Dungeon Crawl - Classic Hybrid

[Tabasco]

I started working on this a month or two ago and a handful of folks have been playing on there since. I've enjoyed it quite a bit so I figured I would share some details here.

The server is pretty traditional with a few exceptions.
Expansions go to Luclin, but all races and classes are available except Drakkin.
There is no formal hub, scriber, buff bot, etc.

You start in your regular home city but Soulbinders can transport you to handful of convenient locations around the world so different races can readily group.
Hailing a Soulbinder also sets a waypoint allowing you to teleport from any Soulbinder to any other that you have discovered on a per-character basis.

Your stats are more meaningful, influencing melee abilities, spell damage, cast time, natural haste, mitigation skills, pet power, pet weapon damage, etc.
Most bonuses are set up to use multiple stats so having a good spread with a general focus on typical stats for your class is a good idea.

We've flagged over 1700 boss and named mobs. Some are well known, others not so much, and I didn't forget the necros and dark races either, so commonly camped old-world guards and bards are included.
This list has then been classified with a boss level to describe difficulty and this rating effects bonus loot drop chance and quality.

Any named mob has a base 10% chance (boss level increases this) to drop bonus loot scaled to their level and difficulty, typically not exceeding the kind of thing you would find on any other named mob at that level.

Trash mobs have a 1% chance to drop additional lower quality loot. The stuff isn't that great and it's very infrequent, but when they do drop it feels a lot like Christmas.

Experience gain is faster than classic but still quite slow. It's pretty easy to solo most classes in the beginning but grouping is going to be better exp and more reliable leveling.

The box limit is 2, just to catch all those multi-player households.

I have a few low-end tailoring and blacksmithing recipes slightly augmented with more to come. The idea is to make this stuff worthwhile without it becoming overpowered.

What I've found most compelling is that a lot of the quests that people tend to skip over are worth something because of the stat bonuses and buffs that we didn't even use on classic are like gold now. I'm looking at you Spirit of Snake.
Anyway, it's been good fun for a handful of people and I think we could all use some new meat to group with and crack some raid content.
The level cap is 50 but once people start getting into the harder planes we already have server-wide quest in planning to increase the cap to 55.

http://midian.homelinux.net -- Site still says Discordant Whisper but I shut it down recently. The forum has links to the db and character browser though.

[jonnyx3]

I played on Discordant Whisper and really enjoyed myself. It was a unique idea that wasn't really present on most servers. That idea was wiped in favor of this "Dungeon Crawl."

First, how did you come up with the name? The name would imply an "Eye of the Beholder" type of game where you "crawl" through the depths of an unknown dungeon. This is clearly not the case since this is traditional EQ with a slight chance at besting the original with drops.. !?!

Experience gain is faster than classic but still quite slow. It's pretty easy to solo most classes in the beginning but grouping is going to be better exp and more reliable leveling.

Faster, but still quite slow.. I won't even bother with that. And the solo in the beginning until later? It's nearly a gosh darn old school EQ server.. did you even need to mention you will have to group at later levels?

Tabasco- I loved your old server, and I love people who think "outside the box." But what do you really think you did here? Why would people really want to come aboard this server? Ooh.. low end crafting recipes! Sign me up!

You and your team (if there were others) had a great idea with Discordant.. then you decided you were real EQ dev's and created, well, old school EQ.

Great job reinventing the wheel..

[nenelan]

I, too, really enjoyed playing Discordant Whisper for the 2+ years it was around. However, I feel that it had reached the extent of its lifetime. I say this because it suffered what Live and a few other servers around here have as a rampant issue, and that is Mudflation. When you get to a certain point, items have so much in the way of stats that it's just kind of silly, and there's no sense going higher because it keeps getting worse and faster. There's SO many items in the database from 0-600ish HP, but on DW, we were up to the 1300-2000 end of things. Also, I imagine it would have been darn near impossible to balance any kind of custom content.

As far as DW's mechanic, this new server has the same thing, random drops as well as stat-based gameplay. My shaman on it casts spells over twice as fast as another one and they hit nearly twice as hard, and that's really cool in my eyes. Better yet, when I get a Sta or Wis upgrade, I can actually watch my healing and damage go up. I've always been kind of irked at live where if you get an "upgrade" unless it has HP or AC on it, it is hard to see an actual benefit reflected.

As far as being old-school, I'm not so sure about that myself. Granted, there's no custom content yet, but playing on his server for a while, I can tell Tabasco prefers core mechanics in place before other content, and that makes sense to me, as even when he would put in quests on the other server, few people would do them when compared to the general population.

The leveling, yeah that can be a bit slow, but there's servers out there that you can pop on, play a bit, be max level, and be bored afterwards. Drive-through content has its place, but I like places that I have to work for my achievements as well. (My first character I DID solo to 50, and it can be done. I gave up soloing my monk at 37 and grouped him with my Shaman, but that can be done as well, it just takes a bit more work.)

I envision that he'll have much more in store for us in the future, and I can't wait to see it myself, especially looking forward to how crafting will evolve, being that stats have such a big impact on your performance. (Taking a bit of a break right now, but looking forward to how this server evolves. I was the same way at DW, play solid for a week or two and take some time off.)

[Tabasco]

I was pretty fond of Discordant Whisper myself (I make what I play after all), so why was it always empty? After two years we spiked to over 40 players and then the bulk of them left within weeks. It was too easy, and maybe leveling was too slow for most people.
I don't know, but the majority of the people I spoke with ignored the custom quests and just ran around grinding for random drops and whining about the melee pets.
I had a lot of code trying to mash the inflation of 16+ expansions into one meaningful world with a coherent progression and thought the last big update did that reasonably well. Still, nobody's there.

The Dungeon Crawl Test server was where I was actually testing the Dungeon Crawl idea, which was completely custom and never finished. It saw a lot of different things though because it was ultimately a test server and I do a lot of experimenting. Most of that work found its way into Discordant Whisper in one form or another.
It is so named because that's what it has always been and I didn't want existing players to have to hunt it down in the list after a name change. Oddly enough, Discordant Whisper was named for a PvP idea that never saw the light of day.

Also, just to be clear, DW wasn't taken down and replaced. Akkadius was kind enough to provide reliable hosting for the test server so I had them both up at the same time.
DW was taken down because it was perpetually empty or < 2 at peak times and I needed a test server.

DW was a spin on classic, it just ended up being too heavy-handed. This is also a spin on classic but instead of trying to manipulate the existing content into a particular idea, I wanted to make that existing content meaningful on its own. Have you looked at the quests svn lately? It's full of people's hard work and I doubt most of them see any action even on a server like p1999. We didn't have much use for them when I was on live at that time either.

I think it's nice to get some str gear and have a visible, if not minor, increase in my melee damage, or a single piece of int gear raising my necro's dots by a point or two. Getting the SBS off the trainer was more meaningful knowing that the shield AC was going toward bash damage, etc. There are a lot of mechanics at work that you're ignoring. It IS easier to solo because your stats do something, even in small amounts, and reasonable equipment is available at lower levels if you're diligent. The bonus loot adds diversity and is competitive with natural drops. Most of that depends on the expansion the mob existed in. I tried to balance the curve so that it worked with luclin bosses and classic bosses alike. The point is that we can't artificially inflate drops while trying to make old quests and items relevant.
I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but last I checked ball-bearings were pretty cool.

My suspicion is that you didn't play on the server long enough to really see how it worked. That's fine, maybe it's not your thing. I enjoy purely custom work as well as the nostalgia of classic. That's why DW went down, I'm still working on those ideas, but in the mean time I'm having fun with this server.

I don't really know what you're upset about at this point. Basically, I took down a server nobody was playing on so some friends and I could enjoy a new twist on classic EQ, hopefully with some like-minded strangers.

If I had a place to put DW, I would keep it up forever, and it's safely backed up, ready to be deployed the moment I start to miss it, but it was my first server and saw over 2 years of life.
I hate the idea of making all those characters unavailable for people, but there just wasn't enough interest.

[phorest]

This server is tons of fun! It's like regular legit eq, but -

No corpse runs.

Soul binders will port you to a few select areas. Once you speak to a new soul binder in a city besides your start city, you are flagged as being able to transport to that city via soul binder as well.

Awesome loot system that is like regular legit, but, each named / boss mob has a 10% of dropping bonus items! And regular mobs (starting at level 1) have a 1% chance of dropping a bonus or uncommon item. These arent overpowering items, just bonus item that are in tune with the level of mob.

Stats matter! more than regular eq. STR/DEX make an effect on melee attacks etc etc. Much more so than regular servers. if you focus on getting a specific stat up, you see a significant change.

Low end trade skill items have minor stats. For example. a Raw silk head band has +1int/+1cha, not outstanding, but it makes tradeskills worth doing.

Well, there it is in a large nutshell.
see you there!
-Blasticus

[Tabasco]

It's been nice to see people grouping on here. The community is still pretty small, but dedicated and friendly.

I've updated some more tailoring and blacksmithing recipes, fixed some minor loot issues, and most recently launched the level 51 quest.

Levels past 50 will be done purely by quests with no experience grind. As people work toward that we'll probably adjust some AA requirements to get a better pool of usable abilities.

Thanks to everyone who's helped us test and work out some of the kinks!

[notknowing]

Just wanted to say I've been really enjoying this server. The fact that the random loot is rare and perfectly scaled. Makes it much more satisfying compared to some random loot servers where you get a ton of high end items at the low lvls quick. And of course the stat system is quite a nice change for each class. I highly recommend this server to any new comers who are curious. It's a nice balance between the legit slow servers and the ultra high end item custom ones.

[Tabasco]

A lot has happened in the past few months.

We've tagged hundreds of new bosses, which are now identified with a tag indicating their approximate difficulty.

A number of convenience commands have been added for players. Type !help in game for a complete list. Members of the Adventurer's Guild can use commands like !banker and !merchant, and commands like !scribespells and !traindiscs are available to all.

There is an achievement framework in place for additional rewards as you accumulate kills and waypoints. Several other achievement types are planned.

Augs now have a chance to drop off of bosses of any level. They are rare but can be extremely powerful. Some augs have click effects which work while slotted. Basic augs scale with boss level, but spell gems scale with player level.
(See: http://dungeoncrawl.us.to/eq/forums/...php?f=10&t=141 )

Travel is done through soulbinders and discovered waypoints.
( http://dungeoncrawl.us.to/eq/forums/....php?f=10&t=87 )

Numerous tradeskill types have been buffed. There's still a bit of a gap in the middle but lower and higher end tradeskills will be much better than before.
We also have new fletching recipes for arrows with proc effects.
(Thanks to Nenelan for the tradeskill work!)

Levels over 50 are done by quest. At this point we're up to 54 with more to come. AA level requirements have been reduced so AA's up to about 66 are available at this point.

We're slowly adding new camps around the world for better leveling progression and access to boss and named mobs.
The idea is to add flavor to the old world and then start adding custom branches. Some of this is already in place, but it's not nearly as thorough as we would like.

There is an auction house available on the website that can link your login account to a Dungeon Crawl forum account and allow you to buy and sell without being logged into the game. The process is secure and only requires that a forum account be set up on the website. From there you initiate a request and then confirm it in-game.
Auction house representatives will take items and coin and you can redeem items, iventory, and money at any time.
It uses in-game currency only.

We have a number of regular players who would love to see some new faces and start cracking harder raids, so stop in and give it a try.

http://dungeoncrawl.us.to

[Akkadius]

Not to mention you are powered by Akkadian Hosting!

Nice work Tabasco.

[Tabasco]

Thanks, and thanks for the host!

[Tabasco]

I've opened up IP restrictions. Boxing is allowed on a trial basis, but at the rate I do things it will most likely end up being permanent.
If you haven't visited in a while, drop by. Much has changed.

[Zzasikar]

This server is a lot of fun.

Its highlights for me:

- No hub zone: Your character starts in its home city. A lot of people might sigh at the prospect at having to walk everywhere but because of soulbinders providing teleportation to one another after they've been hailed(and there are a lot more than live - at least one every other zone) you only have to make the trek to a lot of places once which is enough to be nostalgic but doesn't end up getting monotonous. And what to do while walking from one place to another? That brings me to my next point.

- Boss mobs: They're everywhere. While exploring a zone you will likely stumble over at least a few of them without even trying. The owner has taken the time to flag so many mobs for the random loot and you can both easily differentiate a boss mob from a regular mob and judge how hard the it is both from con (obviously) and the difficulty indicator which is underneath the name of every single one. I cannot express how awesome this is.

- Random loot: I feel the word random is a little disconcerting though. Items have been painstakingly flagged so that you get level appropriate items from the boss mobs you get loot from. And while you can get really cool stuff from even lower level mobs such as augments, mounts, illusion items (and other clickies) among other goodies, chances are you will not get an item drop which will make you ridiculously overpowered for your level thus ruining the leveling experience. Every zone has the possibility of dropping useful loot with no exceptions due to these mobs and even non-boss mobs have a small chance of dropping a piece which means you can hunt wherever you please and not feel bad that you're potentially missing out.

- Extra stat effects: Every single point of a stat you gain you will be able to see a visible improvement in your characters' damage, resilience, pet etc. Every stat has some use (with the exception of the opposing casting stat to your class to my knowledge) and there is a guide to them on the forums. With this in effect it really feels like your character is progressing with every single minor upgrade you get.

-Auction house: So easy to buy and sell items using this system and it now works on the in-game browser on the Underfoot client which is really convenient. Some very nice people seem to put up a lot of nice items for fairly cheap to help people who need/want a little help getting started too.

-Achievements: There are only a few at the moment but there are apparently more in the works. A few cool little bonuses while leveling up is nice and there is a lot of potential for even more interesting achievements down the line.

-Leveling quests: Levels after 50 are earned through quests. Each of the quests is quite different and sends you off doing a bunch of interesting things in zones you may not have previously experienced much of. It's incredibly satisfying completing one of these quests and makes you feel like you've really accomplished something rather than just another one of your average 'dings'.

-Friendly people: Haven't met a single person on the server that hasn't been happy to help me out in some way if asked or wasn't up to just chat about the server. Really great and mature folks.

-Classic hybrid: It's different enough to hook you with some really well thought out, interesting features but if you take away those features you're left with the good old EQ everyone knows and loves complete with Kunark,Velious, Luclin, LoY and some of the planar zones.

If any or all of this appeals to you, please come and give it a crack. The amount of work that has gone into it must be immense and I really doubt you will be disappointed. I certainly wasn't!

[Tabasco]

We just added a new twist on the boss loot system. I'm still fleshing it out and adding detail, but the fundamentals work.

The core system relies on tagging existing named mobs. While we've been very liberal with that classification, distribution is still imperfect. To that end I've added or complemented a number of camps in various regions with more regular mobs and additional named, but that process is slow and I'd rather custom boss areas be real encounters and not just slightly higher level tank and spank NPC's.

The way it works now is that after you kill ANY spawn in the game it has a small but reasonable probability of being a 'boss' on the next respawn. So if you're killing bears in a forest, you have a chance of spawning a named bear that is slightly stronger and drops out of a level appropriate boss table.
It doesn't matter where you fight or what you fight, you now have the opportunity to encounter random bosses that drop sensible loot.
I'm still doing some tweaking, but so far play testing has proven to be very satisfying.

I've also set up Lesson of the Devoted as a persistent kill achievement reward so as you work your way up the kill achievement ranks you can expedite your leveling a bit.

[c0ncrete]

saw some of these dynamic bosses while poking around in ill omen, feerrott, and rathe mountains. i haven't been on a great deal, but i thoroughly enjoy what you've done.

[Tabasco]

Originally Posted by c0ncrete

saw some of these dynamic bosses while poking around in ill omen, feerrott, and rathe mountains. i haven't been on a great deal, but i thoroughly enjoy what you've done.

I'm glad you're enjoying it. I tend to focus on global mechanics and only stop to do real content when I'm satisfied with the overall state of things. This doesn't happen very often or for long, but I'm not unhappy with the result.

We do have pockets of custom content but I can't bring myself to just grind something out unless it's inspiring or special in some way. I'm really fond of some of the 50+ quests for those reasons. I just need to spread that out across levels so people don't have to wait so long to find it.
Most critique I hear relates to the exp rate, but I think the journey is as important as the end-game, if not more so.

In other news, we have an automatic hotzone rotation going.
There are 28 hotzones at any given time and they cycle every 6 hours, so there is a complete weekly rotation. Elligible zones are loosely scored by level range and the script keeps 4 zones per level range at the moment. The server doesn't have to restart for it to take effect and neither does the zone.