I agree.. it is quite entertaining to think of what eqemu and eqlive can become.
Although, with eqlive I am completely bias on the subject.. I've basically given up any chance that I may ever pay 10/month for all the up/downtime verant offers... or the banning of my accounts for finding little 'quirks' that allowed me abilities that I shouldn't have (nevermind the fact that their programming expertise is what allowed for 'bugs')...
.. so I am very 'religiously' bonded with eqemu. It is allowing me to play eq once again, and fully enjoy it without being commited to paying each month (isn't paying $60 per each new copy of the game itself payment enough??)
On another thread, someone mentioned about Verant making eq single-player-able, due to their profits going down, or whatever..
To me, this is a brilliant Idea.. Mainly because that's what eqemu offers. Funnily enough, I see the developers of eqemu accomplishing this far before Verant.. So in my mind, I set my horizon on seeing eqemu doing this before EqLive. If you could log into eq and play while being offline, and still have npcs.. and 'smart npcs' which would nearly 'simulate' actual players..
.. then wouldn't eq be nearly 'renewed'? I think it would.
Right now the way eqemu is, it's momentus.. completely. Better interaction with npcs/smart npcs/mobs would make everything much better... and I'm sure people as a collective are going to work toward this effort. Hopefully, eventually one day we can load up our servers, log into them.. and have that same feeling of logging in to a 'world' full of people.. and 'live' amongst that world, just as we all have done at one time or another on Verant's servers.
In my honest oppinion, I believe the best Idea at this point would be for the developers to have an eq server on gotfrags that was geared toward development, instead of playtime.. where there was an oper for each zone.. and as a collective, everyone could work on npc/quest scripting... work on enemy ai (because I agree about Verant's Idea of enemy ai leaving much to be desired)
Instead of a few people working on all zones and trying to do everything in Norrath. Then, as new addons and updates came out, you could login to this server to literally experience the new changes, and submit oppinions, etc.. to me, this would be a development effort of a grand scale.. and would inspire me to definitely do everything I could to contribute, because I truelly appreciate eqemu, and what it's allowed me to do so far.
The only 'problem' I experience with eqemu when I'm playing on it, is the latency.. which I feel has a lot to do with the constant loading of info from the database.. but I'm fully confident this is being worked on (judging by status updates, etc).. but what happens is that I go to attack a mob, and it takes a minute or so before anything happens.. spells are delayed, etc.. but it's definitely dealable, and still fun.
I am looking so forward to what the EqEmu developers come up with along with all the other inspired developers that volunteer efforts to make eqemu a great alternative to EqLive.
Just seeing what has been done so far proves to me what can be done in the future, and I'm more excited about that than even ever seeing Verant do another thing with EqLive.
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Kron TheHorrible - ServerOp
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