Were there this many jerks in '99?

No, things were never half this bad in 1999. I don't chose not to remember, I remember quite well. It was a fun and pleasurable experience. This, is not.

Many mmo's have had play nice policies, must not have played numerous mmos. Heck even in Ultima Online with its cutthroat style that was more hardcore than EQ, it had some play nice rules that people followed.

Yes but not all of them were enforced like EQ. I've played many MMO's, although they have a play nice policy, getting in trouble there consisted of basically hacking...Or threats to rl stuff. Besides that I've never seen it enforced, besides the EQ PNP.

Valid point, i'll conceed that one. EQ enforced the play nice policies more than most other mmo's have.

I spent a few hours in Unrest yesterday, and what I saw was completely and utterly shameful. People had no regard or respect for "camps" (yes I know DBG doesn't care about camps, blah blah blah, hear me out). I was camping the "hand room" and the 3 mobs that spawn in the room adjacent to it. I would routinely see people coming up from the fireplace camp to see if the mobs in "my" room were spawned. At least a few times they managed to steal a spawn when I was dealing with another mob (as if the entire second floor wasn't enough mobs for them). They had absolutely no shame whatsoever in walking up to the third floor, popping open my doors, scanning my room, and leaving. This happened at least 20 times. I know (and they know) that DBG is not going to enforce camp rules, let alone pursue or punish anyone who "steals" mobs. Still though, just because there is no rule that says you must respect other people's assumed "areas", that's hardly a license to be a complete tool. People who act like that should be ashamed of themselves. Is getting a few more ticks of experience really worth shaming yourself and your reputation? It's completely pathetic and if you're participating on this kind of behavior, you really need examine your priorities.

If you want to eliminate a lot of jerks, you make the game hard to play by yourself.
Add in things like corpse runs, weaken all of the classes, ban boxing, and start out for a few weeks actually enforcing a decent PnP until it becomes the servers culture.
You will lose a lot of accounts, but the server will stay more healthy and have a much better community which will keep people coming back.
I'm not even sure that I would play on such a server, but that is how you would do it.

You can't really talk about things like this because everyone is against something. Maybe they are against slow xp or maybe they are against corpse runs or maybe they are against boxing or maybe they are against...
Then after you find that one unicorn of a guy who actually agrees with everything, he says he can't live with it because he is now grown up and has a job and family.

Side-note: Funny how many childish acting people online suddenly grow up and sprout families and professional careers when you talk about changing a rule to something they don't like!

If you played in a raid guild back then, you would know all the bad things that's happening now, happened before. Training, ksing, guild drama, backstabbing, all happened before. Yes things were generally good when you weren't playing in a guild racing for the raid bosses. But once you stepped foot into the raid scene, there were a lot of crap that happened you would normally not see.

By the way I agree with some folks that said there are a lot of nice people on Ragefire. People right now tends to focus on the negative things, things like queues, crashes, boxers, ksing, overcrowding, etc.. But for me I've had good experiences with majority of the folks playing on Ragefire.

I've met some really good people, and met some really bad people. It has been pretty balanced on my end so far, which is suprising, I thought it would be worse. I do believe the player base as a whole, was much better in 1999. Yes I did raid, and yes it did get nastier at that point, but I still see people with attitudes here, that I never saw on Quellious prior to the mid 2000's or later when boxing became prevalent.

1999 had just as many bad apples though boxing was less prevalent so 1 bad apple rarely had as much impact, as 1 bad apple playing 2+ characters. Also there was a stigma for having a bad reputation such that you could not get a group or guild outside of a guild with the same reputation, and some of the worst of those guilds were disbanded, their officers temporarily banned and losing the privilege of running a guild. Boxing changes much of that because now you don't need to adhere to societal norms or polite behavior to enjoy the game.

A quick positive story about being a jerk on accident.
I was camping gnolls on the EF side of BB for a couple hours.
After being trained out and zoning back into EF, I had to /pickzone 2 to get back to my camp.
Now someone else was coming in from up top taking my mobs. (I am aware there are no camps).
She was killing them to and fro. We both started to sit at the mobs and wait for the spawns and DPS race. She won some and I won fewer. We both were getting frustrated and angry and she finally exclaimed "why are you being this way?" to which I said "you are the one taking over the camp I have had all morning, you are welcome to join." I was at least willing to resolve the situation by grouping up but I was very annoyed.
What came next surprised me. She said "I have been here for hours killing these." So now we both thought the other was taking the mobs that we had been camping for hours. (There are only 4 gnolls so pickings are slim).
We both insisted that /pickzone 2 was ours, but she eventually convinced me that I must have somehow been mistaken because her friends corpse was up top where he had died holding the camp for her.
I went and found a different instance where I was able to kill a few gnolls but we were able to part amicably after both of us understood neither was trying to be a jerk.

Wish more of my jerk stories ended up like this and less with angry man X hurling personal insults about how I must be a "stupid idiot" and have not "learn to read" because I have an opinion different than he does and "all opinions are not equal!".

Ya I ran up to orc 2 this morning, and because of the hill, I saw no-one. I pulled the mobs, cleared it, turned to run up over the hill, and as I did, I ran into a druid and bard. I apologized, offered them each a plat, and it was all good, I moved on. It happens sometimes, but it should be followed by a "hey sorry" and a peaceful resolution.