That's rather onesided. When gear didn't matter, up to 1.05, PvPers didn't give a damn about gear and mainly farmed T0.5 for the looks. Those raiding being PvE geeks. Even during gemme era the amount of players using them was low enough not to make it that bad.
When the gear change arrived everything got turned upside down. On the server i was on 80 to 90% of the PvP was done in open-world. And it's a heck of a bad way to XP, especially if you're PvPing in groupes (the point of an MMO i believe).
So there was two options after 1.05:
- change the way you play and do a lot more of mini-games to keep up with the gear race and thus leaving aside open-world a bit.
- Continue doing mainly/exclusively open-world PvP and slowly but surely be outgeared by those who chose the first option.
A lot of guilds collapsed and PvPers left the game when they didn't have enough play time to reach PvP 4 with open-world/duels/and minimal minis. Gearing up became a neccissity and not everyone was keen on farming minis to achieve that.
You can like or dislike the concept of gear race but it is here.
- You can chose not to participate at all in that race so you keep playing the game how you initially liked to play it, but then you'll get out-geared by everyone and your combative potential will shrink to the point you can't PvP anymore.
- You can chose to participate softly, so you have an acceptable compromise. Have decent gear to keep up without changing completely your gamestyle.
- You can chose to throw yourself completely in the race and have the best gear possible. But it might mean you'll have to radicaly change how you play the game.
Initially most of the PvP was guild vs guild. Therefore falling too far behind gear wise was the promise of mean spankings. You wanted to keep competitive, you had to get the gear. Get the best gear so you can crush your ennemies in Keshatta and Sieges and not get crushed by them because they farmed gear so they wouldn't get crushed by your guild who was farming gear not get crushed by their guild who ... Vicious circle...
But not everyone can follow that pace. Top guilds farm top gear so they can keep competing with each others. But smaller guilds can't do the same and fall behind preventing them from competing with top guilds. Especially true in big fights were individual skill will be outpowered by T4 demos AoE and the frame rate drop. The major turning point of that was when T3 weapons started to hatch in the hands of all the players of the top guilds. T3 crafted wepons and T4 gear made it worse.
Today when you start PvPing you have a choice to make. Either start straight away and get your ass whiped by vets in top tear gear. Or farm gear to reach the minimal threshold to be able to compete.
So i believe most people don't farm gear to be able to farm undergeared or new players. They farm gear so they don't get farmed by fully geared vets.
You'll have noticed that a huge amount of decent players have ego issues when it comes to PvP and simply hate getting killed by players they consider as 'noobs'. That only kill them because they are more, because they have better gear , because they play a noob class with a noob spec, [insert more random excuses].
Getting the top gear straight away is kind of a check list. "Gear done ! Now i can sololy focus and skilling up and having fun". It was one of the arguments of mean bori diggers: "I get PvP 10 in a month that way i wont have to work for gear for the next year !"
Regarding newbies
'Farming' (by that i mostly mean killing) newbies and undergeared players is normal. Of course it depends of some factors but generally when you're in a 1 vs 2 situation or worse, you gank the squishiest of them all first. When i play my sin if i have a tortage gear demo and a PvP 10 demo against me. I'll quickly one shot the tortage gear demo so the ****er won't stun me while i got the PvP 10 one on his ass ready to get killed.
An other situation. You're team is getting farmed and you don't like leaving minis so you keep fighting. Who are you going to go for ? Fully geared players you have little chance to manage to kill before his team mates help him ? Or the under-geared player you might just have a shot at killing before you get ported on the rezpad.
I've played most characters in PvP starting with green gear. And while on Conq and Guard my aggro was super low. On HoX and Necro they were super high. Now that all these chars are PvP 5+ ... well it's still the same, the squishy ones get focused while the others don't. Main diffrence being that now i have decent changes of killing those who attack me. Therefore instead of going 5-20 i can go 15-10. Sure you get chased further the squishier you get because the odds of you catching up with an badly geared toon is higher than when it's an older char (AAs for better running and the gear diffrence on your side allowing you to have high chances of killing the guy fast enough, before he can reach his friends). We all get bloodthirsty at times in PvP.
The main problem with AoC's PvP is it's solo PvP. In minis it's aweful. It feels like you've been thrown in an arena, chained to 5 other guys you don't give a damn about and you have to make the best of it.
PvP being, kill your ennemies and try not to get killed. It results in some not so interesting minis. And since it's been like that for years now even inside the same guild, most people don't give a **** about each others outside raids and don't play together, don't communicate. Fully individualistic PvP content.
No guild pride to defend, no reputation either since there's no community.
Bottom line:
I sincerly disagree with this simplistic idea that says that players gear up just to farm noobs. I think the state of mini-games has three reasons:
- It's solo PvP
- Open-world shrank, mini-games became solo, sieges crashed. No guild PvP goal they stopped caring and left their players do what ever they liked. Community took an arrow to the knee.
- Gear race pushing players to PvE forgetting their PvP origins and pushing towards a 'professionalization" of the game. Bring up the maths and kill the sport.
Give players a diffrent environment and you'll have a completely diffrent attitude. For instance, on the French servers, untill the merge with Fury, rezpad farming didn't happen nor did bringing the flag on the rezpad. Insulting and flaming on groupe chat was kept at a minimum because guilds valued their reputation and officers tamed the wild ones amongst them. Teamplay was decent because of guild reputation. You'ld get kicked from most guilds if you would AFK in a corner during tough minis or not hit your guildies. And you'ld be laughed of if you refused to assist an open-world ennemie who ended in your groupe during a mini.
Same players, diffrent environement, diffrent attitudes.
Sorry... had been in need to write some wall of text for a while