Hey all,
I'd like to put together a server but before I start i'd like to mention I have no hosting or any other team members to help do this. I've ran a few small servers in the past, EQLite and Age of Kunark, but maintaining a server that can host more than 20 players by yourself is a bit of a nightmare money and time wise. My main skills are development, database work and from my dabbling with eqemu hosting and of course playing EQ and I would really like to see this idea go somewhere. If you can help out with hosting or spawning or gming or anything to get this going that'd be great.
The Idea
Something for everyone
From testing with EQLite I have been able to get EQEmu running significantly better on Netbooks with just a basic 3g dongle running the SoF client and old world models (thanks to scary for the hints and testing with this).
The Content
I love Lore and from Age of Kunark and segments of EQLite I have been able to pull out several of the stories from EQLive and expand on them and or utilise some of the specific fanfiction (prophecy of trakanon and such) as well as EQRPG. Now there is alot of content that players will never have heared of even if they have played EQLive for 10 years. This gives us a great base for fleshing out a full world that is true to EQ's story line and gives players a completely new way of looking at Norrath.
The Progression
Having max level 30 on EQLite really didn't seem to effect players that much, it was a great way of controlling content and the hardware requirements for hosting the server. It also leaves plenty of room for content by content progression with functioning AA. This is a fantastic way for the Devs to be fleshing out other content while players are segmented in the world.
The World
A custom content server based 500 years in the past will allow players to replay EQ but with legitimate lore that will open up whole new sections of history of the EQ world that they may have only stumbled on Live or through TGC.
Over time we could expand on this until eventually we reached modern day, expanding our levels from level 20-30-35-40 and so on.
So in between somewhere we'd take the route of EQOA-Frontiers and unlock sections of Odus as Erud crosses from Qeynos
Supporting Roleplayers
I believe having a lore driven server like this would bring in a friendly crowd and help make this server successful. Events would have more meaning and it would give players other things to do than trash through experience and items which is inevitably a losing game for the developers.
Breaking down the job
What we'd need
* Someone to run the hosting side of things and find a good way of funding it via the community
* A design team
* A team of spawners and developers
* A QA team of class and race testers, PVE and PVP
* A live Events team to help the process of time in the game world appear real to the players
* The GM team to help with petitions, bug reports and player support
There's still alot more to discuss and as you can imagine this is just my initial thoughts, but I think between all the servers that are currently running solo we could put together a good coallition together to help make something along this line a reality. I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas!
Mixxit