Classic (Not Progression) Server Rule Set; For the Fans!

Serious questions--Is there any such thing as "objective" analysis of any situation related to the progression servers? Who do you think is providing objective analysis of the situation? What kind of objective data do you think is available? What have other players done to track or present this data? What would "objective" analysis even look like?

Things have been said by people. Other things were said by other people. The statements made were of a certain quality. Then more statements were made in the direction of others, creating yet more statements to be made.

So what would be some tweaks they could do Machen? What could they do to improve a progression or classical server in your opinion? Speak man!

What would be your ideal tweaks?

Tinky TINKER! Your still around hahaha! awesome! I do think many different combos can form a good group. And druids and shamans can definitely run as main heals for grouping.

On darkpaw, I also noticed there were more of certain classes and less of others. That's how it was back in the hey day of everquest as well. And disregarding sheer numbers, there were definitely class balance issues. Everquest did not posses a finely balanced class system. I do not think classes should be restricted, however, it would be cool if they could tweak some things.

Let's be honest. Rangers sucked pretty badly. Warriors weren't very active/fun to play for most people (whether you thought they were bad or good). Let's take rangers as an example.

I. Rangers- When I started EQ in 2000, I played a ranger as my main. After I got to 50 I created a mage, and a druid and leveled them up. Then I played a monk. There really wasn't much of a reason to play Rangers pre-AA. Their bow damage was awful. They could kite (panic animal or agro kiting was the best form), but not nearly as well as druids. They were not considered tanks for groups like warriors (lacking damage mitigation) They were a hybrid class that was not well balanced relative to the other classes. A ranger was not the backbone of any group (tanks/heals/cc), and if all you wanted was dps or snares/roots (ghetto cc), there were better options. They could fit into different things, but as a whole they simply were not as strong as most classes. Could they fit into groups and such? of course, any class could, but were they the 1 choice pre AA? No.

Now, maybe I'm wrong about the fippy server, but I did not see nearly as many rangers as monks, mages, etc.

So why couldn't they tweak imbalances that existed in classic EQ. I can't imagine it would be too hard to tweak ranger's bow damage much like they did to monks fists to fists (a change which was kept in place on darkpaw), or new mage pet damage (which was also retained on fippy). These changes were kept in place because it would have been more work to remove them, but it would be cool to see some changes that were added in to tweak the game. Maybe its not bow damage, maybe its something else.

But how cool would it be to have a progression or classical server that improved on the original game? Or improved on fippy darkpaw? WIth classes, or other things.

I agree Taledar. A monthly fee for server maintenance and supervision would change the whole dynamics of this server. In addition, a monthly fee would make your progression and characters more personal and valuable. People would have to worry about not only their actions but their money invested, which will promote a healthier world environment.

I could spend days writing out ideas, but I think it would be mostly an effort in futility and a waste of time, because Daybreak has basically already made up their minds about what the options will be and they aren't really looking for new, creative input. But here are a few tweaks that as far as I know, no one else has suggested, and things that could maybe actually be done with the current staffing, for a single pve progression server, to build on the Fippy/Vulak experience. Disclaimer--this is mostly stuff focused on guild versus guild raid competition, because that's what interests me personally.


1) Difficulty: Correct the difficulty of the game during the first few expansions by restoring original spells, pets, monk fist tables, and ac soft caps. To make the impact minimal on live, you could make progression only versions of certain spells using the rank 1/2/3 system from later live expansions--for instance, the live version of Ice Comet becomes Ice Comet Rk. ii, while a weaker/ rank 1 version is created for the progression servers only, more in line with what the #'s were in 1999. The rank 2 versions of these early spells would never be available on the new server.

Also, then, take out the melee progression weapon augs as they would in theory no longer be necessary to balance the caster dps.

On things like the monk fists and ac softcaps, I'd personally just apply changes globally, and not worry too much about the impact to live--the practical reality is that on live, tank mercs are so overpowered during those levels that probably no one would even notice the changes anyway, and the actual impact to gameplay would be minimal. (I'm well aware that it is extremely unlikely they will do this, though.)

Also, scale veteran rewards to be appropriate to the expansion era, rather than simply flipping them all on at once. We don't need Armor of Experience or Intensity of the Resolute to skew the difficulty of Gates of Discord encounters.

2) Raid Spawn Camping: For open world, pre-instance mobs, add the exact time the mob will respawn to the systemwide message on death. <SYSTEMWIDE_MESSAGE>: Lord Nagafen has been defeated by a group of hardy adventurers! Please join us in congratulating Throe along with everyone else who participated in this achievement! Look forward to the next appearance of Lord Nagafen on Monday, March 2 at 8:12 P.M.

This will remove the inane necessity for guilds to sit on spawn points for 12 hours at a time in order to compete for a 2 second fight, a situation in which no one really wins no matter who gets the xp message or the loot. (We'd still be able to experience some of the uncertainty on server resets, where no one would know the initial timers, but it wouldn't be a constant aimless time sink for raiding guilds.)

3) Raid Spawn Competition: Declare that all contested raid spawns will be resolved by dps racing, with no GM involvement whatsoever. Brand new PNP for the new server, first to engage does not apply to raid mobs, nor does first in force (whatever that even means.)

3a) Either scale the HP of most open world mobs appropriately for 3-4 guilds' worth of dps fighting it out, or, if possible, make it so that the mobs' hitpoints automatically scale based on the number of players in the zone when the mob is engaged. IE if one 25 person guild shows up to attack Trakanon, then he has his normal 32k hit points. But if there are 150 players in the zone when he is engaged, then he automatically scales up to 180k hit points and the guilds now have some real work before them as they battle it out, instead of an anticlimactic 2 second fight where Trakanon is instantly slaughtered by the combined forces arrayed against him.

3b) Unlikely to be implemented, but would be cool if they scaled the quantity of loot to the force size as well. If 200 players show up to contest the spawn, the size of the pot gets much bigger. Added bonus that it would then become counterproductive to train the enemy force--if you kill them off via training before you engage, you'd end up with less loot than if you go toe to toe in a dps race and win. And it also opens up new diplomacy options, in that there might be times when guilds would want to team up and work together, battle a more difficult version of the encounter cooperatively, and then divvy up the larger rewards.

3c) To help facilitate the dps racing, make all systemwide mobs and related adds immune to memblur effects.

3d) If possible, remove limits or drastically increase the maximum size of a raid, so that guilds could form alliances and fit even huge numbers of players into their dps calculations. This would have potentially great impacts on diplomacy. If one guild gets uppity and doesn't want to play well with the rest of the server, the rest of the server could form a coalition to win the dps races. As it stands that's not really a possibility, because the most you can have in one raid is 70 toons.

4) For pre instanced content, when a boss spawns, design it to kick all players from the zone (including those logged out, so you can't just sit your raid force at character select with a tracker in zone, then everyone logs in for the kill on pop). They already have most of the code in place for this with Vox and Naggy, would just have to change the conditions and add in a mechanism to handle offline players, then apply it to other zones as well.

That way, at the very least, guilds will have to compete to mobilize across the zone to reach the spawn. (Stretch goal: Maybe even throw a few extra surprise mini bosses up along the way, or scale up the hitpoints of the trash near the lair based on force size as well.)

Hirbow. Do you mean a server fee in addition to the $15 subscription, or just the $15? As I recall, it required a $15 subscription last time. I never noticed much of this myself, but a lot of people complained about hacking, guilds fought over raid targets, etc. There will always be some bad guys regardless of fees I think, but I would pay a subscription and hope they adjust some of the things that went wrong with fippy.

A few posts ago I talked about rangers, but there were not very many rogues on darkpaw either. Rogues and Rangers really need AA, and in that classical setting they just arent balanced. I'd really like to see some class tweaks on the prog since monks retained increased h2h, mage's increased pet damage was retained etc. There were far too many of these classes that are simply stronger than others. Classical EQ was not well balanced in terms of classes either, but it got even worse on fippy due to the global changes that were applied to the entire game, and not removed in fippy. Would be nice to see a few buffs to certain classes in progression.

Rather than buffing more classes to make things die even faster than they already do, I would rather them rollback the buffs implemented. Like pets in general and how insane they are at the lower levels.

It's always better to nerf something back in line so you don't have to readjust the stats of mobs in response to buffing everyone else.

Heck, rollback the buffs, and increase the raid stats. There are resources available for fights etc. Make the server more challenging, not less.

I do not think a DPS race would be healthy. Certain guilds would always win, and in effect shut out the smaller guilds. The people who enjoy that play style have been catered to for quite some time. And announcing the spawn times ahead of time would just make it easier for one or two guilds to monopolize the content. I'd rather not hang out with people whose idea of fun depends on ruining other people's play time. That doesn't demonstrate skill, or knowledge or anything besides who can muster the largest zerg force.

I would like to see everyone get a shot. It should come down to whether a guild has the numbers and skill to win the encounter. (As in PvE). I don't think this is such a horrible idea, given that people have attempted to establish rotations which would (if they worked) result in just such a distribution.

Maybe I'm the only one who has seen a guild raid night fall through because there were no targets available.

I understand that some people enjoy the dps race, I don't like it but I can understand it. I believe the format caters to a very small portion of the server population (top guild).
If that's the format that's declared on a new server then this new server is being created to cater to 1 guild. Rumour is that Twisted Legion and EoE are joining forces for the next round and if that's case then any other guild would be foolish to try and compete (I'm assuming Citizen are not going again).
That 1 guild won't find the competition it's looking for so (same as last time for EoE) some of it's members will go looking for and imposing their own form of competition on players that thought pve meant you just had to kill the mob.
How long does the top guild think it can maintain a healthy population on a server like that?
That's less people to buy krono from, less people to sell gear to. No reason to farm plat and a dead /baz.
You don't win EQ by crushing the population of the server you play on, I call it shooting yourself in the foot but until they come out with pills for stupid I guess a few players just aren't going to get it.
This server isn't going to last as long as Fippy or Vulak if it's just a repeat performance. Anybody not in the top guild should do themselves a favor and stay off it to save themselves the frustration.
If it's an option when they become available I may vote for PoP locked in the hope that the "competitives" get bored and leave as they did last time. I certainly wouldn't vote for a server where the top guild dictates the pace of unlocks. Not being spiteful but when they get bored and quit then a server that is at 14 or 15/21 is less attractive than one at PoP.

I just... what?

Your post sounds very defeatist. Was it meant to be that way?

Also, the "casual" players and "hardcore" players are equally needed for a healthy server, so I'm unsure what point you were trying to make other than "I will quit if I can't compete, regardless of playstyle"

I don't think it's defeatist, I'm going off personal experience on previous new servers, competition doesn't just apply to raid targets, for some players it applies to all aspects of the game.
I don't want to see a repeat and I'm stating that there won't be any competition if TL and EoE join forces. It will be 1 guild rules the server.
Those of us on Vulak didn't have a very fun time with EoE, maybe TL were super nice friendly fun guys that got along with everybody?
I'm not sure where you get "I will quit if I can't compete, regardless of playstyle" maybe my English is lousy?
I didn't like the competition, I'd prefer guilds to just focus on raid targets instead of trying to block the progression of the 3-4 guilds that are trying to progress behind them. That better?

Oh, sorry. I took a few intuitive leaps.

If TL/EoE are locking everyone else out of content (either intentionally or unintentionally) and the point of view is not being in that guild/group, then regardless of playstyle, be you hardcore or casual, you aren't able to compete. And I suppose it was less of an actual "I" (you personally) statement, and more of a "everyone should think this if they aren't part of TL/EoE".

Sorry Machen it should read as follows.

<SYSTEMWIDE_MESSAGE>: Lord Nagafen has been defeated by a group of hardy adventurers! Please join us in congratulating Coldplay along with everyone else who participated in this achievement! Look forward to the next appearance of Lord Nagafen on Monday, March 2 at 8:12 P.M.

Well, unfortunately my experience of dps race format has been that the top guild uses this format to block other guilds from experiencing any of the current content. The need to block was so bad than when instanced content came out the top guild were perma-camping the trigger mobs.
That's not healthy competition.
The majority of the server won't be hardcore raiders, my experience was that for the most part it was people that would like to raid but didn't know how.
To give an example we were in Kael and we set up a chain heal rotation. It gets to the shammy and nothing. I look around and our shammy is tanking. I asked why they weren't healing and they said "I have haste!", I said "You're supposed to cast that on the tanks" and the reply was "Why? it's mine.". After the wipe we removed him from the rotation.
Maybe that's an extreme example but the point is that most people are not going to able to handle any form of competition, the best they can hope for is that they are playing an FD class and they have time to see the train coming.

If you want to raid and experience current content then you'll have to app to the top guild. If they don't take you then you'll be sneaking around for scraps.
That's my opinion based on previous experience and that's why it's my opinion that dps race format is going to be bad for the server.
It's also my opinion, once again based on previous experience that the top guild will be enforcing the rules of the new server and that's why I hope they forget about dps racing.
It's my opinion that the server will last longer if players have a choice of which guild they wish to raid with when progressing, not the one option, and unlocking Kunark and Velious with the promise that the top guild would move out of classic for good didn't work either!

I agree with Jezzie on some matters. Either way there is going to be a top guild. Whether its TL or EoE both or whoever. A top guild is a necessary evil, It propels the progression.

I guess it depends on the format of the new server, we certainly needed good raiders to beat the content on the last batch but people objected to the manner in which some server firsts were achieved. Hopefully we'll never see a repeat of that again.
It doesn't have to be an evil though, there's no need to make life miserable for the #2 guild on the server to the point where their members either quit or go back to their old servers. It's not the job of the top guild to crush the "competition" and in the end that kind of action hurts the server (population), hurts the playerbase as a whole (subscriptions) and ultimately hurts the top guild by killing it's recruiting pool!

I absolutely agree with the proposed changes Machen suggested, even to an expansion locked classic server. The one change I'd make is instead of raid bosses announcing when they'll respawn, just completely randomize respawns. Keep the banish on spawn mechanic though, that'd be awesome.

I wouldn't assume that.