Playing on Zek the population is very low. If its a free transfer to Zek, why not a free transfer off Zek? This might eliminate the pressure of people considering to transfer to Zek and could potentially encourage a healthy population to get a raid guild for Zek. What do you think?
I think a better solution for Zek would be to make it like the test server. Anyone from any server can /zekcopy and copy their entire character over to Zek if they wanted to mess around with PvP.
You can do what you want but there is no solution EQ PVP is not popular enough to matter so why would anyone whos not interested in PVP play there ?
I recommended /zekcopy years ago... I know other people have independently thought up the same solution- I have never heard any kind of direct response to this. I doubt anyone would care if people did this if it would give them an opportunity to actually PVP against other living players again. I think allowing it as a paid service would even be fine- I'd pay to transfer a char to Zek just to have fun like in the old days- I originally paid to transfer off of Zek, wouldn't mind coming back- and I assume if they allowed zekcopy they'd allow it from FV- they certainly should not restrict that kind of transfer in this scenario.
its kind of a self fulfilling cycle tho, its not popular because they havent done anything for zek in years. it wont get any better on its own
One thing that we cant deny is that a huge majority of the population of active players originate from one of the Zek servers, and take pride in that fact.
Everquest PvP whether you believe it or not, is the best PvP that's ever existed in any game. I just came back from 2 years of inactivity and have been playing on Zek for the last 2 weeks or so. Nice exping all the thousands of AAs I need from the last 3 expansions. Right now PvP classes ranked in strength are something like Tied for First place: Sk, Rogue, Ranger Tied for 2nd: Mage, Druid, Monk, Zerker, Necro With that being said, you usually don't see any Bards, Paladins, Beastlords, Clerics, Shamans ever PvPing. Warriors, Wizards and Enchanters used to always be pretty decent, but I haven't seen any for the last couple weeks. Due to the low population, non existence of a raid guild and difficulty doing any progression or camping of items in open zones every day I think about getting back into blue server raiding again, but as I am now married I don't think I could be able to adhere to the schedule and be in high attendance. My only saving grace to these facts is that I now live in China and am 12 or so hours off set from everyone and usually while I am playing whatever zone I am in is always a ghost town. In EQ pvp, besides the OP abilities on classes like SKs the fact is that there are a lot of abilities, AAs, DAs, clickies, ports etc etc etc between the classes. Usually if you die, unless it's from getting one rounded(some melee hits, for example, and yet again, the Shadowknight with his 3 slash attack, one single hit from it did 260 k dmg to me once, are not coded to only do a max of 40%) due to all the diversity of effects and options in the game, you are going to have the feeling that "well if I did this combination or that option I would have survived" It makes it a lot of fun. Unfortunately the non pvp flagging of raid zones was not granted to the Zek server until the last raiding guild was already dead. As AE burns became a significant way to increase raid DPS the guilds on Zek, already behind in progression, just couldn't kill anything in new raids and all died. An opportunity to play on Zek freely for all servers via a char copy or perhaps something outside of the server transfer, something that doesn't remove you from your guild but allows you to play on either server as you so desired would be enticing and definitely bring back previous PvP players, the majority of which are on blue servers at the moment. Right now, a movelog to Zek basically is a death sentence, or a transition into only group play. Which means all those raiding achievements and special items that you want to obtain before progressing on to the next expansion where your guild will never go back and get them again, will only ever be accessible to you if you Play on Blue and Stay on Blue. Imagine if everyone, at the login screen could select log in to Zek, or log in to their regular server? All those fully geared raiders that got all their done in 1-2 months time and never want to log in outside of raid hours, maybe they'd play on Zek. The only other consideration I could think of that would increase the populace is significantly increasing the items available on the PvP merchant. Rather than adding/creating special Zek items, just dump all the raid loot to the Zek's PvP merchant once an expansion is 3 expansions old. That's about how far behind in progression Zek is, because group gear only gets better than raid gear in about 3 expansions. In the most recent case, ToV teir 3 crafted group gear is significantly better than EoK raid gear. But if all EoK raid gear was on the merchant on Zek at the launch of ToV that would have been quite attractive to some who maybe couldn't complete any progression through EoK, RoS or Burning Lands. Or perhaps had come back to the game after being absent for 3, 4 6 8 years etc. I'm sure you'd see some people come to Zek to get 3 expansion old raid loot if they were wearing full Omens of War or Seeds of Destruction gear.
The best option is to allow free transfers off Zek. If we have character copies then people will abuse this feature by copying a character to Zek then transfer it back to a blue server for a free copy of that character. If we have free transfers to and from Zek then this will allow the player base to decide if Zek is a good fit. Most of the players today have an Army of toons that they box, or at least that is how it is on Zek. Moving one toon to Zek just to experience PvP would disallow those players the opportunity to have the full experience of their characters on Zek. As it is right now, Zek has no economy. There are maybe less than 10 traders in all of Bazaar. Zek has an incredibly loyal player base, and to turn your attention away from this server wouldn't be right. The whole reason that our population is so low is due to the lack of attention that Sokon explains above regarding the AoE's for raids. Maybe if Zek has free transfers to and from might bring a raid group of players to the server. We have no raid guilds, and not enough population to currently support raids. Please don't forget about us. We will do our best to try and get some raids going to encourage a healthy population, but we need a little bit of help from Daybreak Thank you
