Neskonlith wrote:
Taldier@Venekor wrote:
Whereas we already know for a fact that open pvp servers existed for years without requireing any form of direct effort ---> reward system to subsidize them.
During that time, open-pvp was a fluffy timefiller that was often dead in the water and the forums littered with complaints from hardcores asking SOE to find a way to force everyone out of instances to be available for farming, and Venekor was merged into Nagafen due to declining population.
It took TSO revamp to spark the casual majority interest in open-pvp.
The issues that pvp has always been plagued by have been class balances, poorly thought out itemization, and general complaints about mechanics. The forums were not at any point littered with complaints that we didnt have enough minigames to play while killing each other.
All of these things have been sidelined in favor of the new dev motto of "creating pvp content" when the only "content" that needs to be created for pvp is for people to have a game that functions well enough for them to fight each other in it.
And honestly as the hundreds of players in warfields should prove, the only reason we dont have venekor anymore is the original decision to allow half its population to transfer freely to what was at the time a very slightly higher (possibly even slightly lower) pop server, starting the slow inexorable unabated spiral into hopelessness and oblivion.
TSO brought with it the proliferation of instances, which make any server population appear to be a small fraction of what it really is, this was a drastic blow to the visible population of the game in general and far worse to open pvp which relies on the interaction of the visible population.
As I pointed out, it is a simple matter of human nature that the numbers of pvpers increase if it is easier to "win". By ensuring that merely striking another player with a ranged attack before they die was forever redefined as "winning" by the collective conciousness of the playerbase, the revamps with writs predictably generated the zergs at both ls docks and tg.
What we have now, 20 poorly played q's chasing individual players across zones to "defeat" them in over lagged warfields while another 50 stand afk next to a tower for their free 15 tokens, is merely the end result of these trends.