Curious if there has ever been a vigorous beat the doors down effort to rebuild community of players on Nagafen. Whether they be individuals or groups of individuals. I know the ruleset brings a lot of the worst of the MMO community. But to the polar extreme it at one time also served to provide the best type of community. There likely has been multiple efforts I am sure and it may just be too late for the server. But count me as one who would find it worth fighting for and I haven't played in a couple years. But recently logging in I find it terribly sad and I am just not as motivated to play the neutered EQ2 when Nagafen has all a blue server has plus overland PVP. I am somewhat intrigued and enticed by an attempt at a nagafen revival movement. Almost like a fun project - find some like minded people who are willing to go all out in promoting the server. Because in the end, a broken Nagafen still offers more than any blue server.
There is no hope in such an endeavor. Red server play no longer exists in the format that it used to. It now consists of farming BGs till your eyes bleed and all love for the game has been lost, at which point you have the tokens needed for all the gear you want. Then you log into Nagafen and look for PvP...not realizing that since everyone is farming BGs for tokens, there is no one doing anything on Nagafen. Ironic. Until the best PvP character progression is available from actually playing on the PvP server, and not from playing BGs, Nagafen will be a ghost town. ...and as long as "that one guy at SOE" is cramming his BG centric mantra as the new wave of "what players want", then there is no hope to change that.
The EQ2 team put in hundreds of man hours trying to keep PvP relevant and keep Nagafen going. Look back at the last 3 years and there were hundreds of class changes, tweaks for PvP. Yet no matter who they listened to, a full 60% of players complained about every change. Despite all that dev time for PvPers, they migrated to PvE servers and just play Battlegrounds. At this point, the EQ2 team have to focus their attention on where the players are.
Hundreds of man hours?! It's more like open PvP has been subjected to 9 1/2 years of automatic PvE server content dumps like level locking/AA slider/instant travel/leapers and fliers/instanced dungeons galore/gear separation/Battlegrounds/you name it with no thought whatsoever of how that would all negatively impact open PvP. And heeeeere's Feldon, who doesn't even play on Nagafen, sticking his head in the door here for his bi-monthly troll, before he goes back to a blue server once again....
I agree leapers and gliders and instant travel should never have been allowed on Nagafen. And you're welcome.
BG should have never made it into this game. They ruined the pvp and pve aspect of the game. Why actually pvp on a red server or pve on a blue server when you can get high end heroic gear with zero effort and zero risk in BG?
Here is the best summation of why Nagafen is dead, and why Feldon's assertion that the Devs have poured tons of work into PvP are just words, bereft of any thought, value, or relevance in regards to Red server play. The PvP servers didn't need tons of work. They merely needed to be kept the place where PvP mattered. No one who was there will ever fall for the smoke and mirrors hard sell about how "The players wanted BGs...". The Blue players wanted BGs...the Red players didn't, or didn't care as long as PvP rewards were kept on PvP servers. But the rewards were placed in BGs...so that is where the Red players had to go.
I imagine that hosting a bunch of tiny instances certainly cuts down on server lag, but outside of that, I don't understand what the big push was for BGs, or why they weren't kept to PvE servers only.
/agree. Combine that with a "Yes Man" for a Senior Producer and the death of 3 servers that were flooded with happy players was inevitable.
Nagafen had already been a ghost town for a few years by the time BGs went in (back around 2010) to be honest. But you know, Smed might have been copying World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds, now that I think of it. That's probably it. Although Blizzard really only created BGs to alleviate server lag. Back during the beginning of vanilla WoW, pre-BGs, there was a lot of self-flagging and PvP raiding at Crossroads going on even on PvE servers. I was on Dalaran back then, one of the 44 original launch servers, and the lag was so bad you couldn't even search the auction house, or use the mail. And forget dying-- you'd be unable to rez for half an hour or more! Once BGs went in, open PvP went bye-bye of course, as it always does once BGs hit, but the lag situation did improve some.
While there was definitely a thinning of the massive crowds due to newly introduced blue server mechanics hurting red server play (speedy travel, guild halls, lack of good contested dungeons, AA slider), Nagafen was still packed before BGs...the travel, guild halls, and AA slider junk just made all the people be seen out in the open less. ...and the lag on EQ2 red servers was consensual. If you wanted to join in on the lag fest of the massive party of the madness at a Hurricanus pull, you could. If you wanted to enjoy the generally lag free fun of single groups hunting, you could. It wasn't like it was shutting down the blue servers. Geez...what I wouldn't give to actually see lag on a red server now; Warfields don't count...they were BGs stuck in a red server zone. Anyway...it no longer matters. EQ2 red server play has been stolen and sold to the blue servers. It won't be back...and it won't be back in EQNext either. That will be canned PvP from the start, that way no one has to worry about the players having nostalgia for when it was fun, memorable, and populous.
