New Server Idea

[gravystain]

I'm a die hard EQ fan and have been following EQMU and all things Everquest since 2008. I've had an idea for an Everquest server for years that I think would create the perfect environment for all us die hard fans. I admit that I'm more of a purist when it comes to Everquest so I don't usually enjoy non classic servers so this idea may not appeal to all but in all my years following EQ servers I've never seen this tried (maybe for a reason). The idea is fairly simple. A NODROP server.

I know this doesn't sound like I'm an Everquest purist and trust me I think that EQ has the greatest economy system of any game ever made. I love farming gear for friends and twinking out alts but sometimes I get the itch to just start fresh again. To start fresh and dungeon grind with fellow adventurers and just get back to the basics of what Everquest truly is. I know the whole argument of "nobody forces you to twink" and I fully agree. I've tried this. I've joined role play guilds, fresh start guilds and tried just playing a solo class by myself. This is about as close to getting that fresh start feel as one can get. Unfortunately it doesn't last long. On popular servers where grouping is viable, its nearly impossible to find a dungeon or group that isn't loaded with at least 1 twink that can keep half the dungeon cleared by himself. I've lost several friends who had never played Everquest to this problem. They start off loving it. They love the struggle, they see how challenging the game is and look forward to exploring this dangerous world. Until about level 10 when I take them to crushbone or blackburrow and they see the same class they are killing reds in seconds without losing health. They form the opinion that the game is just getting gear and mindlessly annihilating mobs over and over until you level with no challenge and realize that the world isn't dangerous at all. Us old school EQ fans know this isn't the case.

I think if a server was made that had all drops from named or "boss mobs" be no drop this would solve so many problems that every established classic EQ server runs into several months after its release.

The economy could still be thriving. I would have ALL trade skill made and non magical items be trade-able. I would also have most "random" drops be trade-able. Things like orc fang earrings, cougar claw earrings, basically anything that cant be camped or dropped from a single mob. This would still allow for a ton of twink options as well as simple upgrade options for non twinks as they make the journey to 60. I know that a lot of these items are insanely good but i don't care how twinked you are in these items. A full cultural armor warrior without regen or haste is going to get thumped. A full Wu's armor monk is still going to want to group. Nobody is going to clear a zone by themselves in these types of items their lives will be much easier and they would make a awesome group member for sure but you wont see them killing reds or have no downtime.

Now I know the argument of "people will find a way to twink" I know this, I've seen how creative people can be. If a necro wants to drag his level 4 rogue friend into guk and camp him a dagger and fbss, that's going to happen. I don't think there's a way around this but as a whole I still don't think this would be that common or ruin anyone's gaming experience. By simply enforcing a no 2 box rule and that if your group or raid did not kill the target, the loot is then FFA. This would keep people from camping items and logging to their alts if they know a rule is in place that anyone can snipe the loot from you if you plan to camp loot it. On the other hand nothing stops you from doing this if you want to, just do so at your own risk.

When you think about it, this is exactly how the game is endgame. Nobody is getting any items via camping fungi tunics over and over for the sale of the item to get gear for their level 60 main. End game EQ forces people to work together to get NODROP items and to earn your gear. The thought of logging into an EQ world where players are working together struggling to survive in Norrath instead of pillaging it over and over for its resources just sounds like so much fun to me.

Maybe I'm a very small minority on this or maybe the only person that feels this way. That's why i made this post! Would anyone else like to see a server like this? Would any of you awesome server developers have any interest in creating a world like this? Let me know what you think!

[DanCanDo]

I've seen the odd server that has ALL items tradeable, with many players liking it.
I used to think just like that way back when I played on Live, everything no drop.
But these days, on these servers, not so sure players are very much in to doing
tradeskills, etc.

[ChaosSlayerZ]

I hate twinks.
But NO DROP is bad for economy and for gear grind.
Ever been in situation when mob drops 3-5 pieces of great gear and they all from classes that are NOT present in your group/raid ?
NO DROP makes its impossible to trade it for something you could use.

BUT, REQUIRED LEVEL is a good option.No more lev 5 twinks in planar armor ;)

Another good thing for economy are ATTUNEABLE items. This will prevent good gear continuously being passed down from player to player diminishing its value as more and more added to the world. It also will prevent devaluing of trade skills. (Back on LIVE in 2004 already, all tradeskills under skill of like 300 were useless, because you could buy better items from players for just a few plat. )

[NostalgiaEQ]

I love the idea and count me in. This will be a feature on my server. I also love the idea that every boss mob's loot is FFA. That means if there are multiple groups camping a spawn everyone can have a shot at looting. Groups will basically be forced to work together on kills because anyone can loot. Or to be a little more nuanced you could make all loot go FFA after 30 seconds. That would help keep people on their toes and also prevent camp looting. We can do a IP limiter where an IP only allows one player to play really easily like p99.

Again I think you are dead on and I can't praise you enough for this idea. It is truly the holy grail but I doubt many people will 'get it'. When the server environment year after year is a positive one instead of a negative one the proof that this idea is correct will be in the pudding. You are very smart.

If you want to collaborate with me (my server/client will be open source) email me at nostalgiaeq@gmail.com.

[Maze_EQ]

I hate twinks.
But NO DROP is bad for economy and for gear grind.
Ever been in situation when mob drops 3-5 pieces of great gear and they all from classes that are NOT present in your group/raid ?
NO DROP makes its impossible to trade it for something you could use.

BUT, REQUIRED LEVEL is a good option.No more lev 5 twinks in planar armor ;)

Another good thing for economy are ATTUNEABLE items. This will prevent good gear continuously being passed down from player to player diminishing its value as more and more added to the world. It also will prevent devaluing of trade skills. (Back on LIVE in 2004 already, all tradeskills under skill of like 300 were useless, because you could buy better items from players for just a few plat. )


On Nagafen's Lair we added Bind on pickup with an option to unattune the item for a cash price.

This was pretty cool seeing as it prevents twinking to a degree except for those who actually can afford it.

That being said, our raid zones were level-locked to prevent a noob from entering and getting all the phats.

[ChaosSlayerZ]

That being said, our raid zones were level-locked to prevent a noob from entering and getting all the phats.

another good point. I remember back on live even NO DROp tag wasn't enough to stop a twink - people were selling loot rights on high end Shadow Knight Sword of Pain and Bard Rapier in high end Velious dungeons (was it Velketor? or CC?) and getting them for their twinks, because they didn't had required level on them.

[gravystain]

My thought to combat this would be to simply have a rule set put in place. If your group kills a mob, its your groups loot. If your guild kills a raid mob, its your guilds loot. Anything outside of that is FFA. If someone wants to sell raid loot to a buyer, I'd encourage 10 other people to go try to pick themselves up some nice raid loot. This should create a lot of risk for buyers and hopefully destroy any market for such transactions.

[NostalgiaEQ]

My thought to combat this would be to simply have a rule set put in place. If your group kills a mob, its your groups loot. If your guild kills a raid mob, its your guilds loot. Anything outside of that is FFA. If someone wants to sell raid loot to a buyer, I'd encourage 10 other people to go try to pick themselves up some nice raid loot. This should create a lot of risk for buyers and hopefully destroy any market for such transactions.

I'm not quite geting this, how can you set rules like that? You could have them written but unless you can set them into the server its no good. The only way to totally mitigate it while keeping things not level restricted is to make every drop FFA. I don't think there is a way to mandate that only group or guild can loot corpses even if you could a twink could just be sitting in group. I think the real answer is FFA looting but that could cause lots of openings for griefing, someone following you around and ninja looting your corpses. Basically then I feel like I would need to open up pvp as another check and balance.

[DanCanDo]

I'm "kind of" confused at what the goal is here for no-drop loot in the first place, no
matter what kind of mob it's on. Corpse's already come with a loot timer lock, which you
can set yourself in rules. Until the timer runs out, it's group only loot. But after that
it's FFA. I have mine set to about 6 minutes.

[N0ctrnl]

Doesn't most everybody have theirs set to about 6 minutes? That's the stock, isn't it?

[DanCanDo]

Doesn't most everybody have theirs set to about 6 minutes? That's the stock, isn't it?
I actually found different timers for different rulesets.
I have a stock db sourced in and ruleset 1 and 2 are different 150/240

[NostalgiaEQ]

I'm a big fan of emergent gameplay but sometimes without a lot of thought from the developers before hand the emergent gameplay can become less fun than the original game. I get tired of hearing people saying "if you don't like pok books then don't use them" or things to that effect. In that example even if I don't use pok books but other people do then I feel bad everytime I don't because I am loosing time, whereas if no one could use pok books travelling by foot could be more fun and exciting.

So in my mind it is the same as no drop. When I played p99 I basically collected enough bone chips a couple weeks to get a full set of wis gear by lvl 20 that would have taken till like lvl 40+ with months if not years of camping rare spawns in the original release. What no-drop does is make it so everyone needs to camp their own gear. Also it makes it so that people who don't need the gear won't camp it. For example as a druid who actually needs the goblin bengazi ring for charm break can't get it because every warrior and rogue is camping it so they can flip it for 10k plat. So a no drop system would just make for a friendlier and more laid back game. You may not envision it yet but I assure you it will.

Right now I'm thinking a good balance would be no-drop on every item with stat boosts and whatnot and change the group only loot window to like 30 seconds to discourage low level twinking. That way they can't log out and log back in with a twink to loot the drop uncontested. But if someone wants to pay money to be in group to loot the drop, there is nothing you could do about that. Unless you want drops to be totally FFA but that opens up a whole nother can of worms that I don't think I could design myself out of.

[DanCanDo]

It really is a individual player preference. Some like the grind, others don't.
The whole "EQ" journey can be doing the content inbetween the bottom
and top, quests, tradeskills, etc., or some don't care for anything except
that "Raid Boss" at the top.

[NostalgiaEQ]

I actually found different timers for different rulesets.
I have a stock db sourced in and ruleset 1 and 2 are different 150/240

What I'm seeing in Rule_values is NPC:corpseunlocktimer and it is set to 150000 (assuming milliseconds so 150s). I don't see a second one.

[DanCanDo]

Not sure what your setup is for editing the tables, but if you can "sort" the name column
in ascending order, then scroll through, but if you have stock db, then there should be
several rulesets, so you would see more than one entry for NPC:corpseunlocktimer
But maybe see if you're only viewing one page of rules ? There may be more.

[gravystain]

By 'rule set' I'm simply referring to a set of rules that all servers should layout at launch. I'm a huge proponent of laying out server rules that help people govern themselves. You or your group kill a mob, you have 3 mins where the loot is locked to your group by default. If the rule is FFA after that time period obviously that person was trying to alt log over or sell the loot to an outside source. 3 mins should be plenty of time for a solo kill to loot an item or a group to roll off and loot it. There shouldn't be any GM petitions or squabbling arguments over such scenarios if the rules are laid out properly.

The only thing i cant find a solution too is what to do when a group member dies and cant loot until rezed or a run back. The surviving group members obviously cant loot and give you the item. I dunno maybe this would have to be chalked up to just being a hardcoreish server.

[NostalgiaEQ]

Thanks dan I will check and make sure I was viewing all in rule_values. I have begun to change all +stat items to no drop! I chopped my item database down to 30k entries from 90k by getting rid of every item added to the db after 2004. Hopefully I'm not missing any old school items that way.

gravy you are really good at thinking these sorts of things through, I'm really inpressed. I'm not a big fan of laying out rules personally. I think that unless you can enforce it consistently there shouldn't be a rule. In general whatever a player CAN do they should have a right to do that. Make things that I don't want people to do very difficult but not "against the rules". For example I set it so my server only allows a person to log one instance of the game per ip address. If they can find a way around that by using mobile internet so they can get 2 boxes up, that is their perogative. There really wouldn't be a way for me to enforce consistently "hey it looks like you are boxing but I can't be sure" you know what I mean? Also I HATE when devs punish people for their own mistakes by making "bug exploitation" against the rules! That is shittyest thing I can imagine to be banned for doing something that was the devs fault for allowing in the code, and that has happened to me before. I am very libertarian
when it comes to these sorts of things lol.


But ya it looks like most drops go ffa after 2.5 mins anyway. But I think that should be shortened to 30 seconds to prevent like you said people trying to sell drops on the ground. Yeh you would miss out if you died but things aren't going to be perfect you have to choose the lesser of two evils when making a game. I think that downside is outweighed by the upside. Mabye I could make it to 1 min before it goes ffa so someone could be rezzed a little more comfortably and still beat the ffa timer. Mabye if someone is afraid of dying they will get a cleric to stand around ready to rez just in case so they don't miss the loot window.

But ya of course I will tell everyone the settings my server has so people are well aware beforehand which is what I'm thinking you are meaning now by saying you are a big proponent of laying out the rules. My server will be open source too so people can even look in the database and see exactly what all the settings are.

[gravystain]

We seem to have the same vision. I've always thought that rule sets should be an overview of things you WONT get in trouble for as opposed to "Here are my rules, please follow them". I think its good that people know that they CAN camp loot for your alts, here are the risks, don't bother reporting anyone that snipes your loot when camp over and its gone. They CAN sell loot rights, don't bother reporting the person who looted it faster than your customer. I think sometimes people forget what Verants reason for the LORE item was. When you think about it, A LOT of the best items in the game are LORE and its not for the reasoning of not wanting people to wear multiple of the same item. LORE is applied to TONS of items that you cant wear multiple of anyways like BP's, legs, cloaks, helms etc. Verant did this so people wouldn't camp items over and over that they didn't need because they obviously already had one. Too me this was just a failed idea that didn't work for them. You can also see that they wanted the game to be played this way eventually by their end game items which are mostly all NO DROP. That's just my thoughts on the whole concept. But I also think its really important to make a variety of items that are not no drop to encourage a healthy economy. With crafted items, soft wicker, blacked alloy chain sets etc.

[NostalgiaEQ]

We seem to have the same vision. I've always thought that rule sets should be an overview of things you WONT get in trouble for as opposed to "Here are my rules, please follow them". I think its good that people know that they CAN camp loot for your alts, here are the risks, don't bother reporting anyone that snipes your loot when camp over and its gone. They CAN sell loot rights, don't bother reporting the person who looted it faster than your customer. I think sometimes people forget what Verants reason for the LORE item was. When you think about it, A LOT of the best items in the game are LORE and its not for the reasoning of not wanting people to wear multiple of the same item. LORE is applied to TONS of items that you cant wear multiple of anyways like BP's, legs, cloaks, helms etc. Verant did this so people wouldn't camp items over and over that they didn't need because they obviously already had one. Too me this was just a failed idea that didn't work for them. You can also see that they wanted the game to be played this way eventually by their end game items which are mostly all NO DROP. That's just my thoughts on the whole concept. But I also think its really important to make a variety of items that are not no drop to encourage a healthy economy. With crafted items, soft wicker, blacked alloy chain sets etc.

Hmm good point, after I change all +stats items to no-drop I will go back to make all player crafted items tradable. So like crafted +stats items will not be no drop. Let me know what else you think should be tradable.

[gravystain]

I actually think a great number of items should be tradebable and I'll give you my reasons. Everquest has a lot of items that I would consider 'random' drops. For example, dervish cutthroat rings. Theres plenty of derv camps and any one of them can drop the rings. Why not add that item to the economy. Barbed Legs and armplates in befallen, they are a less than 1 % drop chance off of random shadow knights. If a person really wanted these items it wouldn't really be realistic to farm them. Things like tentacle whips, random chance from most any terror. Minotaur axes and horns. Theres a ton of stuff that could be put into the economy, most if not all is considered junk. I'd keep anything, no matter how terrible the item is, NODROP if it drops from a specific rare mob and is one of his 2-3 item drops. I could go zone by zone and make a proposed list and send you it if you agree.

As far as people perhaps camping some of these better items to sell....well maybe. I think plat would mostly end up being used in tradeskills and purchasing regents and gems on this server. What incentive does a person have to farm loads of plat so he can buy.....what with it? I envision most of the economy will be trade based on these type of items. Some may want plat.

[NostalgiaEQ]

Wow you weren't bluffing with this idea, you really had this well thought out. So ya I can search an item name in the database but it takes a while. If you could organize a list by the highest stat it adds that would be helpful. So like for example a wisdom list +5 wis items that should be tradable, +4, +3 etc. If it adds to multiple stats then just group it by whatever its highest is. So if an item adds +4 wis and +3 int, group it with the +4 wis items. I can't search by zone so for me what I would need is at minimum the name of the item and if it could be grouped by its highest stat bonus that would be extra helpful.

I trust your judgement but when in doubt I think we should lean towards no drop. Because with so little tradable then there will be extra pressure on every item that we do let be tradable. So even if that item wasn't camped before like derv rings they may be camped now because there are so few things that can be traded. Probably not derv rings but you get the picture.

Another thing we should consider is "is it impractical for someone who wants an item to get it without buying it?" Like for example derv rings, is it impractical to get them if you want them without buying it? Not really. If you want the ring just kill dervs. So I don't think we need to make that item tradable. Make sense? What are your thoughts on that?

[gravystain]

Right I already have several items in mind that a person would have to break that rule. Items in Seb like seb berserker cloaks and random frog drops are technically random and very rare chance but i dont think they should hit the market. I'll do what i can to get you a list.