As title suggests, I am about ready to jump back in... With a new TLP on the horizon, I might wait. For me, my ideal scenario to come back and play "Classic EQ" is a PVP server, hear me out. This is something we haven't ACTUALLY seen since early 2000s. "Classic EQ" has been repeated the last few years, and it's basically the modern experience at this point. Let's take it back to something classic and fresh....and keep the Mischief loot rules
I remember there was this big lobbying campaign from a small group of PvP advocates who scheduled an event to show support for PvP on a server, even made a video promotion and then on the day of the event the only people that showed up were the small group and their army of boxes. EQ and PvP dont mix anymore and the best you can hope for is maybe a special event PvP server that shuts down after a few months. You only think you want PvP until the single hardcore guild that rushes to max level and can massively recruit and runs the server killing you repeatedly and blocking you from important quests and other content or the army of boxers that will use hack and cheat programs to own you until you go back to playing on the most recent non pvp TLP server again or quit altogether, .
That's true, the hacks would be hell and might require a police force (if even considered viable). Everything else, players already deal with, like epic bottlenecks being swarmed for months. Mischief loot rules would alleviate some of the pain, like being killed over and over trying to reach X camp (when any camp can drop X loot), and would encourage players to similarly form their own alliances. I think it would be good fun, but the hacks would definitely put a damper on things depending on how rampant they were used. Overall, it might not be too bad.
There might need to be a few balance tweaks like: Player => Player DD spell damage reduced by 30%; Player => Player Blind duration reduced by 70%; Player => Player Mez effect reduced by 70% Player => Player Stun duration reduced by 50%. Player Pet => Player damage reduced by 30% This would be a good starting point presuming we had a way to keep hacking minimized
Can't post about wanting to play the game differently than others in here. I am all for a PvP server too though. A PvP server with Free-trade & AoC's would be a fun time.
It is not impossible for there to be a PvP TLP - however the chances of it happening are 100% dependent upon "enough" PvP players actually showing they are interested in doing this - and that means 1,000+ players in my personal estimate - enough to make a new PvP TLP at least have a chance at making Darkpaw enough money to cover their costs & make some profit from it. For the past 5 years that just has not happened and I would say the chances of it happening get lower every single year, at the peak of past efforts there were maybe 30 people who bothered to make any effort, far too few to even consider the idea. I still think the best chance EQ has of ever seeing any form of PvP being played is a "Huttball" type x-server Instanced Sports arena match. A "Scenario" based PVP fixed-duration team vs team matches rather than any form of Open-World PvP server - if that used a reworked version of the shroud system - could be fun and would be one of the most straightforward ways for EQ to provide "balanced" PvP content since you could engineer the shrouds with PvP only abilities far more easily than messing with the player-spell/ability system.
Modifying Player to Player abilities would be only a few extra lines of code. An experienced dev could write this in 15 minutes and create a new era of EQ PVP.
I think the correct answer to you would be "you're wrong", but I am not an EQ Coder or Developer tasked with spell design and I have never worked on any game let alone one that is over 20 years old so take this for what it is worth - just an opinion. However, Ngreth the lead dev has gone on record at least once to say there is no plan for the team to consider changing spells to suit a PvP server, of course if 1,000 PvP maniacs log into Zek tomorrow to demand a PVP TLP you could be in luck, but the chnaces of that happening are as close to zero as it can get without actually being zero. How many games have you worked on?
People complain about balance all the time in the game and when it comes to pvp you have classes that can quickly kill multiple players if not entire groups while others that can't do any pvp on their own.
I help balance for player-run emulators, and my friends are developers. We play an equally old and retired game, Asheron's Call where PVP is a big part of the community still. I help balance PVP mechanics through testing and my friends code it in. The game is written in C#, Python, and I'm not sure what else, but I think it is similar here
Wanting PVP in EQ is the equivalent of buying a high mileage Ferrari to get groceries. Not only is it impractical, it's a dead on arrival.
Neither C# nor Python existed as commercial products when EQ's engine was written. Python does not scale well to server applications of this size. C# was an in-house closed-source Microsoft product until its public open-source release in 2004. The engine for the original Asheron's Call has C# code in it because it was developed by... wait for it... Microsoft. In other words, you have no clue what you're talking about.
This is a great answer, thanks. It is a shame that EQ has no shot at pvp balance because it would make the game so much more interesting for a decent chunk of their players.
I actually logged in zek with 6 accounts to support the pvp and if there where 100 people in there it would have been amazing
