More PvP enabled areas

They didn't just do those server merges because they felt like it but because the servers no longer had a population to support themselves and that can be seen based on the population decline of the Zek server. It sure is easy to make claims that the server was the most popular but you have no evidence to back that up. If it really was the most popular there is no reason why they would have merged it into a lower population server.

Not sure how I missed this but World of Warcraft doesn't actually have any open world PvP servers anymore. They just have generic servers and you have the option to opt into or out of open world PvP as you choose. When you opt into PvP you get benefits such as increased experience, faction, currency gains among other things. And I seriously question the idea that it was #1 because of open world PvP when they got rid of all PvP servers and made it an opt in feature instead.

Ima disagree on this point. PvP would be an excellent use of dev time as open world PvP is an extremely popular concept with many other MMOs and is a proven concept to keeping MMOs healthy in the long term. There is no highly successful MMO out today without a solid PvP scene. In my opinion part of the reason EQ has such a small community and player base is because the lack of PvP and competitive content. Reason PvP is so unpopular is NOT because people do not want to PvP it is because the devs put absolutely no time into developing PvP content and thus the PvP is bad. If Devs put time and resources into PvP they could create a whole new fun branch of content and with a lot less effort than developing new raids every year.

In order to make PvP in EQ fun there are some big things that need to be added
1) Sufficient rewards. There needs to be rewards for both competing and winning PvP content. This could be a special currency that can be spent for meaningful prizes. Prizes should be balanced so winners feel good about their achievement and so losers feel good about the effort they put in.
2) Objectives. Points of contention that bring players to specific areas to battle. These could be King of the Hill styles objectives or raid bosses that teams defend/attack. Think how cool it would be to defend your home city from waves of invaders or pillage the city of your enemies. Good PvP has direction and purpose other than 200 people in a FFA deathmatch.

With just these two things you could have the foundation for new exciting content that would might even catch the eye of people outside the EQ community.

All of that is a complete & utter waste of time when there are nowhere near enough players interested in PvP, there's maybe 20 long time posters on the forum repeatedly asking for it month after month, and you all know what you need to do in order to show the devs there's enough of you to get what you want, why you refuse to accept the reality that 99% or higher of EQ players have no interest in PvP I honestly do not know.

The devs are just not interested in throwing time & money at content for such a tiny handful of players, they can make a far bigger impact for a vastly larger amount of players doing pretty much anything else.

You and many others keep using this argument and its just not a good argument. What if 90% of players didn't want to play a particular class? Would you tell the devs to stop wasting time on making it playable because no one wants to play it? Because something is bad you do not spend time making it better? That makes no sense. EQ has terrible PvP yes, but was it always that way? No. At one point EQ had multiple thriving PvP servers. PvP didn't die because it was bad. PvP died because they progressively spent less and less time updating and improving it and as expansion and features were added they hurt PvP. It was the years of stagnation that killed PvP not the concept and in doing so removed a large section of the EQ player base.

Even to non-PvP players having a good PvP scene is beneficial as more players means more revenue means bigger company means more and better content. In addition in a social game like EQ player base is a major part of the quality of the game being good. Even if you do not like PvP yourself you still indirectly benefit

It's a perfectly good argument, that there are too few PvP players to bother investing in PvP is a simple fact.

Maths is hard for many people I know, but there are 16 classes, so if every class was played by a similar number of players EVERY class would have 6.25% of the players playing it and 93.75% playing some other class. That's not the situation EQ has of course but the point being your argument about percentages is mathematically bogus even under the ideal circumstances of perfectly balanced distribution.

I would argue yes, that it was always bad.

EverQuest used to have very little competition, that situation changed and the reasons why EQ PvP died off are many but among them are better PvP games coming onto the market along with some players deciding they no longer wished to play a PvP game, not everyone who played PvP stayed a PvPer, for many it was a short-lived experience.

EverQuest was not built with PvP in mind, it lacked many of the innovations that made PvP an engaging activity & EQ PvP was archaic, retrofitted garbage, sure it was ignored but it was never really treated as anything more than an afterthought in the first place. You only have to look at how well it was done in other titles to see how bad EQ PvP was from the start.

On this final point I agree, but the sad reality is that it is simply far too late to do anything with PvP in EQ at this stage with the limited resources available.
Better off hoping that a PvP (or better RvR) aspect of EverQuest is considered for any EQ3 that might appear one day in the future.

That is a horrible argument as it makes no sense at all. There are 16 different classes in EQ meaning if the classes makeup was perfectly balanced it a single class would make up 6.25% of the population and 93.75% would be playing other classes. There would be nothing wrong with only 10% of the player base playing a class because that would show a good amount of interest in it above a perfect balance.

As has been repeatedly been pointed out the people who keep asking for this server need to show that there is a demand for it as the devs have said.

Why should devs waste time and effort on something that the playerbase largely does not want? EQ's foundation is not PVP oriented. Let's try not to reinvent the wheel

This is petty but ill indulge it for the moment. People play more than one class and there is no limit to the amount of characters you can make. Many people play multiple classes at the same time (boxing) so this type of analysis is not the correct direction to take.

Sure that is true but that doesn't change the fact that there are 16 classes which makes a claim that only 10% of players playing a class means anything. Some people do play multiple characters with different classes and there are some that play multiple characters with only a single class.

This is a cop-out argument. Remind me the demand for Overseer. Demand for reduced mob kill xp? Demand for Dragon's Horde? Demand is not the prime motivator for features being added to the game. In fact more often then not features are added than have had 0 or negative demand.

I think you are reading way too far into the hypothetical metaphor for why we should spend time on bad features.

Demand is the only thing that matters for making a new server the devs (and the player base) don't want to spend the time and money to create a server that will be dead on arrival. Look at the complaints about the recent TLP servers regarding population levels.

Reading to far into an outrageous claim that 10% of the player base playing a class that only makes up 6.25% of the available classes actually means anything? Not to mention with the copy and paste that is done in each expansion there is very little work done in keeping each of those classes updated each expansion. That is nothing compared to the work and cost of setting up a new server that will likely have well under 5% of the population playing let alone the 10% number you used.

Mirigul, Selos, Vaniki were all serves done without any thought into the demand. PvP at least has a known player base unlike any of these servers. If you are willing to release a Mirigul then PvP doesnt seem that far out of the question

*Sigh* I guess if you are going to make me spell it out. The analysis you posted makes the assumption that people can and only play 1 class. But that's not how that works. Say there are 10 people on the server and they all make 1 of each toon. Every class has 100% play rate. Say there are 10 people on the server and they all make a war and a cleric. War and cleric have 100 play rate and all other classes have 0. Say 15 guys all make every class except cleric Now every class has 100% play rate except cleric which is at 0%.

So its feasible for a particular class to have 30-40% play rate on top of that its entirely unfeasible that every class have a 6.25% play rate because by just making more than 1 char you raise the minimum distribution.

Miragul, Selos ENDED their run with far more players than a PvP TLP would START with, and that's after several years of losing players.

Sure, PvP is a known player base, and it's too damn small to justify a TLP server, too small to justify updating spells, and coming back to the Original post in this thread its far too small to justify even a single zone for live servers in the next expansion or any prior one. It's barely big enough to justify Zek as it is.

Miragul only had at most 100 people after the initial 2 weeks i think. PvP TLP could have much more than that with effort put into it

Evidence has conclusively proven otherwise, but feel free to actually change that with a new gathering of interested players on Zek to show interest that amounts to more than the 20-25 players that showed up to the last attempt.

All of those are new ideas and not an existing concept that has proven itself over the years to not be popular with the player base.

You are still making no sense at all and there are some major problems with what you are trying to claim.

1. 10% of people playing a class when you have 16 classes to chose from is pretty good.
2. They can't just delete or stop working on a class that 10% of the people play. that would be a disaster as you would alienate those players.
3. Stopping work on a class is not remotely the same as making a new server.

If you want them to make a new PvP server stop making ridiculous comparisons about the hypothetical popularity of a class to a PvP server. Also you should provide some evidence of how popular EQ PvP is now as it doesn't matter at all how popular it was when they rolled 5 different PvP servers into a single one or how popular it was over a decade ago on a free service.

The entire argument is moot, the way to get a PvP TLP has been laid out so many times it's not useful to even repeat anymore. No amount of trash talk in a forum was ever in the single requirement that needs to be met. If you won't do what you've been asked to do then you really aren't serious about the subject at all

Every open world MMO that does PvP has been a huge hit. All of them. Runescape was probably saved by it to be honest. You can sit here and tell me its a bad idea but everyone who tried it had success. Why should EQ be any different? Its the lack of PvP that is holding EQ back. People left EQ PvP because it never put effort that the other games were to be frank other games were just better than EQ at that point and EQ needs to put together a PvP scene if its ever going to build back its player base. The currently formula of release and xpac and release a TLP isent stopping the game from dying its only slowing it down.