How to build a PvP server for EMU
The one thing I think most pvp EQmu servers need is to eliminate the need to box for wars, rogues, clerics, and the like. If people could level a rogue on a 10 pop server and still enjoy the game without having to dual box a healer or a porter or feel the need to because everyone does it would greatly increase the number of people who are tired of leveling a mage/necro/wiz to 50 in classic (ive done wiz, druid, cleric about 30x now to 50)...
On a PvP server people need the opportunity to solo to build their chars and provide for good pvp game play. If you make the playing field as fair as possible you will eliminate a lot of the cheating people do as well.
In really well designed pvp games like quake for example players can always compete alone, even in team matches they can pick a side or no side, but really the game starts when you learn to work with other players in CTF like games etc... (in EQ you raid a mob instead of trying to capture a flag, or hold a camp)
Boxing is an annoyance to me and I tend to play solo classes to avoid the need to box. Also boxing does not make a good pvp experience period even if your sam da man and can 6box 6 wiz (seriously he was an exception to the rule).
The way I would go about this would be to completely re balance the PvE game... We already have plenty vanilla PvE servers. This is easy enough to do by changing mob hit-points, AC, damage output, abilities, spawns, spawn positions, etc... You could easily re balance EQ PvE to be pure melee friendly and not screw or make casters OP.
It is also pretty straight forward to work on re balancing classes by simply balancing gear and resist rates and tweaking melee and spell damage in addition to re balancing PvE this would even out the PvP balance a bit, it does not need to be perfect wow which pretends to be perfect is far from perfect yet they have the right idea in this regard. There should still be some promotion of the rock, paper, scissors effect still as well (wizard beats warrior, warrior beats rogue, rogue beats mage, etc). But the rock paper scissors mechanic should be much less pronounced then vanilla EQ.
It is important to avoid or take out or change mechanics that favor one class over another in pvp, an example is item loot, theres 3 ways to solve this and i'll explain what the problem is.
Item loot favors casters, period it does no arguing here. This makes no one want to play a melee really. EQ's camps are designed to make items hard and not fun to replace.
Solution 1: Make items easier to replace
Solution 2: Make only 1 slot loot able and give items in this slot very relevant stats to pvp, like resists, make it moderately hard to replace a good item, if you can loose in item in 5 minutes of combat, it should take 15 minutes to get another one... not 1 day. Or make 2 slots and make one require a day and one require a few minutes to replace. Care should be taken to make it so players who have lost these items are only at a slight, maybe 5% numerical disadvantage over other players so luck and skill can still be a factor in recovering these items.
Solution 3: Take item loot out and provide other rewards, coin, titles, bling, EXP, points that can be turned in for DS or Haste or Clarity potions, etc... i.e. players could drop ears when they die, 20 ears can get you a tradeable DS pot, 40 ears will get you a higher level DS pot the DS pots should be level appropriate and not unbalance the game. Or be acquirable through other means.
Definitely raid targets should be left in that require 20+ players to work together...
On a server like this I would expect a raid force of 2 - 3 groups on the mob and another raid force of 1 group to hold off enemy attackers/trainers etc... (no training is not a sportsmanlike tactic but a good guild will be prepared to stop it).
As far as the leveling process the PvE should be balanced so that anyone can level any class solo, get competitive gear to enter into raids with and pvp with, then the real fun should start. You could balance one or two dungeons to require groups. (multiple spawns, harder hitting mobs with better avoidance or more hp...) using different styles and tuning them to require different groups with different tactics adds more depth to the game.
I think it would be really cool to have a project were runneye, blackburrow and maybe upper guk were completely reballanced for solo play by all, then leave lower guk, CT raid targets, maybe make Permafrost a group dungean, or perma and lower guk group dungeons were perma requires good avoidance and lower guk good dps.
This can be done by changing mobs, pathing, etc... all very viable from the server I'm pretty sure not much is stored in the zone files other then geometry and maybe some scripty things like locked doors etc.
So basicly you would roll a rogue, at lvl 1 you would learn to fight, and work your way up and pvp with the option of grouping more at lvl 30, by then you would probably be in full banded with some minor magic items, getting close to 40 you would have worked upto full ravenscale and minor magical armor/weapons.
At the raid, group pvp levels you would be working for planar gear etc...
You could release expansions rebalanced and retooled, people already at the end game could gear up to participate in the next harder tier...
This is much like how I believe EQ2 is done.
In EQ2 you can gain and loose exp in pvp. This might also be an option as well.
I think its time someone took the player vs AI out of EQ and made it the players vs players. Just some ideas and thoughts.
I'de like to see new breath breathed into the game though and I'm curious how you all think about these ideas.
An example of a server that was somewhat like this was the crucify pvp server which was successful and popular for quite some time despite having a shady GM/staff.
When designing a PvP server the focus should be on PvP, how players will interact in PvP and not necessarily on PvE barriers to leveling/ability gains. PvE grinds, and PvE trade skills and PvE spell research and PvE bind affinity etc were all designed to reduce the rate players would be able to complete the game. The idea behind PvP is that the game is never complete. So these barriers can be lessened or made easier. The mechanics behind them are sound. But its should be made fair for all... Can everyone bind outside non-dungeon raid zones? Can they only bind in cities? Can research components be bought off vendors so people do not need to spend hours farming like an Asian for the 20th time?
Another thing is people who PvP are more interested in different tactics and game play. They want to try to play many different characters and classes, why make it so only geeks with 40hrs of time per week can compete like this? There's no need to, no one is making money from these projects. Don't give content release as an excuse, if you balance the game well first then people will be happy and patient for additional content expansions.
/who should be disabled on pvp servers, it should be a challenge and a great boon to scout out and find enemy players or opposing guilds, you should require people to spy on raid targets. It would promote stealthy game play. It would also avoid children from logging in 1 toon so they can train a raid zone based of of a / all, at least make them use MQ.
You could keep the PvE challenge of EQ while making it impossible for mobs to train, you could set mobs to snap away and loose aggro very quickly. This would make it much more challenging for week FD'ers to train by themselves. You could make it so once a KOS mob agro's a player it goes indifferent towards all others until it re-reaches its spawn point or is attacked directly.
Now as for cheating as I read everywhere on EMU pvp server forums this is the biggest gripe out there. Some things have not been tried...
You could give every guild leader access to suspend players. Players would quickly get suspended on both sides until only mature ones were left. Guild leaders would need to be screened and could be banned only by real GMs, it would be the real GM's job to only ban and disband guilds abusing their power to self moderate each other. You should be able to temporarily suspend another guild characters, probably a 1 day suspension. GM's would be able to perma band players.
You could make a bot that would log in and log chat and suspend any players for foul language, automatically. This would also very much increase the maturity of players, as they would have to find better ways to interact then clogging up general channels.
I read somewhere someone was trying to make a wrapper/scanner to detect MQ use and I think that would be great.
You could also make a web page were IP addresses and player names are collected in a secret database and all players can vote ban a player that is a nuisance. For example player Able_Trainer logs into the server, the server logs this and some apache scripts parse the log then set up a database with Able_Trainers IP and character names, then Able_Trainer proceeds to train Guild_Awesome sauce. Players log into the servers website via their registered names and can vote against Able_Trainer, GMs will receive and email about this incident and the web page will fill out the correct fields in whatever file to suspend Able_Trainer because 15 players voted that they needed to be suspended. To avoid people abusing this, you could tie the login into the EMU server login somehow.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, of things that would fix a server and as you can see many things can be implemented different ways. It is my personal vision of what would make a good server and promote a good community. I think if we could get some of the developers thinking more about fairness then uberness when they are coding then we might see a shift from people avoiding servers like voidds like the plague =) and people would flock to the new servers you would see populations like the p99 server has brought about.
The #1 thing that makes people leave a server is probably feeling like they were treated unfairly, I know that kills my gaming experience, I wont even play tabletop DND with people who treat me unfairly, if I'm playing a rogue and my DM only gave me critical immune monsters to fight, ide find me a new DM.
So I leave this for the community to read and think about and discuss (civilly please)... maybe one day I'll stop trolling these forums and try to implement some of my ideas on an old 486 i have in the basement of my grandmothers house...
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