PvP TLP: A Serious Look for DBG and Community

Duplicate Agnarr and throw a Rallos or Vallon/Tallon ruleset on it.

Why not just go Red on Agnarr?
It saves having to wait for a server

Not mind blowing at all. There isn't any money in it. It's as simple as that.

April last year:

I did resort to hoping/proposing for that to happen considering the prospect of a PvP TLP is so bleak.

PvP at max level only isn't really the point imho, though obviously a lot of it takes place there. For me it's the PvP along the way which you can't get on live that a TLP PvP server really offers that I'd be most excited about. I like having to think about pvp even when im lvl 12 and naked in CB =]

You might change your mind on day 2, when you are level 12 and can't even get to Crushbone from Kelethin because you are being permacamped by a couple of level 50s.

IIRC the PVP server(s) when they existed had various baked-in rules. One of which were the level ranges you were able to be attacked from and attack to. But go off.

You're right! I went over to zek and started a few toons (and revisited my lvl 12 druid - my very first EQ toon!) and talked with the folks in /general. Turns out, no pvp until you hit level 6, and even then you can only be attacked by toons that are within +/- 4 levels of you. Unfortunately, that means you really need a lvl 110 toon before you can even take a look to see what's going on there. Grinding a toon to 110 when you don't have a pre-existing 110 toon takes a long time! And who wants to sacrifice an existing 110 toon on a live server just to take a look?

I'm gonna say it again: DBG should allow free COPIES to zek, just like they do for Test. I'm pretty sure the existing Zek community would love it, and all of us could at least try it out!

Free copies to pvp would be cool

Another thing that I learned was that /anon and /role work differently on the Zek server: toons with those flags are not reported in /who results. So it is virtually impossible to get a good idea of how many people are on the server, but from the responses I got in /general, it didn't seem dead - heck, there were even 16 traders online in the /baz. I checked poor Fippy for reference: 0 people online, 0 traders in the /baz. Now that's dead

Finding information about the actual ruleset on Zek was nigh impossible for me. I finally found this: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/EverQuest/Zeks. It would be way cool to see an official list of all the current differences between live servers and Zek.

IIRC a pretty common trick was to get a rogues epic and some other good gear then delevel to 10 in order to gank people as soon as they hit 6

15 was the sweet spot from what I remember. Pen15 club!

Pot, meet kettle (RE: disinformation).

It's true people used to kill Sam's boxes all the time, but Sam was a boxer, in the old-fashioned sense, not a scripter. If Sam had a script that detected all player character entries into the zone and immediately targeted them and/or warped onto them, you can bet nobody would have picked him off. That kind of stuff wasn't easily available then, and Sam wasn't the kind of player who would have wanted to do it anyway. He was a weirdo, but he wasn't a griefer. Plenty of griefers around these days, including on TLPs, and especially in the PvP community.

Also: Active hacks aren't a problem in PvP anymore? Are you nuts? Up to and including the moment where Zek literally couldn't support two "guilds" anymore (actually, just two groups of 10-12 people, not even guilds), the most serious issue was the non-stop use of active hacking, primarily warping to targets with one-button kill macros. And both guilds leveled up SKs just to have SK boxes constantly available with zero cooldown for zone control. These issues are very much still current on Zek, and the use of active hacks certainly does pose a high risk of banning--in theory--but the frequency of these bans is very low. Check the forums on the sites that sell the plugins/compiles. It's not a deterrent at all.

I started on Rallos, moved to Vallon...when they launched Tallon I moved there. I also played a little on Sullon zek.....I still remember the shortie guild "Gnomercy"

Sometimes I question just how much time people spent in PvP.

Rules? HAHAHAHAHA!!! That is one of the best jokes I have heard. Virtually 100% of the time spent by PKs on the PvP servers was griefing lower level characters and circumventing the rules. If you don't remember getting trained by a higher level character, you weren't there. IIRC<???> after a character 30 levels above you would train you, they could loot your corpse of rusty weapons & tattered armor just to be a jerk.

Not only that, there would be cheap shots like characters 4 levels above you that would follow you around while you were leveling and wait until you were <50% health before they would attack you. We aren't talking rare occurrences, we are talking about being every minute you played. Jerks waiting around on zone lines with Show EQ and fast walk hacks that would attack your character while you were zoning. I mean REALLY! Zoning would take up to 6 minutes and your character would appear on their screen before you got control! You would zone and just have a death screen greet you. What the heck kind of PvP is that?

OK, we don't have 6 minute zone times anymore, but we did back then. I've talked with people that say they won't PvP with anything greater then a 30 ms ping because you are automatically dead meat. How are you going to have a PvP server with the 20-30 second zoning we still have is beyond me. Everquest is the single worst platform for PvP I have ever played on.

imho, PvP was only populated on one server and sustainable, and that was the diety based server. Loot was medals, which we turned into rewards, like ldon merchants.
3 teams, good, neutral, and evil. There were no hometowns per say, all was just like it is in game, cept if you were seen in enemy territories, you would be killed.
So yes, it was a very populated server that SOE shutdown right about when DAoC came out. Don't remember the reasons given, might have been the zek mergers. But when they took such a great idea (literally forcing people to work together asap to survive) and put it with the crap they called zek (griefer servers), yeah pvp died in 6 months.
They keep burying the fact the diety based server actually had more people playing than the live servers, which is disturbing, I'm not sure why they keep hiding what a great job they actually had done with that one server. It's literally the only thing that keeps me around hoping they will reboot the idea, they have the server somewhere in there.

Holly saying no one plays Zek, is right, no one plays Zek. It's not what EQ pvp was supposed to be, the deity based pvp server was exactly what EQ was supposed to be.

I've played now all the TLPs here, and each and every one of them when I reach the highest tier and join the guilds... they are run by 3rd party boxer teams. Truebox be damned.
There isn't a single guild left in this game that isn't run by 3rd party boxer teams. Truth.
That's probably why EQ will never re-release the deity-based pvp server. Krono farmers cannot live there, boxers cannot live there, but DBG is fully invested in having Boxers run (and ruin) the game.
Had to think about Holly saying 'no one plays' on Zek..
Well dear, it's becoming to be that no one but 3rd Party boxers plays your game.
Pvp could solve that, but I digress,
WoW Classic, including it's pvp is launching on Aug 27th.
You would think it would have been in EQs best interest to try and recapture some of the real elements that keep people playing this game (prior to DAoC, WoW, SWG releases), but I'm guessing no one in DBG is actually from Verant.
I want to play an EQ worthy of being played. I want to kill boxers for being boxers.
Resurrect the Deity-based PvP Server.

Sullon Zek is dead. Long live Sullon Zek.

Sullon best pvp server? Nah it just came out during peak EQ popularity.
Rallos was a blue server where you could ganked unless you wanted to be a “pker” and shunned by others.
Vallon/Tallon had best rule set if you actually liked reduced griefing good open world pvp (you knew your enemies and were expected to fight them). If they would’ve hard coded teams from the get go it would’ve actually worked.
Sullon had the better team structure but it failed when they threw their hands up and said no rules do anything. That chased off most normal players. Plus the teams were amazingly lopsided.
Evil = blue server
Neutral = some pvp, medium/hard mode
Good = masochist super hard mode, hold onto Permafrost because that’s all you got.

Sullon was probably the most fun I had in EQ! Of course I played on the good team, so it was incredibly difficult to do anything. I remember we banded together as a team so players leveling could have 1 area to level in, we decided to hold down the warren/hole, that was our domain for about a month. They even had a map where you could see which factions controlled which zones which would dynamically change, very cool.

At one point good/neutral banded together and formed alliances to try to topple evil, but in all seriousnesss I think evil was 60% or more of the server, it was really lopsided. It was an amazing concept and even being on the good team we still accomplished a lot- I remember those days fondly.