Project TheoryQuest

[Shin Noir]

So, I noticed this topic here talking about Custom Servers. It is full of great ideas and aligns with something I agree with.

I'm going to list proposed ideas for a server, feel free to add suggestions, I'll edit the list if I feel it sounds great to add in. NOTE: this is all tentative, and open to debate.

If you like this idea, or would like to contribute, PM me (or shoot a comment), we can work towards making it a reality.

• No mercenaries or bots. -sunbeam
• Boxing is not recommended. (Cater an environment where grouping with players is ideal.) -sunbeam
• Adjust content away from the original raid-style scale. (Less player base, weakened enemies) -sunbeam
• XP/AA adjusted to be more casual friendly. (While an MMO, it isn't a player's life's goal) -sunbeam
• Keep the ideas simple, and obtainable, adjust the experience as time goes on. -Shin
• Attempt to remove designs that cause class favoritism (high HP mobs -> lots of DPS) or class dependence (high DPS mobs -> healer chains), or at least, don't make it a static formula for all encounters. -Shin
• Try to balance spawn locks with an effort = spawn alternative. -Shin
• Simplify learning curve, hold hand for custom content learning and ensure direction is clear for newcomers to encourage retention. -Shin
• Reward past knowledge of the EQ universe by adjusting original content with a better twist. Causes players to interact and gives them an instant knowledge pool and direction, also enhances nostalgia. -Shin
• Adjust reliance of MQ use. (Disallow MQ warp, or other obvious hacks, try to find ways to make MQ use less required since it causes a difficulty for players to keep equally competitive). -Shin
• Adjust progression and itemization to make a bazaar marketplace more reasonable for the longevity of the game. -Shin

In closing, I want to talk about soloing. It is my belief that most, if not everyone, who is a fan of Everquest enjoyed the experience of making friends and teaming up with others to achieve goals. A reward is always sweeter when shared. My ultimate goal is to try to design a place where collaboration is rewarded. Soloing is doable, but really, soloing is depressing. My hope is to make it where soloing can be done to a certain level, and then the game turns into a small group experience, with a difficulty that causes boxing to be troublesome.

[knowom]

I wouldn't even have a Bazaar type of market place and keep it 100% bartering like EQ classic Freeport/Tunnels. The prices fluctuate instead of being a fixed undercutting of the bottom end price or a marginal market up on bottom end prices for low volume high commodity items if your a flipper.

Classic's player bartering market is really closer to the stock market where values change constantly and you need to learn trends a bit and adjust your buying and selling habits a bit based upon them. The more you study the market the better your decision making will be in general.

It's really more difficult to control the market in said system than with the Bazaar which is far more predictable anyone can easily undercut a price or buy a cheap item and mark it up if the going rates are directly in front of them to look at.

I'd also like to point out the AH in D3 completely failed and EQ's economy was really more healthy prior to Bazaar even though it did add convenience particularly for the ones in the best position to control the market itself.

I think the best way to add longevity is to ensure items never go out of style to begin with make them progressively upgradable to a extent much like UO had different grades of magic weapons and armors. Build them into a crafting system take 2 of a particular item and combine them to form a superior grade version of itself the bonus can be minor, but over time obviously you can build upon it.

This would keep the items always in demand much like we continuously build and enhance upon stuff in the real world just look at the smart phone industry as one example that's evolved by leaps and bounds in the last 10 years.

I agree with most of those bullet points though. I do think the large scale raid element is a bit of a poor situation for the masses it creates too much politics and detracts from just creating a fun game environment. You can still have a fun and challenging game without resorting to crazy political nonsense. I also agree that bots and boxing ultimately spoils the game in a lot of ways it waters down the social grouping aspect of the game unfortunately.

In real life I don't typically hang out with 12-18 people nearly as regularly on my own free time as I would 6 people. It's really a bit obnoxious to be expected to emphasize that as a common game play aspect to me personally.

I think providing a mix of solo friendly content with group content that's both hard and easy for both play styles is ideal. Couple that along with a reasonable bit of raid content about 1/3 of overall game content perhaps without huge social barriers to participate in that varies from easy to hard in difficulty.

Also progression can be really poor and dodgy at times it shouldn't be overly easy or difficult and for the most part more in between the two, but can lean a bit more on one side or the other at times.

I actually think in terms of spawn designs you really need a lot of variety when you want to increase difficulty and challenge, but keep things more bland with less variety where you want it easier. The harder and more rewarding group content should be more structured on better overall group balance though shouldn't always be same sort of group balance make up that is often the case. I'd say that enchanters are often undervalued more than they perhaps should be healers can be overvalued and tanks very undervalued it's too seldom that you'd ever want two tanks in a group.

I think that MOBA/DOTA really gets to the core of balanced team group mechanics that would be more ideal for MMO's to strive towards. You've got carries, supports, assassins, mages, fighters, tanks, ect...and different situations require different tactics and adapting to them a bit. I'd like to see more group team tactics than well I'm a healer so I spam heals and that's pretty much it that's a really tired formula for MMO genre as a whole. Having different class armor branches for different play style variations would be a really nice way to change things up sort of like WoW has with class skill trees which could be race or deity based perhaps.

[knowom]

Another thing I'd add is straying a bit from NPC spawn camps is a somewhat poor EQ aspect. I think having named mobs able to spawn from any mobs within the zone would be better for players so you don't run into so much I or we're camping this nonsense that notorious to EQ. Basically more global spawns and drops. Another benefit of that would be less duplicate repeat camp spawns and thus items. It would probably encourage a bit more zone exploration by not being so self restricted to camps. I just want to have fun and kill stuff personally.

[Shin Noir]

Thanks for all the input, knowom! I read over everything.
tl;dr edition, and responses.

• Let's see if anyone +1's the "ecommons /OOC" trade system and removing bazaar.
• Your itemization tips may be difficult to implement, is my larger concern. Trying to keep this simple is an emphasis, the world is our oyster but time is not on our side.
• Enchanters and the CC role is always a challenging class with a lower group compositions. We'll have to figure out how to best leverage this identity.
• I would LOVE and agree to ensure that each class would contain combinations of roles and never feel entitled to "sit and heal all day" or other "do your JOB and that's it".. One major redesign I am currently contemplating with clerics/dru/shm being staple healers is a "Promised Renewal" heal system. I remove the majority of "immediate heals" (minus perhaps mend, I still debate paladin's role in this) and instead leverage delayed healing like the Promised Renewal line (73+clr) being the staple heals. This makes stacking healers inefficient. If any instant heals are in game, their recast delay is too high to be used regularly. This has a positive side effect that a cleric has time to do other things, since you can't spam heal a target.
• I'm a huge MOBA fan so I can relate to your role system, obvious they would not fit directly like you say, but I get the idea.
• Racial specialization is something I'm deeply contemplating as well, it allows a roleplay aspect.
• On an experimental server I wrote a system where groups of mobs e.g. orcs have no nameds spawns, but every mob is a potential PH for named. When you kill any orc, a named orc has a % chance to spawn where it died. This makes MQ map usage less effective since nameds aren't sitting around up all the time (Except on wipe). Effort yields reward sort of mindset. This may be part of your second topic? (Downside: Swarm kiting, but that can be addressed.)

[knowom]

I think the truth of the matter is we need more collective emphasis as a community to work together to create stuff we can all enjoy. A server that's got much custom depth shouldn't be a 1 man project by any means it requires both a lot of effort and time plus quite a bit of knowledge additionally. Personally I believe a lot of servers have short runs and fail or don't end up getting started in the first place due to that fact. The more we share and help each other the better and stronger this community is.

[knowom]

Nice points Shin and good break down to the point simplification to most of what I mentioned!

Yeah swarm kiting is a minor issue it's takes a lot of time and it's easy to counter in terms of design oops that mob summons oops that mob roots, stuns, mezzes, charms, fears, knocks back, blinds, snares, ect numerous ways to discourage that. I'd also add that some swarm kiting isn't a bad thing particularly if there are plenty of mobs to go around.

I've been gradually work on doubling PEQdb spawns actually so that could further aid to providing less spawn camp endangered species syndrome plus it could do so much more adding increased challenges and a more filled living breathing game world. I have Odus and Faydwer somewhat done. Still have Antonica to do which is about the size of those two combined.

What hasn't been done though is the X, Y, Z, and heading locations haven't been modified yet so they are simply stacked directly on top of the old spawns and haven't modified the names yet either which ideally I'd run through a name generator.

It's just a basis idea atm, but I envision potential to it to vary and differentiate things from a carbon copy of EQ classic that's been hashed over with little or much more minor changes. So much stuff could be done with it for depth stuff like guard shift duties for night and day bit like Kithicor and other stuff like mobs that path differently depending on game time by exchanging two spawns.

It's the subtle or brash added details that would make it different and interesting and newish feeling even though it would have a core nostalgia familiarity which I think a lot of us seek out of personal comfort.

Your experimental server system is exactly what I meant!

I think the itemization would be sorta difficult, but could be tackled gradually kind of like I'm going about this spawn population increase thing. Just doing it for a handful of common highly popular items could change and shake things up quite a bit "Short Sword of the Ykesha" or "Golden Efreeti Boots" for examples were highly popular pretty rampant EQ Classic items. You can also imagine being able to upgrade a "Fungus Covered Scale Tunic" that would be pretty popular and a way to help keep supply a bit lower as well by removing some from the economy itself in order to do so.

[knowom]

"Trying to keep this simple is an emphasis, the world is our oyster but time is not on our side." I agree fully on this statement or at the very least or at least get plenty of help if it's not simple. You kind of have to pick and choose what you want to invest your development time into when working on a custom server. Kind of why I decided to share my work whether it ends up getting used or not. I'd rather have it made available for the public to make use of if they wish to like a street side walk. They may only use portions of it too, but that's fine by me if they make any use of it that's positive to me at least it was helpful to someone.

[Shin Noir]

@nillboard: Thanks for the link. Hoping that doesn't happen.

I'm not after a committee. Treat this more as a brainstorm session.
I plan to take executive order once ideas are thrown around, skimming and ensuring a theme is maintained.

I understand the importance of ensuring direction is one person, and hope to attract more people with like-mindedness once a theme is established.

[knowom]

Originally Posted by Nillboard

This is going to be a great horse!

P.S. Knowom, you have terrible ideas.

P.S. welcome to the forums TROLL4TEH GIGGLEZ enjoy your bridge to no where say Hi to Sarah!

[vsab]

I must admit one of the things I love doing in EQ live is camping named spawns for "that cool piece of loot". The thing I hate hate hate is grinding xp mobs.

HoThule on live was great for named frequency on ph's (actually as a casual, group player I loved that expansion in general). May take an evening or two, but at the end you will probably get that awesome aug, and have that big grin your wife doesn't really "get".

But then Diablo loot seems popular in EQEmu, for me it's just "won't try that server, then", so maybe I'm a minority.

What you want to avoid is too much difference in loot quality between group/"raid" mobs because otherwise it's REALLY hard to balance mob difficulty (which is one reason UF totally screwed over casual players, particularly non raid geared tanks).

[vsab]

On a more positive note, I'd like to see the first 10 levels improved. In most MMO's the first ten levels basically consist of one or two abilities, which you spam to kill rats/bats/skeletons until you hit level 10. It's be nice to get the real mechanics of the class as soon as you start.

[knowom]

A problem with global fully randomized loot like Diablo is range is range so the results are like the lottery they are completely mixed and unpredictable. The flip side is with camps people tend to get territorial over them because it's a lot like creating a monopoly over loot within the game the way they are normally setup. Really I'd say neither system is perfect though providing duplicate camp locations to named mobs in a zone could solve a bit of that. It would require more effort is the problem, but end result could be more favorable.

Raid targets have similar issues, but compounded even further by the fact that they are in even more limited quantities along with having bigger barriers of entry to clear the game content. Guilds act almost like corporations within the game ecosystem in regards to raid content and there are often game loop holes that can be taken advantage of by bigger and or more efficient ones that can cripple or hold back lesser organized or time or resource restrained ones. The raid situation is particularly troublesome where servers do to little to scale the difficulty and requirement along with the loot quality well enough with not enough stepping stones in terms of progression.

I still believe you need a system of not to high not to low in terms of group and raid difficulty and it's corresponding loot rewards with a ample amount of stepping stones or else you'll run into the issue of too much political control and pull from the top 1% of the player base over the 99% in the same way capitalism is a bit broken and flawed.

[Davood]

have you played eve online? they have a fairly advanced economy one that makes anything done in other MMOs look like prison inmates trading cigarettes and favors with each other. if i were to redesign guilds and the economy, i would use eve as the model.. haha.

That said, and with regards to the initial post talking about no bots and group content only...

one of the fallacies that most of the new servers I see popup seem to have in their design mindset is "I will have 100s of people on my server right away!!!!". You might, but generally you will not; it takes time to earn the trust of the community and there are servers that have been around since the start that 95% of the people play on anyways so it is hard to define yourself differently enough to attract those stragglers who just don't quite like the "mainstream" server which has
1. better support than you can provide
2. 1000s of players visting on and off (most of the community)
3. multiple actual developers and GMs

How do you compete with that? Well the answer is NOT to simply try and make a server that simply has different rules in rules_values

youll need to think of a fantastic new story, possibly re-envision all of the zone connections (years of trees and sanctuary in the sky did this well)

youll need to not be thinking in terms of just copying the peqDB - try out some other servers, are they already doing what you are doing? Maybe you should join another project team that might only have one or two developers.

ive been hosting eqemu servers for people (for free) for years now and most developers seem to poof after ~4 months and then I never hear from them again and I can their servers after 6 months of inactivity (which i define as like 1 person checking it out every week). the successful projects require constant maintenance, the only way to get that is by having a team.

READ THIS IF if you suffered a TLR moment.

You launch your server.
few people log in (this is normal). your content .. is it tuned for small trickles of people? if so then great they will stay, if not then they will leave.
If you absolutely must have raid and group content. scale it down in the db temporarily until you develop the 100s of players you are planning for, then slowly ramp up the difficulty in line with the population.

[Shin Noir]

thanks for the tips Davood.
All valid points and concerns.
I hope, just like all servers, for a serious population, but that isn't my primary motivator, since I know it's unlikely with the pool of players we have.

• I want something a group of friends can do, so having 100's of people isn't my goal, if you come on with 2 or 3 friends and have a good time, I consider that a job well done. If nothing else, I'll play it with friends, and others can try it out if they want.
• I'm down for a EVE economy, assuming it can be itemized and converted to a EQ style engagement.
• Right now this is all a theory, anyways.

[Davood]

Now that is something I would be willing to lose sleep over.

we could have something like the EVE economy. the only question is. what is the main driver for the development of the economy.. on EVE its about developing your corporation and building up a fleet of ships- trading stealing etc technologies and making backup clones

What would be the equivalent in EQ?

First you need some slowly developing but extremely painfully expensive process like developing skills but x1000 and have it be given the opportunity to degrade.

Also, you would need to not have any "finished" loots on monster drops, except in rare cases of a quest line or special boss monster (like the end encounter for an expansion).

Then you need to have systems that you hook into with those skills to do stuff - your a smith - OK great - I would then make some system where items are crafted with simple ingredients and certain items can be upgraded along clear paths - but as groups of items rather than linear item -> item paths (few small db changes to store data). Also I would take the item DB and add/change all aug slots on all items to "hidden" and then each permutation of an item with xyz etc augs hidden on it would have an id number based on the augs installed and the original item id.

this might also require a # based interface.. but i digress

returning to the item creation
-> item creation would be semi deterministic but the result of a combine might have many possible outcomes, including producing an inferior product to what you were building / whatever.
-> when you are the first to create an item then you can make that item again later on purpose - other players cannot automagically make that item on purpose, they would have to hope to get it when they combine for that type of item. So if you managed to make a fine steel short sword with some damage augs and such, you could make it again on purpose if you have the ingredients you used. this would be valuable to other players as each item will have (7 aug slots and thousands of augs? so lets say 5000^7 possible combinations for each item?). Also if you stop making the items you "discovered" for more than x amount of time, you lose the "ownership" and someone else can claim it if they manage to make one - or "disassemble" one for parts

the above scenario would satisfy the item creation and patenting aspect of the economy.

as for the actual economy.. nothing would be "nodrop" per se except some crutches for quests and such.

items would have to be available "offline"
ownership of item creation shoudl be tradable somehow which would make for an extremely valuable asset on a pvp server if you get lucky and get 7 lifetap augs and your server allows multiple procs - that patent is monay.

yes yes yes davood that is great but where does the actual base money come from????
regular game quests.
slaughtering monsters
and the above aspects.

yes yes yes davood but why should i care about money if im the top of the game with my items ive made?
because there should be some other methods to make / sink money maybe selling AA points or buying access to temporary mercenaries / pets like oh 10 mlllion plat buys me a one shot summon of rallos zek himself who follows me around until he dies or i do.

thats nice davood but what if you are offline and i want one of your specially discovered holy swords you invented?
oh ok so my offline trader can have "me" in npc form provide to you the item if you have a price ive set + the material(s) for the item group.

well mr davood im going to write a script and farm me up 100000 item combinations and ill come back later if a nice one appears and farm those out

ok sure but you better take into accoun the possible "good" combinatiosn you want for that particular item because I am going to be limiting you to 100 "invented" items with only the latest ones counting with item create repeats putting that repeated item back at front of the line.

ok im happy with this mr davood but what about the items themselves.
oh ok thats easy if we are continuing this thought experiemtn.
lets take a basic peqdb
every item in there that is equippable or clickable in some way -> run it though my magic formulae (which already have) to determine its value and tier. then categorize by type - count the number etc and generate some random crap to use as the combines. lorewise it wouldnt be pretty, but it can be cleaned up later. SQL-wise its super easy to do.

that way you could deterministically create a rusty short sword but you have a chance of getting various abilities on it each time you make one, and if you are the first for a particular combo, you can repeat it on purpose. etc

that concludes mental diareah for tonight
stay tuned tommorrow when davood meanders on about his project M plans.