Starting your own server is definitely a great way to learn how to do it all. But to reiterate what has already been said, there already are many types of servers out there so it will not be easy to make a new successful project that can hold a population for an extended amount of time.
You can make progression really fast and easy, and may attract a good number of players for a short while, but it is hard to retain players that way, as they crank through the easy content and then get bored quickly and leave.
You could make progression really slow, but to do that right without making it boring, you would need lots of content to break up the slow grind/etc. It is difficult to find the perfect mix and to really do it right would take a long time in development before even opening the server at all.
If you really plan to be in this for the long run, and plan to devote endless hours to the project spanning over a year or more, then I suggest making a good roughed out plan before-hand.
If I had to redo my server again from the start, one thing I would do is focus on what ChaosSlayer said and make sure loot is balanced through the entire leveling process and end-game. You don't want players maxing their stats by level 30. I wouldn't even want them to have maxed out stats by 70 (or whatever max level is set to). Maxed stats should be something to strive for through the end-game content, otherwise you are left mostly just being able to increase HP/Mana/End for each following tier. The more types of rewards you can give, the more variety you can give and the easier it is to make meaningful upgrades for later content.
To review some of the existing types of servers:
1. Classic - P99 has this completely covered and it would take years of work to have any chance at competing in this field.
2. Live-Like - PEQ (and also EQTitan) have this covered, and the only way to make any progress in this category would be to continue to expand EQ-Live content in the emu faster than PEQ already does so. This would be quite a challenge since they have a great team already and have made more progress in this category by far than any other team has.
3. Solo Server - There are a couple of servers that fit this category, including Irreverent. I don't know much about this category, but this may be one of the easier categories to break into with a new server. Making a PEQ DB into a solo server could largely be done with a few simple queries to adjust NPC stats and such. Though, I am sure there is still a lot of tweaking required for this.
4. Solo with Bots - I am not sure offhand how many servers exist in this category (if any). This probably wouldn't be an overly challenging type of server to setup with the right queries and settings.
5. Custom - The custom server category has quite a range of server types. Each one is considerably different (though most have certain things in common). If you want to break into this category, you would need to have some innovative ideas to stand out from the rest, and then sync tons of time into it to catch up with the huge amount of content that exists on the current custom servers out there that have been around for years. The nice thing about this category is that the possibilities are endless. There is always room for multiple custom servers, it is just a question of if you can make a server that can compete with the existing ones. This category is probably the most work of all categories, depending on how custom you want to get. But, it is also the most rewarding IMO.
6. Custom with bots - There are a couple of servers in this category, such as THF. This category is very similar to custom without bots. I am not really sure of any major differences that exist between the 2 types.
Sorry, I don't have any solid recommendations on which direction to go. That really depends on you and how devoted you really are to this project idea and what your interests are.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Funkey Monkey
Id like to see an sof/sod server..not one that has it enabled or using 1 or 2 zones but full progression/tasks/raids be it custom or live..That and big stats 100k+ hp..im a stats whore myself  |
If you like SoF/SoD zones, it will probably be a pretty long time before any other server catches up with Storm Haven as far as the number of high quality zones go in that content. We are up to 18 custom zones in SoF+ so far (4 from SoD) and have many more in the works. You can see the list in our custom zone leveling chart here:
http://stormhavenserver.com/mediawik...le=Level_Chart
We plan to release the entire SoD expansion very close to how it is on Live. The rest of the SoF+ content will mostly be fully customized. Kayen is currently working on a new top-end raid zone, and using Solteris for it (looks awesome so far), and he is also working on the second tier of SoD zones which will probably release around the same time. I am currently working on the revamped version of Steamfont Mountains and doing something completely new and unique with it to be announced when it is closer to being completed.
Currently, you can level from 1 to 75 in SoF+ zones and even reach raid quality gear via the new SoD content.
We don't have insane stat gear, because the clients just aren't made for that really. Gear is really only relative to the difficulty of the content anyway, so there isn't really much difference from having 100k hps vs NPCs that hit for 30k or having 10k hps vs npcs that hit for 3k. The only difference is an extra 0 for visual appearance.
What type of server do YOU want?
Linear Mode
