Varlyndria Server - Coming Jan 2019
 

https://i.imgur.com/niZdUoy.png

Greetings everybody,

I have been developing a new Varlyndria server for well over 3 months now and it will be available to play in January of 2019 by the end of this week.

OFFICIAL FEATURES ADDED TO THE SERVER SO FAR
• ROF2 client only.
• Level 50 cap because it fits well with this server, as well as a custom AA system. (more info below)
• All equipment of level 50+ has been changed to level 50 rec/req.
• No Bots or Mercenaries this time. They would defeat the purpose of the class pets I made.
• Custom NPCs added and some custom quests. This is a work in progress and more will be added as the server grows.
• There is an NPC that will fix stuck characters in New Sarith. He'll send every one of your toons to Plane of Knowledge. Very easy to use and works great.
• 2 boxing allowed but only 1 character online per account. Donation Tier 1+ allows max of 4 accounts per IP.
• Shared Bank is working fine because you can't be online with 2 characters of the same account.
• Very fair and user friendly donation tier system. NPCs handle pretty much everything account wide.
• No Class Path system this time. I have decided to go with a new vision with this server that offers even more fantasy without locking you up.
• Spells, Songs, and Discs, are now purchased from custom vendors.
• The old Spell, Song, and Disc vendors have been removed.
• Spells, Songs, and Discs, now cost far more platinum to purchase.
• Obtaining money will be important to progress your character.
• There are 16 spell categories that can now be purchased. (See class cards)
• The new hub zone (Sarith, City of Tides) has a portal master that will get players to various main player-friendly locations.
https://i.servimg.com/u/f40/20/00/67/85/new_sa10.png
• Custom locations that sell Spells, Songs, and Discs, are designed to toss you into the fantasy of that theme.
https://i.servimg.com/u/f40/20/00/67/85/diseas11.png
• All 16 Classes have a much larger variety of spells and abilities they can use now, but there are a lot of restrictions to keep class identity.
• All spells, songs, tomes, etc, have been changed to No Trade. This is to prevent a huge amount of money abuse.
• A lot of changes to spells have been made and many new spells have been added to the game. You will immediately notice if you're an EQ veteran.
• Class Cards (Details on Affinity Levels) have been added to the forums. This is a level penalty system -- Higher numbers are bad. Low are good.
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/5...ass%20Card.png
• Almost all abilities are now very fast casting but have longer cool downs. Bard songs have remained unchanged and they can twist.
• Bards can use Disciplines from level 1 now to give them some staying power as a fighter if they so choose to purchase them.
• Bards use Disciplines to summon pets now starting with their first pet at level 13.
• All classes can use pets and have various level penalties based on class.
• There are over 1200 custom pet spells (Including Ranks) distributed over the 16 classes.
• Players who prefer to go petless can get a strong affinity buff like fire, water, etc.. that procs a strong unresistable nuke.
• The nuke has a chance to go off when you fight in melee combat, fire/throw a ranged weapon, use a harmful discipline, or cast a harmful spell.
• All petless buffs (Lone Wolf) will destroy your pet with reclaim energy, and casting a pet will remove any Lone Wolf buff that you have on you.
• Players can progress through more difficult PEQ content solo/group with the Blessing of the Tides system.
• To gain ranks of this persist-after-death buff, players need to speak to the Keeper of the Tides in Sarith City.
https://i.servimg.com/u/f40/20/00/67/85/keeper10.png
• The Keeper of the Tides will provide you and your pet 1 rank of Blessing of the Tides for every 50 total ability scores you gain beyond 600.
• Ability Scores are: STR, DEX, AGI, STA, INT, WIS, CHA (The 7 main stats)
• AGI and Heroic AGI have been nerfed in their evasion and dodge. Points of AGI still count for Blessing of the Tides so it's always useful.
• Custom AA system that uses AAs from Serpents Spine down. All of the character sheets look very good with no buggy "unknown" AA's or any of that.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...77/unknown.png
• Players can get AA points at level 1 and up by killing creatures. The chance to gain a point is 1% per level per kill. This works in groups and solo.
• All AAs can be purchased with the level cap at 50. Levels changed on thousands of AAs.
• The NPCs killed to have a chance at gaining an AA point have to be your level or higher.
• Dria, the Wise will raise your 7 main ability scores even further for AA points, so your blessing of tides buff gets stronger and stronger.

What's the over/under on longevity this time? I could use some extra cash. Anyone got odds?

I want to like your servers. But they are never out long enough. Great ideas, no follow through or duration.

Eriviyn was given to another dev after I left. That was when my life was in a bad place and I didn't have time to work on it any longer. I am in a very comfortable place now and have time to work on Varlyndria. My goal is to keep the server going for a very long time. The server is also very automated so it doesn't demand too much of my time with say stuck characters and such. I made sure to make it easier on both the player and myself this time around.

I loved Eriviyn when you were running it. I'm happy to hear that you're in a good place now, and I look forward to seeing everything you come up with for your new server. Good luck!

Valyndria
 

Eriviyn was my favorite server. I am super excited to try this out. Trying to wrap my head around the class cards and affinities, can't wait to see how that translates to in game abilities. Sleepless weekends incoming.

Can't wait to try this out, Drak

Do we have an estimated launch date better than "Jan?"

Varlyndria will be getting a sneak peak tonight around 7 MST or so. Be there. If things go smooth I may go ahead and launch with what I have so far and we'll go from there. Keep up to date on the Varlyndria discord. Click my sig for more info on that.

Had a rough start due to zone server issues but things are fixed now. Come play and have fun.

I was so excited for this server. The past servers have been a blast.. until a certain point. Both Varly 1 and eryvien. I figured that whats we were getting back into. When I seen this page pop up, I was like fuck ya, Varlyndria is back on the menu.

Until I actually read the post and remembered the worse parts of the past iterations. In your top 10 bullets, 2 of them are focused on donations. I thought, alright sure, whatever. First log in, drop into PoK, looking good. Go to the first "hub" zone, at the landing area from the zone in, a giant swarm of "donor" mounts. Walking up to the city to where your Tides buffer is, the road all the way is flanked by your different tiers of donor toys. Hell, you even have a option on your porter to take you straight to the donor area...

This is what led to the downfall of your previous servers IMO. Greed, trying to wring as much money out of your players as possible. The ideas and concepts you had behind them were amazing, but allowing people to donate for unlimited power only leaves you with those who donated for the unlimited power. Nobody else could hold a candle to them.

While there is obviously some tuning to be done on the server itself, since it was just released, the one thing that is going to drive people away from this server is the blatant attempts at trying to squeeze as much cash as you can out of your playerbase.

You said you spent the last couple of months developing the server, however
it feels like it was spent developing options for donating.

Edit: As I was writing this, you moved the donor area away from the main hub. However, the point still stands.

I agree with you completely, I put those NPCs there for easy access orginally, but I can see that they were rather intrusive and that's why I decided to move them into an area of their own. Donations are always helpful, but I did not spend the time and passion on this project just for that. I am a big gamer myself, and I enjoy EQ a lot. That's also one of the major reasons I didn't make the donation system P2W. Varlyndria is a little bumpy right now with some balance issues with melee classes at the start, but I will be making some solid changes to help out with that. I really do appreciate the feedback. I hope to see you back online and having some fun once this all smooths out.



EDITED:

MAJOR QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES AND AID TO MELEE CLASSES

• The Melee Damage of all weapons on the server has been increased by 100%.
• The AC of all items on the server has been increased by 100%.
• Items that give AC now give an extra bonus of + 2 HP per point of AC for all items on the server. Example 50 AC = 100 extra HP.
• All spell costs have been reduced by 100%
The AGI changes I did to the source to prevent being invincible had a very negative effect on overall protection. These changes will make you far less squishier.
Melee will also be competitive with pet users now, dealing far stronger damage.

Having played all night i'd just like to say that people should give this a fair shake. The donation thing is a sore point for a lot of people but the npc's have already been moved, and more importantly the server is very fun. It's not perfectly stable, but this was day one.

The class system looks VERY interesting the further in I go and the adjustments just made to melee classes is going to help a lot. Also lower spell prices.

Don't let that first night entirely turn you away. There's something special here coming together. Just my two cents.

Varlyndria is now available to all players. Remember this is a work in progress and many things are going to be added to it. Enjoy and have fun.

1st night fun
 

Played until 11:00pm PST, had a blast. Having 18 people in discord chomping at the bit to get going created a fun buzz.

I played an Enchanter to level 10, was a pretty smooth leveling experience. My biggest gripe was the mana regen was so slow I had to med a bunch but that was on me, there is a buffer in the hub that I just forgot about who gives clarity. The fun of learning a new server.

Looking forward to playing this weekend. It is very different than the previous servers and I am curious to see how that plays out.

Things I wish I had known when I started:
First thing in the hub is talk to the guy standing in the cart next to where you zone in. Get the axe to chop trees and then right click on it while standing at a tree to damage the tree. Start with weak trees and work your way up (the damage increases over time). Don't just equip it and auto attack... This will get you cash for spells and gear and buffs.
Group while chopping trees (everyone gets each group members wood :oops:)
Get the 10pp buffs from the dragon who roams just inside the front gate.
(Caster) Gear vendors are to the left of the Tide Buff guy as you enter the gates in the first door on the right. Can get armor and upgraded weapons. The CTRL-F pathing for this was a little wonky (went down into the water and up under the room)
In Field of Bone, the scorpions drop a carapace that the quest woman next to the logging guy will pay ~220pp each. Good way to get money for gear and spell upgrades.

I am glad you're having fun. :) That NPC was bugged and was giving too much money. I hotfixed her this morning to give 1.5 to 3 plat per shell turned in. Down from 15 to 30 plat. That was too many zeroes when I was half-asleep at the keyboard.

Oh god, not again.

See y'all in 2 weeks.

Why would I pay to play, errrr, donate, so you can shut the server down in a month or two?

I'll donate to EZ, or for the login server, or for an established server. Stick around for two years and we'll talk.

Eriviyn was one of my favorite servers, was sad to see it go. so i hope this server stick around i put in alot of work before just for it to die :( so looking forward to this.

Varlyndria is now running on a fast amazon VPS and the really bad lag has been completely dealt with. I am working on making this place as great as I can and I have new content on the way. Come join us on Discord by clicking my signature. Have fun.

like sanctuary, great ideas and great work/quality mired by the toxic attitude and constant abrupt changes in direction offered by the owner of the server.

how long will this iteration be around?

You might earn back some goodwill by giving previous donors some credits on the server. You've burned some of us numerous times. You're a very talented developer who makes very good servers but you've fooled me far more than the one time I give most people.

https://i.imgur.com/LqJqMcO.png

More content coming soon.

Good Luck
 

Will always love, adore, and miss Eriviyn. Good luck with this project, it was just wasn't my jam.

I do appreciate the compliment and I am sorry for the past servers going belly up. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had a lot of problems when I was younger and in-experienced in EQemu. Not to mention RL problems. You have a nice idea about credit to past donators, however, adding such a thing would be difficult as I don't want to share personal information on the website. I could however add the names of the characters possibly if I can find the documentation on my old computer.

I don't make these servers to just run off and quit them. As you can see, I have put hours of work into this new server and it's growing pretty fast. I want to keep things going and having more control with little stress in my life will help with that.

Zemus, this new project is in its infancy and will get better. I created that server you love and miss. I can always turn the new Varlyndria into the parts of Eriviyn you enjoyed. What do you miss about Eriviyn?

Thank you to everybody who helped in the past. This is for you guys.

https://i.imgur.com/hn5URad.png

It is sad that you only use EQEmu as a piggybank you can break open every couple of years because even I enjoyed the original iteration of this project (and donated for that matter). The bolded statement is just funny when you read the other posts in this thread. Such an obvious money grab after you have upped and left so many times and your half-hearted attempts to placate people in this thread just enough so they will donate more is just slimy man.

I think if you were serious you would make a server with no donation rewards.

I appreciate what you did in the past. Come on over and talk to me. Varlyndria is here if you want to play.

"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

So, over the years (2012+) you have created several servers.
From Varlyndria, to Ascension, to Eriviyn, to Varlyndria again.
The previous 3 renditions lasted 5 months, 3 months, and 2-3 months respectively.
During this time, you not only had several mental overloads and banned people, but you also made nearly $20,000 in the first month of one of your servers (the one that had a $660 Donator tier).
This all followed by and surrounded with you going incognito on your 'oslander' account to shit on Akkadius and other peoples' servers/ideas simply to promote your own.
Players have continued to support you and give you chance after chance, but when they voice their opinions in a way that is displeasing to you, they are simply banned/kicked/muted in to oblivion so no one care hear their complaints.
I believe you think you have solid ideas and know what you are doing to an extent, but you do not have the trust of most of the community, aside from loyal basement dwellers and previous donators eager to empty their wallets at your feet.

Just so none of what I said is taken to be "flaming" or "slander", here is a list links to various threads outlining the things you have said and done, as well as the longevity of your projects and the outrage of players regarding your greedy habits.

http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/sho...954#post223954
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=37219
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/sho...7&postcount=19
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=35779
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=37242

Here's you talking to yourself:
https://i.imgur.com/Y3dym4v.png

Thanks, just my 2cp.

Gosh, when I saw all these donate buttons all over these server sites, I didn't realize some might be raking it in like that. My wallet is definately skeptical of what's real and what's not around all of this. It was only 15 a month to play on the daybreak servers for complete content. wow

Are these numbers legit???
I was under impression that if maybe 20 people will give you $10 each you can consider this a success. People REALLY spent THAT MUCH???
I am genuinely shocked.

Daybreak money goes directly to Russia where it's used to corrupt our Great American Way of Life. Money donated to servers stays in America, going to great corporations like McDonald's, Pizza Hut and Wal-Mart, home of the 48 pack of Hot Pockets.

You... you're not a Trump supporter are you?

I'm just getting started but the server seems fun and pretty well done so far. I haven't played one of Drak's servers since Eriviyn but loved it as well and I also donated there bc it was well worth my time. I dont have a post history here really but im Citidal, played on a few different Emu servers/P99 and mostly high end guilds on the TLP servers. Anyone on the fence I would reccomend giving this server a shot, the community is really helpful as well so far with questions and just chatting.

This is my favorite server and I would donate ten thousand dollars if I could.

Dont listen to these haters. Drakiyth is the man and 100% trust worthy as ever before!

havent played any of the other iterations of servers dak has made, and i wanted to hold off a week before commenting on this to see what its all about.

overall the server really is great, population seems to be picking up every day and dak is doing a nice job handling things all on his own.

there is not too much custom content, with things being added every couple of days and hopefully it will continue this trend.

really fun overall and i recommend it to folks to try out, i really hope the server stays around and it doesnt turn out that this server op is not another sanctuary server situation

I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned Sanctuary in a discussion about "donations." Not sure if it was Zerjz or the new guy that set them, but wTf. Bear in mind if you have a peek, these are monthly rates. Not one time donations.

Sadly, he's got 2-3 sadboys pumping money in his pocket routinely. 2-3, which is the population of the server.

I just want to let everybody know that Varlyndria is doing very well and we are seeing a large increase in players every day. I have done a great deal of work to make sure the server is a fun experience from start to finish. Some of the main features include:

- Added well over 100+ zones to teleport to that bypass lockouts.
- Added a lottery system.
- Added more quests.
- Added caravans for quests so it's easy to get to.
- Fixed the money system of the server. It's far better now.
- Greatly improved the tides system for solid character progression.
- Lonewolf damage got buffed.
- Armor Class and Resists for non-pet NPCs are no longer an issue with the level cap.
- Added a buffer npc to help players and grant some early tides.
- Added a mana/endurance regen buff NPC to help with downtime and faster killing.
- Added a powerful heal over time for melee classes called Grit.
- You can now hire a level 8 thug pet at level 1 for any class.
- Added more custom zones and a custom raid boss in Tacvi (GoD)
- Added a lot of custom gear to buy or find.
- Changed the augment system to be far better.
- Updated the AA points per kill system and it now gets better as you level up.
- Added a lot of augment slots to gear to fit the new system.
- Added bonus skill damage to certain pieces of gear.
- You can now purchase very expensive powerful augments.
- Added some new spells for certain classes.
- Made bards far better and they now work great with tides.
- Our discord is rapidly growing and has channels to help get started.
- You can read all the other updates on our discord. Too much to list here.

Personally, I do not like it when everything is oversimplified. After all, that's Everquest and not WoW. Beside this, great work.

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/5...a4640~mv2.webp

THE CURSED ISLE

- Talk to the NPC in New Sarith Inner City - Redfeather Refuge
- New custom level 50 zone
- New armor sets
- New augments
- New quests
- 3 New Heart Pounding Bosses for elite players.


Hundreds of other updates since I last posted. Join our discord for more info.