the former group has inevitably dwindled on PvP servers while the latter has remained.

With the proper ruleset, the diversity of playstyles found on Rallos Zek could be reproduced on a new server—a ‘purple server (hybrid PvP and PvE).’ Such a server, with a truly novel ruleset (as opposed to a novel chronology for content), might reproduce the deep sense of immersion and of dynamic, player-driven content that characterized Rallos Zek, and would stand a good chance of attracting a profitably-sized playerbase.

The ruleset could function as follows:

Allow players to choose between red (PvP) and blue (PvE) character flagging during the character creation process, and to change their flag after level 20 based on membership in a red (PvP) guild or blue (PvE) guild. Guilds would be perma-flagged based on the flag carried by the guild’s founder at the time of the guild’s creation. Switching guild membership and/or creating a guild could be subject to lengthy lockouts in order to avoid exploitation of this system.

The /guildwar command could also be fixed so that blue guilds may participate in the PvP aspect of the server at a time and in a manner of their choosing, by warring each other, or by warring with a red guild.

Red and blue players could also be permitted to crossteam their healing and buffing, but with the effectiveness of their abilities heavily penalized when used by blue players on red players, so that cross-teaming is occasionally useful in casual grouping situations (a red cleric healing a blue warrior, for instance) and would facilitate interaction between the red and blue communities, but would not permit for heavy exploiting of cross-team invulnerability in PvP.

Sorry for writing at length, and thank you for reading.

For further consultation, contact the leaders and officers of Zek’s two active guilds: Retaliation (Trizzity, senior officer, is a good contact), and Wudan (Dorigen, guildleader). They deserve to be heard.

I agree, something needs to be done. Not only is the PvP broken, but it is also scarce. PvP encounters consist of people entering a zone and using various cool down abilities accompanied by a broken item called a "Gyrospire Relocation Device" that will instantly gate the person from the zone (while stunned) to a safe zone. The gyro device is supposed to have a cool down of 30 minutes, but it is broken. Shadow Knights are able to link a host of abilities to one button and insta-kill people. Warriors are capable of insta-killing people as well. There are also many other classes that are unbalanced in the game. If a progression server was made it would not only draw players from Zek, but other servers as well. A lot of the player base on Zek has moved to other servers simply because people had finally grown tired of the unbalanced player vs. player combat that has existed on Zek for years. I realize that with 15 other servers (or however many their are) and one Pvp server, the PvP'ers are not exactly a top priority community. However, we are customers and customers produce revenues for businesses. I personally pay upwards of $120.00 per month to play on Zek and that is not including my Daybreak Store purchases. My intention is not to be standoffish any way, but we deserve to be treated like any other customer; our requests and input should be taken seriously.The attitude of "Oh well if you don't like it move to blue server" has to stop. Myself and many other players feel like we are constantly being blown off or receiving no answers whenever we submit bug reports or petitions pertaining to broken in game items that are being exploited by players.

A PVP-Progression server or some type of hybrid would definitely alleviate a lot of these issues. I can guarantee you my entire guild would move. There are really two main guilds on zek, and both of them would move to the progression server. If it doesn't work out, then there is no real loss. The creation of progression servers has been running rampant now for a while. Players create characters on these servers and play for a while, then they move back to another server or onto the next progression server. We are counting on you not only as paying customers, but as EverQuest enthusiasts to take us seriously and do something about our server. Don't let us down. A lot of us have been playing since EQ's inception in 1999.

This is a TLP sub-section not a zek section.

And his suggestions for improvement included possibly closing the Zek server, and reforming it as a TLP-PvP server. If you would bother to read.

And if they did that then it would fall under the TLP, but right now it falls under zek so therefore wrong section.

I'm sorry, are you a Daybreak employee? If not, what's the point of coming in here and crapping on people for trying to get some basic improvements to their server, or otherwise get a new one?

Furthermore, there was a PvP forum. It was closed and archived years ago. This is the most appropriate forum for this post.

Not trying to crap on your post just trying to help you put it in the right place so the right people see it. No one who sees it in this forum is going to care about a live PvP server, and there are already multiple threads requesting a TLP PvP server so this really isn't the place for a post like this.

I certainly would not mind if they did something like this, however I think you are dramatically underestimating how much time and effort is involved in your point # 2(and to an extent, point # 4). I could be wrong as it is just speculation, but often times things that seem to a player like "non extensive changes" turn out to be a much bigger ordeal in terms of tweaking numbers and turning balance knobs, changing/add code(to a game that they admit themselves is extremely old and difficult to work with) testing, finding new issues, implementing fixes to unseen problems, re-testing, re-tweaking, etc etc. With the resources available to DBG for EQ - it just seems like a can of worms they just aren't going to want to open.

Again, I have no problem if they did this and would love to try it out, but I won't be holding my breath!

Actually, I'm in agreement with you, although I think #2, if implemented intelligently, could be applied with reasonable efficiency and rationalization of resources (there are a handful of problems on Zek that are so bad that just fixing them in particular would make a tremendous difference; Trizzity gave one very specific example, which is a very easy fix: debugging a cooldown)

#4, I imagine, could take a ton of coding effort, but I suppose, in theory, investment and potential reward would be linked in that (hypothetical) case, as a 'purple' server wouldn't just host the remaining red population, but would hopefully appeal to blue players, too.

#3 is definitely the easiest way, and I think that's why you see so many threads from PvP players asking for it. They would all prefer a progression server over Zek, and knowing that the progression server package already exists tantalizes them with the possibility that they could have one. I hope, at the very least, it's helpful to point out that PvP players would be willing to pay their way through the progression content by repurchasing expansions.

I'd personally like them to avoid creating any additional TLP servers for a while. They already have too many as it is.

Yes no more requested servers! Lets let them work on things like this instead,

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...marketplace-illusions-unlocked-please.234206/

A little jab at Ethereal there, but in all seriousness, why not give them a server to enjoy their play style again? We certainly got one, or two, or three...

I don't get it.

I'm just curious how many active players does Zek even have?

He's saying that it appears Daybreak spends at least some of their time updating seemingly trivial things, so it would appear to be fair to at least give the red community a server to play on that meets some basic requirements for fun.

As for active players: Well, we have 2.5 guilds, add in people who run solo quietly you're at maybe 150 active players, 200 if you're being generous. I believe we'd have a lot more if PvP mechanics weren't so bad. They are VERY bad.

And I feel compelled to add to my list of contributions red EQ has made: Marc Merrill (CEO of Riot Games, who developed League of Legends) got the original idea for the whole esports league/season/system (not the game, that's just a DOTA ripoff, but the way the teams compete) from the Discord server of EverQuest, where he had his first real MMO experience. Why is it that other game companies can mine red EQ for its best qualities, and to make them profitable, but EQ management can't or won't?

I've supported the idea of a new PVP server in a variety of threads and locations.

With current conditions I think this server has to be a progression server, and should have an era-lock that is only passed with a 70% server vote to do so. I say this because EQ PVP currently works best if you keep the world small and don't get into midyear to modern content. Having said that, I think current progression all need to be PoP or a bit later before another variation on the progression ruleset should be launched.

I also think existing Zek names should be moved to a new PVP server with a 1 week "login to reserve it" mechanism. Progression would be a subscription based server.

In respects to doing PVP in the modern era... could a global PVP buff that massively ups hitpoints of player characters somewhat rebalance things?

To an extent. If you get a huge set of rune buffs before hitting PvP, you have a chance to eat a burn from a DPS class, but combat is still very quick once the runes are down. So it would move things from a one-round-and-done situation to a two-or-three-round and done situation.

Ability bloat is at the bottom of a lot of it. When SKs (most OP class) had two HTs, the damage of these was capped (by game management) to a certain percentage of a given PC's HP, and so basically SKs could one-round you if you were below 60 percent health, so you had to respect them, but at least they couldn't round you from full life.

Now SKs have three HTs (in addition to other abilities), and even though the damage of individual HTs remains capped, you add them together and you still get well above player hit point totals.

When I first saw the topic of this thread, I was hit by the initial "here we go... some PvP jerk is going to rage about Zek being broken," but then I read the entire post.

I have to commend you, MoveFastRZ. That post was well thought out, communicated, and I think it was as non-biased as can be, given the situation.

I've never been a PvP player in EverQuest. (I tried Zek one time and kept getting immediately ganked by a twinked Ranger on spawn-in for the Tutorial. Once I got out of there, same thing happened in Kurn's Tower. Ganker wouldn't let me get my corpse, so I logged out and never looked back.)

I don't think what you're asking for is unreasonable, and I would even be willing to check out a PvP TLP server.

Fact of the matter is, even during my limited experience on Zek, the only time I ever saw players were the two people who killed me. And that was a few years back. I can only imagine that Zek has gotten even less populated since. I would suggest that Daybreak implement a Zek server wide poll and ask people if they'd like to be merged into a PvE server, in favor of launching a TLP server.

If the players choose it, dump the toons on the least populated PvE server (probably Vox/Trakanon or whatever the new server is going to be where Quarm characters end up) and launch a PvP TLP server that even non-subscribers members can play on. That'll get the extremely cheap PvE crowd who doesn't mind dabbling in PvP to roll there because they don't have to subscribe.

Well, thanks for reading. I know it was lengthy.

For the reasons stated above, I think all EQ PvP players would welcome the kind of solution you suggested.

There are quite a few of us on Zek who wish the hardest-core of the hardcore griefers would at least give new players a moment to find their footing. IMHO the best thing to do for anyone who wants to try Zek out is to make a beeline for a guild. If you can't find one, ask one of the top-end guilds. They'll either be glad to tell you who the current guild(s) is/are at lower levels, or, if you're a serious player intending to establish yourself and raid/contribute to PvP, to take you on as a probationary applicant and help you level up.

I'll say it again. The PvP community should push for an Event Server after Quarm ends this run.

I highly, highly doubt you'll ever see a new PvP server because the population just doesn't warrant it. But, the Event Server would draw attention from other servers, and if it was successful, then maybe your cause is furthered.

We'll take it, for sure. I would love if one of the community moderators could recommend this thread to someone on the dev side of the equation, so at the very least the notion of this request will be floating around in their head as Quarm winds down and they consider the possibility of future event servers.