[jghn]

In my experience most of the people who say this were exactly the sort of people that ruined it for everyone else by taking things too far. Turns out people didn't find it fun to be slaughtered by a horde of 15 teenagers with names like "frogsmasha"

[xwdv]

I didn’t always kill people, sometimes they begged for mercy and I made them hand over some loot and then took off.

But sometimes we killed people and cut up their bodies into pieces and fed them to pigs.

[jghn]

Yes, I did a lot of that stuff too. That's not my point. There has been a very strong correlation to the people who lament things using the sort of terminology you did and the crowd that caused the changes they lament.

Someone like Xavori on Lake Superior was a good counterexample. He was a well role-played villain. Meanwhile there were hordes of troglodytes with borderline (or sometimes not at all borderline) offensive names going around and straight up griefing people. And that latter crowd ruined it for everyone.

A big delimiter I use when talking to people about those days was to what extent they view the largest issue being there not being enough unwilling participants in their PvP/griefing. A lot of people liked Siege Perilous, which was awesome. But a lot of the problem players didn't - because what they really enjoyed was griefing other players.