The PvP being unbalanced was why it was so fun. Most Pks were wizzards, but then you'd have those that chose the underdog classes and excelled at them.
Pk Clerics and others that would totally fuck with people because their foes didn't expect them to play so well. They knew their classes to do it, but most people outside of the hardcore PKs really knew their classes to do that.
By the time emu PvP seevers csne alkng, the formula was found to mess with mass PvP, which was to makn assist one person, usually a warrior for their durability, and then have your whole guild nuke the target at once killing the enemy guild one by one rather than the crazy mess in Classic when almost no one used programs like ventrilo or teamspeak and did everything through in game chat channels.
How active were the pvp servers in EQ in its heyday? Also was the pvp completely full loot?
Rallos had a good pop, like 1800 at its peak, that went down to about 1200 and then 800ish by the end of Classic. VZ and TZ were about the same, maybe less. Sullon had a sharp spike at first and was very busy, but then really dropped off once the evils were clearly the winners of the server. Most of the Sullon population was driven by PvPers flocking to it from the other Red servers, as it was clear PvP had long been dying out by the time SZ came along.
Keep in mind that the average Blue server had over 2000 people and the most popular ones had over 3000.
Emulators went on the imitate the SZ model. VZTZ started off with about 150ish people at peak, but we were all having fun dicking around once again with EQ that PvP was balanced with the rest of the game. That grew to 300 and reached a peak of over 500 with VZTZ 2.0 and 3.0 before they both died.
The problem came with late VZTZ 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 that once most were leveled up and had their fill of playing EQ, the server gravitated towards raid guild warring. Heresy was the first and dominant guild on the server formed by the first people who played on it, and those who sought to dethrone them formed into a rival guild. They battled until the rival guild broke apart failing to topple Heresy, then 1.0 soon after died due to the crappy nature of the "garage box" the server ran on. Garage box got upgraded and 2.0 launched, but it became a race by Heresy and 2 other rival guilds for dominance. Heresy won again, and the server died after a battle in Ferrott when all the screens of the Heresy players went black due to some weird hack the guild they were fighting used. 2.0 got shut down until that could be patched out, then the dude who hosted VZTZ backstabbed the communicty after getting tired of doing it and sold all the computer parts the community had donated to make VZTZ fuctional back in 1.0. 3.0 came back, but a pattern formed where people rushed to play at launch to try to dominate the server. Whoever failed would then whine, complain and forum warrior begging for the server to be "wiped clean" so they could start over (it was clear that if they'd win then they'd stop whining and not want it wiped and merely hated losing to Heresy for a third time). With Heresy controlling most raid content and with their gear disparity, they couldn't be challenegd and only logged on to keep raid targets out of other's hands and to rove around in parties and wipe the floor with people. Eventually they got bored after driving everyone off the server and began to whine about a server wipe, too.
Then P99 came along and everyone waited for Red99, but the same pattern repeated. Again a big population spike until one guild won the raid race and "wipe it clean!" began to be thrown around again, only the P99 devs made it clear they were not going to wipe the servers ever, so most everyone left or just moved on to forum warrioring until they got bored. This was like 12 years ago and I'd be surprised if the only change to the PvP community was that it's just faded out, not gotten better.
Loot rules were full coin and one item on death on Rallos, IIRC only coin loot on VZ and TZ, and no loot on Sullon as the real reward of PvP on SZ was zone control given the zero sum alignment nature of the server.
The result was that on RZ most people outside of a group or raid would keep their items bagged where they couldn't be looted and Pks knew that time was of the essence in ganking someone (hence why naked wizards and their nukes were the most common Pks) as most people would focus on bagging their items rather than fighting back (you could tell as items would start vanishing off their toon). The result of this is that it made No Drop gear very important even if it had terrible stats (like the Happy Love Bracers, look them up) and others would keep around backup sets of more abundant, easier to get loot to use that wasn't much of a loss if ganked (like the 3 wis/int bracers off of the Evil Eyes that were an easy camp when you were lv40+. No Drop status made Planar gear more desirable than it seemed, and everyone wanted to get decked out in that until it could be replaced by the next set of No Drop which came from the Velious gear quests (Kunark gear sets lacked stats and were tradable so they were mostly worthless besides a handful of specific class pieces like the Druid and Shammy bracers which were a free click dot and DD respectively; I used my druid bracer to finish off the last mob on low health quad kiting).
The ironic thing was, the core of the Pk community and many Anti-Pks were the most experienced in PvP to the point that they were confident to wear droppable gear which further gave them an advantage in fighting, especially donning player made resist gear. It often made for some good victory loot if people could defeat the Pks that attacked them.
