PvP TLP: A Serious Look for DBG and Community

I'll take it.

Actually some pretty good ideas here- how about this;

1 year premium TLPVP event server (resets/wipes yearly), 20% higher xp than mangler, 73 day Expansions (ends at end of POP).
Total FFA +/- 5 levels (everything except hacking is fair). No corpse recovery on death, no xp loss at all on any death. Coin loot on kill.

At end of server you can transfer to live Zek to continue, or start fresh again for antother year.

Daybreak doesn't even need to test the waters p99 has already shown that player demand is just higher for PvE servers in EQ. 630 on Regular P99, 38 on PvP (red) P99.

Even looking at it conservatively and giving Red99 the benefit of the doubt, say blue only had 2x the population (and not 20x), there's still no financial reason for Daybreak to not go with the ruleset most likely to give them the larger returns. Unless they don't want to cannibalize from existing servers with similar rulesets which they have proven multiple times in recent years they have zero issue with.

You don't have to convince people on the forums but the bean counters at Daybreak and unless they see people actually playing pvp in EQ they will be unlikely to spend the money based on an unknown amount of players wanting to play.

As for my comments about live vs classic code from my understanding it will be unbalanced from the start due to quality of life changes that have been made for low level players from the start.

Don't forget that Red99 is also free to play and has rule changes designed for a pvp game both of which a pvp tlp server will not have.

There are thousands if not millions of PVP players out there..... but they want to play games that are designed to be PVP games, they do not want to play a 20 year old game where PVP was tacked on as an after thought and is not actively supported by the development team.

No, what you are failing to get is that Zek is a perfect place to demonstrate the existense of all those people who are supposedly waiting with bated breath for this.

So put out a word, reach out to all those thousands of PvP players. Organize an event. Give it enough advance time so people can see it.
Have everyone wanting a TLP PvP create (or even login their existing) Zek character. And play there for one weekend. Hopefully those will be mostly established accounts, not fresh-made FTPs.

If you can get 1000+ PvP fans running around Zek zones for a couple nights in a row, occasionally spamming 'we want PvP TLP' social, that would be something DBG might pay attention to.

Scorrpio use to play on a PvP server and got griefed real hard I think.

No one wants to play on a dead server fool. That being said, I do doubt daybreak will ever make a PvP TLP. The company is out of touch and doesn't know how to adapt. Look at h1z1 rofl

I'll get right on suggesting this to all my adult friends with mortgages, kids, etc.

It will have to be scheduled after the planned street protest outside DBG's offices of course.

You could go to the Area 51 suicide run and pass out flyers, that'd probably be pretty effective

Or youre out of touch, and don’t realize the people calling for this are a vocal minority and always have been.

I do agree that it's not particularly reasonable to think that there's any way to get a bunch of people who would play on a TL PvP server to randomly show up on Zek to show support. After the last ~15 years of slowly declining support for EQ PvP there's not really any reason for them to play there or think that showing up would impact something.

That said I do believe, based on my own experiences and those of people I keep in touch with, that there are a lot of people who DO still want to play 20 year old games - hell, this forum is full of them. A lot of them also love PvP. They just have justifiably been trained to believe that Everquest isn't an option any more when it comes to PvP based on the existing servers. A TL PvP server is what they pretty much all want, and I think the OP has a ton of good reasons for why this is an ideal format for a Time Locked server.

I know I'm coming from the perspective of someone that loves PvP and a lot of people really hate those of us who ask about PvP servers but I think it's worth making the arguments - and I believe these are pretty good ones.

And no, boxing was not a serious issue on Rallos at least. Did some people box? Yeah but by and large that was WAY too risky to make much sense, especially with itemloot or other consequences in the game. Adding in lots of no-drop changes that math significantly but in earlier expansions this isn't a big issue.

Please give this idiotic idea up already. It will never happen. There is zero class balance in pvp for this game. Nobody but a small sect of players want a PVP TLP, and the only reason they even want one is to grief the bot groups or boxers who have been griefing them. Thanks for post 1,030 about pvp tlp's though.

No one is arguing that live eq is even feasible for PvP, but TLPs are about nostalgia and there were enough people at one time who chose to play EQ PvP to warrant multiple red servers for a long time. When Zek fell apart, most people didn't just quit Zek, they quit the game.

Whether we're the minority on this forum and in the game is irrelevant, all that matters is would DBG make profit, and in this case a lot of new profit.

We're simply making the case that there are plenty of good reasons why the average TLPer might want to play on a red server and of course many that are already fans of it would drop their hard earned cash to play on an official EQ PvP TLP at a moment's notice.

Great points.

It's mind blowing that they haven't done a PvP Server. PvP is the single most popular and profitable genre of gaming, MMO's included, and EQ already has a system in place for it.

Make a few tweaks to the poor PvP systems that were implemented 20 years ago just like they've done with the poor PvE systems and profit.

I personally don't care in the slightest if they make tweaks to be honest. For me it's about approximating the environment and risk/reward that used to exist and whether or not the PvP is the same or tweaked somewhat won't have any impact on my motivation to play. I played classes that had no way of landing kills on other players and I enjoyed it.

That said, there may be some value to tweaking a few things per class to make them more balanced - increasing Enchanter mez chance to land on players, giving Mage bolts a slight -resist component or some such, etc. would make it feel a little less focused on specific classes once gear hits the Luclin/Planar level.

I don't think it's truly necessary but I don't think it would be super complex either if tweaks ended up being made.

If I were DBG, the only concession I would throw the PVP community would be free nightly toon copies just like we already have on Test. Oh wait - we already have those on Test? Well then, I guess the PVP issue is solved: Anybody wanting to experience PVP can do so at any time, on the Test server.

So now all the PVP crowd needs to do is organize a few server-spanning events, right here on these forums. Organize a tournament or something and see if you can get a reasonable turnout from across the entire playerbase.

Seriously, you PVP folks will need to take the next steps. DBG has already told you that nothing will happen until there is some sort of meaningful display of player interest. A handful of people begging for noobs to slaughter on the forums isn't going to cut it.

Show us what you've got. Drum up some interest. The broken record of crying for a server, when a server already exists and is underused, is falling on deaf ears.

No one here is talking about slaughtering mobs, you're simply misrepresenting/ignoring arguments here.

You can go right ahead and state obvious things that have already been stated in this thread about the "PvP community" going out of our way to impress DBG to show them how bad we want them to make money.

I don't even know how to adequately begin to express how stupid of a idea this is.

Do you think INDIVIDUALS that like the aspect of PvP (a lot of people) in this game have some kind of secret message board where we all keep in touch or that i have some kind of bat signal to bring them all out?

Second, it's enough of MY TIME, or anyone else's, to bring up what we believe are valid points that could benefit DBG in the form of money here on these forums. I can only assume the people making these suggestions are individuals who don't respect their own time and presume to think that neither should anyone else.

Why the hell would I go out doing community organizing for them on my dime in some sheepish attempt to beg them to let us pay them?

I felt compelled to make my arguments here that I believe would also benefit DBG. I'm fully aware they can 100% ghost this thread and not even get to the point where they could even decide how little they care. That's fine, I don't care.

I can only speak for myself in saying I believe my points are valid, make sense, and that DBG would stand to gain.

Obviously we've gone this long not having a functional PvP server and obviously no PvP TLP. We don't expect it to happen, we obviously just hope that it will. If it doesn't though, absolutely nothing changes and we continue not giving a 99.999% of the time.

Also, this isn't even close to the only blind spot EQ runners seemingly have. There are many great suggestions almost on a daily basis that they have routinely ignored for years. So no, we're not surprised and won't be upset when this probably gets ignored as well.

This should be common sense for what I'm assuming are all adults here. Your community organizing suggestions are childish. This is a game at the end of the day. If DBG wants to ignore an additional avenue to make money, that's on them, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it at all.

I think the TLP well has gone dry. DB had a number of chances to design a server that everyone on a live server and people that haven't played in years would flock to. The TLP servers drew from the set [nostalgia, Something new, ego strokes, ...] Thing is the nostalgia crowd has got their fix, the new/start from scratch got their jollies, and the first to 50 or first to kill Vox crowd have already had multiple flopping contests.

Each time they start a TLP server, every place else dies a little. This is bad for the people returning as they log on to their old servers and nobody home.

It would take something much better then PvP to start another server. If DB offered a free bag of chips to everyone that logged in or created a new character on it, they may be able to populate it for a couple of months but once again at the cost of sucking players off of every other server in existence. Having played PvP servers myself and AFAIK never turning down a Duel on live servers when that was a thing, PvP in EQ sucks. With all the hacks out there now, you will get Enchanters that can out track an honest Ranger and Necromancers that can outrun a SoW'd Shaman. DB hasn't got the will or the way to police the game so it will be a turn off to anyone who wants and honest game. Sheesh! Just load up Doom or something.