Server ideas and or free hosting if you want it.

[Davood]

Hi Everyone,

I have been insanely busy for the last two years, but now I am "done" with what was keeping me busy, and I have time to do development again.

If people are willing, i'd like to hear some opinions on whether I should proceed with the following options:

1: Continue my munchkin-style server where everything is buyable from merchants and bots are a plenty
2: Bring back my classic server where all classes-races are unlocked and continue trying to differentiate myself from the others
3: Try something new
4: Host servers for other people for free, and provide technical support for the database side of things (I can host two servers with whatever OS / config / ram /etc you need/want)

Personally, i'm leaning towards option 4, it has been hard in the past, as the server developers dissapear from time to time. But when the developers were around, we did good work together, as I am very glad to help troubleshoot database and quest related issues.

I ran "Yearsoftrees" for over a year and a half until the server developer quit and his replacement burned out and eventually nobody was logging into it.

There were a few other servers I ran as well. my own servers i have been running on and off for the last few years, with some regular players poking their heads in to see WTF is up and if I have updated anything.

I have been tossing around the idea of developing something based on .HACK

Up till this week, I have not had time to plan it out - I now have a full plan for what little nibbly bits need to be done to get it to a beta stage.

Essentially, in the ".hack" universe, the game works like this:
You have "hub" areas, and "Chaos gates"
in the hub areas, it is essentially a city area, with no pvp
the chaos gate is like an npc, you say keywords to it, and depending on the combination of keywords, it "randomly" generates an area for you, but other players who use the exact same keywords will go to your area instance

weaved into the keyword system would be special phrases that would be available and only usable by players who have progressed through the "story" portion of the world

what this allows is for massive customization of the areas through scripting tools to generate the quests offline.

I won't get into the technical side of it right now, but I have it designed in pseudocode and I have started creating the offline relational databse that will be used to adminsitrate the generation of the eqemu friendly SQL / db entries and quests for the system to work.

That said, i am not interested in making something that only I will enjoy, much like the ghost towns of my previous server creations (I am the first to admit I was my own favourite customer) that I made as technical demos for myself to practice server maintenance and SQL .

I'd like to either be part of something that isn't being offered yet by the community, or just offer some free hosting to someone who needs it.

So far only "Yearsoftrees" had any traction.. id love for someone to take that project over and fix the bugs and continue the story development - I can prep anyone interested very quickly, as i am familiar with its design technically.

[Caryatis]

That said, i am not interested in making something that only I will enjoy

I say, do what you enjoy and eventually you will win others over. If you try to do something that you think will be popular but doesnt interest you, you will just burn out. Posters here are a tiny subset of the total playerbase so even suggestions here are not necessarily going to win you a large playerbase.

[Davood]

i tried that.my preferences didnt pan out to others

I will try again of course id nobody comes to me.for hosting

[Tabasco]

I agree completely with Caryatis on that, but I've also experienced that I'm in some small minority of masochists when it comes to actually playing the game.
It guess it comes down to not caring what my population is.
Just keep trying, make it perfect.