Is Open-World PvP going to come back in any form?

I've been playing this game on and off for almost a decade now. But what really excited me to play was the open world PvP we used to have years ago. I know many that said they would play more or even come back to the game if this were an option. Just fruit for thought.

We had a server or two for it, but nothing I would call "open-world," where every server had to deal with it...come to think, not every server in WoW is PvP (thank the gods), but it was a prevailing attitude, even so. :-/

Now, now, Cey, not every PvPer is a schoolyard bully who only wants to lord it over people who just want to play the game in peace, but certainly the noisy, obnoxious ones ruin the name for others who are more reasonable about it. ;->

Uwk

I know it's anecdotal, but to a man, every single one I've ever met is.

Open-world PvP just means that PvP exists in every zone on a server, not just in specific battle ground-esc areas. It doesn't mean every server has PvP.

It doesn't work in EQ2, and takes too much time/effort to balance it. As evidenced by the PvP progression server.

So the reasoning behind us not being able to have a eq2 PvP server is because the devs have too hard of time balancing the classes??

Mostly because there aren't enough sociopaths who will play on one to make it viable.

The orignal PVP servers died off one by one (population)in mergers, then finally the last one was merged into a regular ruleset server. Then they tried to resurrect it with the Deathtoll TLE server, which died off to a pretty tiny population which ended up getting merged into the non-PVP TLE server. I haven't seen the devs say much lately but last I saw they had no plans for another PVP server.

In short, I think it's not profitable enough for them to bother with the PVP specific troubles that come with having those servers. There simply doesn't seem to be the population in Eq2 that wants it for them to make money off of dealing with it.

::chuckle:: Now, now...we did have at least Nagafen (and one other? way back when?) for quite awhile, until the PvPers, pretty much, got fed up, or wandered away, or whatever. /shrug

At any rate, Naggie was getting so low in population that it got merged--er, consolidated into Skyfire, so I imagine that the folks there do a bit of Battle Grounds and such? We can still challenge folks to duels if we absolutely, positively have a need for PvP; it's just not en masse normally any more.

EDIT: Aaaaaand...Finora beat me to it.

Uwk

After the way Deathtoll crashed and burned, it's unlikely we'll ever see open-world PVP in EQ2 again.

no








Possible troll response, but, to quote a developer on the matter, "no."

No, the reason is because those servers fail every time. That is why there are none. During the server AMAs we had recently it was stated there would not be any more PvP. I believe you can go to EQ2Wire and review the dialog from those AMAs.

PvP used to have an element of "respect", now all that remains is a group of 4+ level 100 characters camping areas where new players emerge from tutorial safe zones and res kill the newer players over and over until they quit. Its just thug behavior.

And before you call me a snowflake, I used to be a yard gunner at a maximum security prison for many years, I am no snowflake. I even have yard bully tattooed on a shoulder blade. Any previous resident of a prison can tell you about the yard gunners or yard bullies.

Cyrrena

Is it story time??? Tell us about it!

Oh my - this topic was so important for all to see it had to be posted twice?

*sigh*

This topic has given me diarrhea I think, or maybe it's the Haggis I ate a few years back coming back to torture me the same as this topic!

Dear one of an endless stream of non-EQ2 players who constantly bring this up: We have had MANY open PvP servers since 2006. ALL of them have been closed due to their becoming empty wastelands. Where were you, oh devoted one, when Deathtoll, the most current Time-Locked open PvP server, got closed down due to being empty last year?

As with all of EQ2's open PvP servers, an endless stream of exploiters, dupers, hackers, cheaters, griefers and gankers overran Deathtoll. We actually have a "banned for life" EQ2 account server called Drunder that was brought to life at this time, and multiple former Deathtoll residents' accounts were permanently sent there to live out their remaining years in EQ2. However, the devs' having to constantly chase down and eliminate the neverending barrage of cheating exploiters got to be a bit much for the devs; they've got many PvE servers to contend with, too, and Deathtoll (like all the other open PvP servers in EQ2 over the years) emptied out quickly. Players just got sick of all the problems from their fellow gamers and left.

Unfortunately, maintaining two sets of all gear (PvP gear plus PvE gear) was also too much for EQ2's tiny dev team of 15 people (5 of whom double up and work on EQ1 as well) to handle, and the neverending class balance issues and subsequent class complaints became not worth handling as Deathtoll emptied out.

For God's sake, man, do a forum search before coming here with your indignant little open PvP rants, okay? As a permanent resident of both open PvP server Nagafen (from launch day in Feb. 2006 until its shuttering a couple years back) and Deathtoll until its shuttering as well, it's getting really aggravating having to re-explain this same situation 200 times to every EQ2 noob who thinks they know more than everyone else.

LOL! Well, there's always those folks (and the gods know I'm guilty of it, too, on occasion) that don't check to see if someone's already posted a thread on a given topic. ;->

And yeah, I agree with Cyrrena. The quiet PvPers may see it as "chess at 80 miles per hour" and relish the chance to match skills, abilities, gear, etc. against their peers, but the only ones we hear from or even see these days are the playground bully types. In WoW, even outside the PvP servers (which I avoided like the plague), it was waaay too easy to get other people flagged for PvP, even when they didn't want to be. Then they could be destroyed at the thug's leisure. >:-/

One of the big reasons why I finally quit was the community (I lucked out with the guilds I was in, but it was very much an "Us vs. Them" mentality). Between the constant attacks by the "good guys," the "civilized, pretty, handsome" Alliance members on lowbee zones (mostly the Crossroads); the forced PvP; the spamming /whispers (their equivalent to /tells) to people who didn't want to engage in such crap; the complete lack of interest in the GMs to curtail griefing, etc., etc., etc., on top of everything else (the in-game economy, a huge part of the game, SUCKED, and the storyline changed for the worse with Cataclysm), I finally got the hell out of Azeroth. :-/

Uwk

Excellent.

To sum up: there are reasons why we don't PvP here in Norrath (do they in EQ1 any more?), and why it's not likely to ever return. So in answer to your question, OP, I'm guessing, "no."

Uwk

(Bolded for emphasis) When was this mythical era of "respect"? I played DAOC back in the day, from when it opened until it consolidated into one server. RvR play maybe had a smidgeon of honorable play, but when DAOC tried an open-world PvP server (the infamous Mordred), it did what every open PvP server on games not designed for it (i.e., level-based games) has done: attracted hordes of players, and then the first big batch to cap level and guild up proceeded to gank, grief, spawn camp, portal camp, etc everyone else until everyone but them quit in disgust. Then they quit for lack of anyone to gank & grief, while whining on the forums that they really weren't a bunch of trash-talking griefers and people should come back to the PvP server. No one did, because they'd learned their lesson, and left the open-PvP to the griefers, who, as previously mentioned, quit because they had no one to grief. So the open-PvP server folded. This pattern has repeated itself in every level-based game that I have heard of.

PvP games that worked/still work:

- EvE is not level-based, and has (relatively) safe zones to play in if you don't want to be jumped today.
- DAOC Realm vs. Realm: Your home realm areas are safe PvE zones. Out in the contested frontier zones, only the enemy realm players (and mobs, of course) can fight you--your own realm can't gank you. (It was a lot like WoW PvP, only with 3 factions instead of 2)
- WoW PvP : is really DAOC-style RvR with no safe zones beyond the cities and tutorial zones (if you play on a PvP server).
- WoW PvE: manages a "voluntary" RvR world--i.e., all zones (except enemy home cities) are safe zones if you don't flag yourself PvP or get flagged PvP by mixing it up with enemy NPC guards.

No. When Nagafen was shut down, there were just a handful of people logged in during prime time hours.

This is all I remember from PvP on Naggy when I tried it.