It is my personal opinion that, after having an account for about a decade specifically for PVPing, if you DBG were to bring back the old-school Free-to-play PVP like the Nagafen and Vox servers I grew up on, that you may be able to slowly bring back the older players who LOVE THIS GAME for the PVP aspects like Warzones and Battlegrounds. Please do this for us. It is a little bit insulting to return after a short time to see that you have Hidden PVP behind a PAY-WALL. However, if you were to bring back free to play pvp like it used to be, you may see some of us older guys coming back and pvping and then we may be more willing to pay for it, considering it used to be the biggest aspect of our lives. -All DBG Fans that still believe in you. With love.
There is a reason all the old-school PvP'ers basically quit, and it wasn't because we didn't have to pay for it.
Old school PvP declined because the PvE side of the game changed. It is kind of hard to have meaningful PvP when 90% of the games PvE content is locked inside of instances.
It wasn't the cost of a subscription that killed PvP. It was battlegrounds, guild hall, and a lack of necessary open world content and travel. People gearing up in BGs so they could go PvP on the real server was dumb, but people did it because SOE added it. People traveling from their guild hall portals on a PvP server was dumb, but people used it because SOE added it. People take the path of least difficulty to get the best gear, despite it being bad for the longevity of the server. I mean look at Hunters Quests on the TLE server: Everyone uses an invisibility totem to bypass the mobs, then uses a pet class to bypass the mobs, then uses an evac once the target is dead. Then they log out and log in their other toons to repeat. That is the grouping that exists... Free doesn't fix the game play options of least effort for greatest reward that are built in...
Skip one coffee out per month and you have sub money. Paying a sub for EQ2 even has multi-month discounts. It's the cheapest form of entertainment out there by a long shot, for all the hours of play time you get. Free servers just mean the devs and server overhead don't get paid and the game closes down.
Warzones and BGs? I'm going to politely disagree and point out that those hurt open world pvp almost as much as the instances (BGs were an instance if you think about it). Instances, as Obano pointed out, were one of the biggest banes to open world pvp/e. All content, drops/named mobs/quest updates, including raid mobs, should have been in the open world - the contested aspect of pvp/e was the best part of the early Venekor/Naggy experience imo.
all the above reasons are relevent, people can still pvp if they can adapt to the changes. anyway the free to play game brings in the exploiters accounts and imo ruins a game for subscribers. I see & understand your point about a free to play game will bring in 'fresh meat'......
You're right, the servers were also at their busiest during WF and BG times, and you can see that most players don't want to farm PVE gear to do PVP, but would rather do PVP to get PVP gear. You can see that by the fact that the servers are dead and almost no one farms PVE gear to do PVP. Simple 1:1 logic.
I would be perfectly fine with Bg's with no pvp gear, in fact I think that would be awesome, I dont remember lots of problems till they tried to balance stats for this and that pvp/non pvp, lets be honest, they do a really crappy job of stats for one type of gear.
Real old-school PvP, back when EQ2 actually had multiple thriving PvP servers, was entirely based on a game where players did content in the open world, and were reasonably guaranteed to regularly encounter other players while doing so. It was leveling and having to fight off enemies doing the same quests. It was your group fighting deep into an open dungeon and finding a bunch of Q's that you had to fight to progress. It was raid nights starting off with a brawl, or getting ambushed in the middle of a pull. This required a sizeable player population to make the world feel alive. But instead, all the content stopped being in the world. So PvP servers declined both from the move towards everything being instanced content and also the fairly dramatic population decline of the game overall. The era of BGs and WF wasn't "old school", it was the death knell for PvP servers. One of the worst things they did. Naggy may have limped along for awhile, but it was just an animated corpse. Impromptu PvP did not happen. People stood in town queuing for BGs. You could go anywhere and see no one. You needed to organize an event just to find players to fight. You could either capture flags in instanced gamified BGs, or you could join the occasional WF mosh pit and hit everyone once for full kill credit. Its honestly still disappointing how badly SOE bungled this game back in the day. They accidentally stumbled into building one of the best PvP recipes I've seen in an MMO, then made it consistently worse over time. In the end, they never really understood what they'd gotten right in the first place. A description which ironically describes much of the game's early history outside of PvP as well. Now I've gone and gotten all nostalgic. Guess their marketing plan worked. Maybe I'll come see in April if any of the old magic is left in this game.
I miss running through KP wondering did that zerg miss me or are they gonna circle around and yep they circled around...
I played since day 1 of Nagafen. I was Tomb from Talisman. BGs never hurt the pvp server(s). It was the massive exploits from guilds like Ebonlore, the gank squads (6 vs 1) camping newly leveled 10s in the newbie zones, and Exile. Some argued that Exile faction helped the game.. actually it did not. The server lost most of the people. Some went to Havoc, and some left the game. A Freeport guild (Firedawg was guildleader) called Onyx which became Exile soon after and absorbed Havoc when Quantum quit (Havoc Guildleader). 75% of my guild did not go to Exile. They quit.
Interesting posts from old school pvp players.` 1"massive exploits" 2" Some argued that Exile faction helped the game.. actually it did not."" 1The recently closed pvp server Tarinax required a membership to join. There were some major exploits..free to play would have meant no CS to quickly squash those exploits. free to play would have meant a server full of bot crews and farming accounts. 2Exile factions...it was to easy for people and entire guilds to change factions, to self-farm themselves. Exile factions could hang out in either major city use brokers merchants/banks.... no pvp in cities. Exile factions shouldn't be welcome anywhere.
BGs hurt population. It took away the requirement to go out and PVP in the wild. This 100 % hurt the "open world" pvp. Exile was there if you wanted to raid and Pvp (since factions didnt have access to all of the same classes that a PVE server did). It didn't hurt the population. Crying and whining hurt the population a lot more than Exile ever did. Please don't post nonsense.
You were in Darkhand, no? Only Sempiternal and Havoc were the Q competition pre-exile. You guys were small in the beginning, no?
I was in Onyx. what does that have to do with anything that you posted? Absolutely nothing relevant with what you said.
Onyx was a new guild when exile came out. Firedawg was the leader on Freeport. Thus, you know nothing about the server. The server was great up to end of Mara, but you would not know that since you were not an original.
my original account started on the server day 1 when PVP became a PVP server. The server was great up till ROK/TSO, just because you fell off in t7 doesn't mean it stopped being good. I can remember some great fights in EOF/ROK era (you know, before battlegrounds)...(you know, the whole point for me originally commenting on your 99 % incorrect commentary of the PVP server).
In your opinion my opinion is incorrect. How can an opinion be incorrect? It is an opinion *******. I PvP'd a lot (more than most you 'had another account lol) and did BGs to stop the monotony. If you use your little mind and think... PvP had 2 servers up to exile. Then merged into one. Why is that?
