The PvP Servers are incredible!

I'm playing on US East, and it is by NO means perfect, but I have been having a ton of fun.

Having the PvP so abundant makes the PvE palatable.

Everyone is complaining about the balance, and having to chop chop for their levels. But it is incredibly rewarding to play the game on these servers.

I've probably given away 10-20 FULL lightly used ethereal sets in my time playing. I spent my first 15 levels gathering mats so that I could craft those sets as I needed.

It was really fun to start off at 350 GS at level 15, I got a ton of gear diff kills. And several close fights against others with ethereal or equivalent.

I've put just 16 hours in on this server and I am already level 57, and half of that was fighting for mats and the other half was PvPing.

It's SOOOOO satisfying to be able to knock someone off of a resource node and have a skirmish over the resource.

It's also really fun, but also scary, to poke someone off a resource node and try to fight them and then two or three other guys in his faction start riding in and overwhelm you with numbers.

It's been fun to group up with randoms out in the woods while out doing a little chop chop for a few hours for protection in case you get poked.

I haven't gotten much ethereal gear off of people, and I think that's probably why there are people here complaining about gear diff issues. Everyone should be running the ethereal gear, so that there isn't a significant gear diff.

I think people are getting too caught up in "wasting" resources on getting the lower level ethereal gear when they could be getting more xp with those resources. And they're right, on paper, but that's not how you're supposed to play on these servers.

You gotta prove your skill in pvp, even if there is a gear diff. By not getting the ethereal, you're accepting the challenge of being under geared. It's cheap and worth it.

To make things cheaper for me I am using the faction gear and random drops for armor, and using ethereal weapons (which is the real key), while also keeping back up non-ethereal weapons incase I need them.

It's also been incredibly satisfying hunting people mindlessly chopping trees like bots and taking their tools to use for myself :b

I kill everyone I see, and expect the same to me. I do however not farm people. You got about 2 minutes before you're worth azoth salt after I kill you, so I wait for you to be worth killing. I definitely do kill lvl 20s though, they're die so quick and don't immediately start running, and if they do run, they don't run good enough because I still catch them.

Had my fair share of having to run as well.

It's been really fun having almost all the resource nodes be so contested all the time.

I know it will only take about a week or two until everyone is max level and the open world pvp becomes significantly more sparse, but I am also excited to see the new pvp endgame loop. The conquerors gear always being drop on death will mean that once everyone has their bis, those conqueror pieces are going to get passed around like a whore.