The only issue that is going to become a problem with this game is the game creators naive view that the in-game population will police bad play through individual’s game reputation. If you’ve played on the newer EQ progression servers you know that this population policing and play reputation doesn’t really work or matter anymore. People who kill steal, camp mobs, and train people to keep mob camps are almost always in a guild of like-minded players who do the same. So reputation to these type players really doesn’t matter because they often have a guild to do all high-level content. Many of these types of players do not care about the community of the game and all they want to do is dominate all raids and camping spots.
One example, I have witnessed first hand was a person had just got a mob camp and a few minutes into the camp a member from one of these bad guild with a horrible reputation came up to the camp spot and said to the person that this is our guilds camp now. The person refused to leave argued with this person so, this person called his guild mates to all come to the camp spot and they trained this poor person out of the spot. After they trained that person out of that spot this guild decided that they were now going to take over every camp spot in in the zone which they did with no consequences from any GM.
The population policing each other doesn’t really work anymore. I really hope that the development teams re-evaluates their position on this subject.
A single highly competitive server that caters heavily to hardcores will have little in common to a general server in Pantheon. Much like p99, those servers are overrun by some of the biggest beards in the history of Everquest. Collectively they will probably make up around 1% of the people playing Pantheon.
Solution:
1. Roll PvP.
2. Beat them. (Or join them.)
3. Profit.
We have multiple threads already on this subject, some fo them quite long, so I will need to go ahead and close this one down, please use the search function for keywords before creating a new thread as more often than not you will find active threads already exist on a topic as they have usually come up several times over the last few years of development.
A few methods we have mentioned but are not limited to are:
Active GMs
Active Guides program
Active Devs
/Report function
/Ignore function
Community policing
I must remind people that this isn't an EQ progression server and trying to compare a new game that hasn't even launched to a very old game on a private progression server is not a fair and honest comparison, the games community acts quite differently after playing a game for 15+ years compared to never playing the game but keep in mind some of our team not only had a hand in creating EQ but are also gamers ourselves and have suffered from the same problems and know what to expect, we keep that in mind while developing Pantheon so I don't think you will have anything to worry about but it is best to wait for the game to launch so you can experience it first hand before comparing it to anything else.