That's true Arioch, well said. I totally forgot to consider risk vs reward.
But all you really suffer in SB from small scale pvp is loss of inventory(basically just gold and junk shit that would be sold for gold), and I remember all too well the first things out of someone's mouth when grinding up to r7 and some item actually worth a damn gets ID'ed:
"Ok, teleporting back to bank, who can summon me back?"
The most I ever got was gold from sacking xp'ers, minus the first DELICIOUS few months when I could take my thief and steal those big deeds of stupid guild leaders sometimes. Yeah once in a great while you find some Un'ided item that turns out to be sick, or some good stat rune that someone was too lazy to bank, but there wasn't much risk other than gold loss. At least from my recollections
The DOWNSIDE to RvR, which I think partly helped kill the game, was how noobs to the game were getting totally fucked over by griefers the minute they were off the island. Esp a while after release, no guild wanted to take in some clueless new-to-the-game lowbie, so these poor fools had to try to fight at the outskirts of safeholds and shop the public trees and were getting griefed hardcore until all their gear broke off their back and their bank runs dry from repairing it. They think "this game sucks ass" and there goes any chance to raise the server pop while they slowly become ghost towns.
WoW does need some form of RvR though. I shouldn't be able to take a trained monkey and put him in front of the keyboard for 18 hours a day and watch him get rank 14. But the "risk" of SB's noob levs for newer players was way too damn high, heh.
