Casual players forced to live in a truly dangerous world with thieves and blood thirsty killers, we’ll never see these dynamics in an MMO again.
When Renaissance was introduced, what happened was most people lived purely in the non-pvp world and horded massive wealth and resources safely (which would have made you a big target in the old world), while the pvp side just became an arena for people to fight all the time. Boring.
But sometimes we killed people and cut up their bodies into pieces and fed them to pigs.
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.
Thank you, anyone claiming otherwise is fucking sheltered. They never bothered to opened up a regular shard other than seige perilous which had extra difficulties cranked up so nobody bothered, and other games filled the gap (until those too were banned).