Velious Launch (Tradeable Loot, Perma un-nerfed legacy items, 3 box, progression)

[babswheel2]

The EQ Archives server (https://eqarchives.com) is launching the next expansion Velious on Oct 28.

Server Status

• Guilds are currently raiding in Veeshan's Peak.

• Most current raids are open server US time zones into VP

• Imperium - a Euro based raid guild is currently the single largest raid guild on the server.

• Login directly or via TAKP server list.

• Highly engaged Discord community - https://discord.gg/5UcHRZGV

Ruleset

• Progression server based on the TAKP source code.

• New expansions released 6 months after select raid targets in the current expansion have been defeated.

• World configuration (rules, quests, spawn rates, drop rates) follows TAKP database.

• Goal is era accuracy (exceptions noted in custom changes section below)

• Firiona Vie (FV)-style loot rules (also known as Free Trade)

• 3 box limit.

• Player vs Environment (PVE)

• Significant exp boost for 4, 5 & 6 person groups.

Custom Changes to from EQ Era

• /ooc and /auction are server-wide

• Class and Race-based exp penalties have been removed in favor of the January 14, 2001 (Velious Era) producer's letter changes described by Gordon Wrinn

• Miragul's Highway is implemented

• Pre-nerf legacy Items remain in game permanently at adjusted rarity

• Keyrings are enabled

Our goal is to have an enjoyable playing and raiding experience along with understanding that people may not have the same amount of free time available that we had in the early 2000s. Along those lines we also want loot to be more accessible. The server is managed by a group that has been playing EQ and EQ emulators together since Everquest Beta thus we highly value the social aspects of grouping and raiding.

Most recently prior to that we played on P99 and then supported dev efforts with the Firiona Vie Project before starting work on our own server and launching it a few years ago. We were nearly complete with Kunark when TAKP/Quarm dbs were released which greatly sped up our timeline for going live. This server was re-launched in August 2023 with the TAKP database. The EQA world server was joined to the TAKP loginserver (neighboring with TAKP and Project Quarm) on November 27, 2023. We are now here to stay and looking forward to building our community.

[nazwadi]

Hey all! I'm the server operator for EQA. I also wanted to highlight the web tooling I've been working on for EQA which I think are pretty cool.

EQA has its own login server / account registration at https://www.eqarchives.com which allowed me to write character and account tools that provide numerous quality of life features - some features that are unique, some that are implemented by other servers as well.

1. EQA provides self-service character transfer between game (world server) accounts associated with your EQA web account.
2. EQA now provides a single place to search inventory for all characters associated with your EQA web account.
3. The character viewer (found by drilling down from your account list) shows you detailed information about your characters' data, inventory, faction, guild members, skills, spells (including which ones you've scribed), and which items the character discovered as server firsts.
4. The site provides full Allaclone functionality (which I've implemented from scratch) against the actual world server database. I regularly improve this based on player feature requests.
5. Zone pages provide detailed information about fishing, foraging, ground spawns, merchants, spawn points, npcs, as well as both classic and interactive maps with Z-axis filtering.

The app itself is open source and I'd be happy to share on request.

[babswheel2]

The Velious expansion will now go live on Oct 26.

The server population petitioned to release the expansion on Oct 26 to allow for a long 3 to 4 days with some vacation playtime.

[nazwadi]

Update - Velious launch happens tomorrow, 25 October at about 7pm ET.