ForEverQuest Server
 

I do hope I'm allowed to have a thread like this here, at least until we get our own website up. :)

As you may have noticed, I started a new server yesterday. I'm pleased to have already received comments from various people on how they're enjoying the server, which was a nice surprise! :)

My new server is called ForEverQuest (cheesy, cheesy! But I like it! 8)) , and it is hosted on my new RedHat 9 dedicated server, yay. :)

Anyway, this thread is here just to gather people's thoughts on the server, and any ideas anyone may have as to how they would like to see it improved etc. I'm willing to invest lots of time and effort into all this, so any and all suggestions are welcome. :)

We (being my boyfriend and myself!) are thinking of making this a custom, semi-legit server. We'd like players to enjoy the immersive experience of EQLive, whilst still enjoying the benefits an EQEmu server can provide. It would be really nice if we could get an active community going on this server! It would be nice to hear your thoughts on just how legit/non-legit you'd like this server to be (if you're planning on playing on it, that is, lol)

So yes, please post here with any thoughts at all you may have regarding the ForEverQuest server. :) If you've noticed any problems which need fixing, please also post here and I'll give it a shot. :D

(We'll have a website up at ForEverQuest.org, as soon as I can sort out all the DNS/Bind problems I'm having! Edit: that's actually sorted now, so the website will be up when... well, when I've made an actual website for it! :evil: )

Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention is that I haven't actually played on my own server yet, lol, because I stupidly patched to live yesterday, doh! :(

Also, I'm going to be implementing the #zone command for all players as soon as I can restart the server, although I don't want to do that whilst there are players on it, because that would just piss people off. ;) If only I could log on to let people know that the server needs to be restarted! *sigh*

Edit: Silly me, I just telnetted to 9000 to access the server that way, heh. The command #zone has now been implemented. :)

The fact that you seem to have something resembling a grasp of the English language goes a long way in my book.

I just hope you're prepared for spending a lot of time on this server. I speak from experience when I say that a custom server takes an incredible amount of time. That is, if you mean custom in the sense that you'll be making new mobs/items rather than just placing the old mobs in new locations.

LOL, I do hope I have more than just "something resembling a grasp of the English language"! ;) *waves an England flag*

And yes, I am definitely prepared to spend lots of time on this server. I do indeed mean that I intend on making new mobs/items. :)

Thanks for your comments, Melwin!

Best of luck to you, then. Maybe I'll come check it out sometime when someone releases a backpatch.

The server is running nicely, there was a bug when you zone and items are deleted but i belive it is fixed now...Thanks for the Simi-Ligit server=)

FTW

Thanks for playing on it! ;)

hey i came in the other day and talked to you

i was i dont remember what my name was!!! i donno what my name was!!!!

are you going to add uber exp bonuses?

extra levels?

all the original items from normal EQ?

cheap items on vendors taht are nice in EQ? (jboots, kodaics robe, cocw, cof)

fun events if the community grows?


the two most important things i like to see in a server is

ORIGINAL LOOTS! (which scorpius2k doesnt have and is why i want to quit it, plus they renamed all the uber mobs to things like DRAGONDEATH2K and LORD SNARE2k!!! and retarded things that dont make any sense) original loots and mobs are SO important

the scorp server is missing items on evrey kunark velious EVNE PRE KUNARK zones items, nothing drops in ldon or luclin either, which makes it useless to lvl



OH WELL this is MisterPink for now and i hope my rant has given you ideas of waht to add to your server !!!!

thanks!! answer my questions that i asked too lol when u get the chance

yes indeed!
 

An excellent server. I've longed for one of these. I've noticed a lot of servers leaning towards legit, and although I enjoy that as well, I like to have a server I can "explore" with various equipment on, while having to earn my way to it. I enjoy being able to choose custom equip, while still having to earn my levels and scribe my spells normally. I just like experimenting with diff. armor sets and stuff like that. Seems like everyone's going legit 'cuz itz in high demand, but there are still semi-legit servers which are still great.
I very much enjoy your server, and I thank you for making it such a great one.

I was wondering if Ranger Trainers have been implemented or not. I've been to various trainer zones and have found them to be either not present, or were acting as a eqemu shopkeeper rather than a trainer. I still have my kick and dual weld to train, and since itz semi-legit, I cannot learn the skill w/o a trainer. I was wondering whether the ranger trainer is just hidden, or it has not been completed yet. A response in your convenience would be great! Thanks.

Yes, Excellent server :lol:

To answer your questions and queries:

MisterPink, thanks for your questions! :) I'm honestly a bit unsure of some of these, as there's lots of issues that we've yet to work out yet! :) But anyway, here's my attempt at answering.

To be honest, I'm leaning towards a "no" for this one. We are semi-legit, as I said, but at the same time, we don't want to make things too easy. I believe there's quite enough available on the server at the moment to make levelling up quite fast as it is. :)

Quite possibly, yes. Again, this is something which is open for discussion though, and I'd like to hear what our other players think about it. As I said, we are a custom server, so it would indeed be nice to be able to expand beyond level 65 and create lots of new completely new zones and mobs for 65+. We'll see. :)

Whilst we'll be adding our own custom items, the original items will also be kept intact at the same time, yes. :)

Well, the #summonitem command is actually enabled for all players at the moment, so I'm not sure if there'd be much point in something like that. :) Again, everything is open for discussion, though!

Oh, absolutely! :) Once everything is a bit more settled, we'll most definitely be holding lots of regular fun events. :)

As I said, we'll be retaining the original EverQuest items, but also adding lots of our own at the same time. ;)

Thanks for all your comments and questions!

GundamGP02, I'm glad you're enjoying the server. :) I've now fixed Ranger trainers (or at least, they should be fixed!) Thanks for pointing out that they weren't working. :)


Other Server-ish announcements
I noticed that lots of trainers were slacking in their jobs. I've given them all a good slap on the wrist, so they should all have got their arses back in gear, now. :D If you do spot any trainers which still aren't working, though, please let me know!

Also, the #save and #scribespells commands have now been enabled for all players. :)

wow! Thx for the great short reply time. Looks like everything worked properly for the ranger trainer, thatz perfect! I would just like to inquire on another issue. I've noticed zoning is great for all other zones except for planes. Even though I meet the requirements and such, I noticed that whenever zoning in planes (regardless of it being a new plane, or PoP plane) the game does not work afterwards. It doesn't drop me off, but I need to force a termination because it will not load. I have to restart the game, and select my char before I'm able to get into the zone.

Sometimes it is worse, for instance when I tried PoFear, and PoInnovations, I had to actually wait for it to time out? I'm not sure, but I had to wait like 30 mins before trying again to actually zone through. I'm not sure why, but it only seems to be an issue with planar zones, so I'm wondering if we need to watch out for planes. I thought it might've just been 'cuz I played so long or something, but I tried on another computer, as well as loading up the game on a fresh restart and the problem persists.

Thanks in advance for your reply/actions! Have a nice day.

Meeble, im looking forward to the server once i get my damn DSL on tuesday ;)

Sorry but, The Data Base is real buggy items are getting destroyed when you zone and old items come back into your invotory...Im not sure if there is something out there you can get to fix it or not...But other than that the server is great...alot of people are 65 now and they are starting on AA or alts

65 warrior
59 monk

FTW

I think exp might be an incy wincy bit too fast if people have multiple 60+ already.

Good luck. The best advice I can ever give you is to never ever ever hire a GM that you haven't observed as a player.

Best way to observe a player your looking into recruiting for a gm staff, is to make a character on a diff account or so & see what there attitude is.

So what im really saying is what " Wiz " said but in my own words...

lol :)

could be just because since we can summon, we can fight a lot of stuff that is higher level than us. After all, it is a non-legit server so something like that is expected. I like playing on semi/non-legit servers 'cuz I can relax and do stuff I otherwise wouldn't be able to do in live.

Ok, Say the server is custom legit.... people ( as myself gm on one ) like Servers that have very few bugs & is fun...



Meaning hard time , if the gm staff is nice & awsome , the events are kool , im sure the number of players would improve :)

Hmm, thanks for letting me know, Vasker. Gah, that rather sucks. :/ I have absolutely no idea why that is happening, but I will look into it for you. :cry:

Hm, I haven't modified the experience at all from the original source code; as Gundam said however, it is probably because of the ability to summon items and such, meaning that levelling up is very easy. I suppose people are levelling up a teensy bit too fast however, which worries me because this can probably just lead to them getting bored and leaving. Hrm. I'll have to have a good think about this.

To everyone else: Thanks for your comments and advice etc. :) I'm definitely not going to just going around recruiting lots of random people as GM's, and indeed, at the moment, we're not really actively looking for staff as such. :)

*sigh* Now to figure out why the database is being an arse.

Database problems
Okay, after fishing around on the forums I've concluded that it's down to possibly corrupt items existing in the DB. As I haven't added any customised items yet I'm happy to try and source the database with the latest dumpeditems table, to see if that works. Fingers crossed! I'll let you know when it's done. :)

Other News
I was going to post a new topic asking about this, but the forums seem to be throwing up errors when starting a new topic. Hrm. Anyway, I hope someone who knows about this will drop by this thread. ;)

Right, well sorry if this is a bit of a silly question, but I was wondering if anyone could advise as to how many zoneservers I should have running for this server, considering that it's been having 10+ people trying to connect at times?

Note I said "trying" to connect, because I didn't realise until last night that I didn't have enough zoneservers running, therefore I think lots of people were getting turned away. :/ I only realised this when I myself tried to connect and kept getting 'zone not available' errors when there were 12 people online.

How many zoneservers does the more popular servers like Scorpious2k and The Grand Creation have running? :)

I was previously only running 5, but have now increased the number to 10. :) So hopefully that will alleviate some of the 'zone unavailable errors'!

Okay, new (hopefully non-corrupted!) items table has been sourced. Please let me know if this fixes the mysterious item loss problem! :)

Edit: Eep, please note that the main problem I forsee with this is that you may have found that you've lost your items when you logon, due to the fact that the old items don't seem to map to the same id's as the new ones. I'm very sorry about this. :( You will need to resummon the items you want!

We're running 75 zservers or so, 55 or so of which are static. The rest are buffer zones in case a static crashes.

Okay, thanks Melwin! :)


Right, now for an update on the database situation. It looks like sourcing the new items table didn't do the trick, and indeed, it made matters worse as charges stopped working, and also half the items we previously had were missing. For this reason, I've reloaded the old items table, as the general consensus was that most people were happier with it. :)

I am still investigating the zoning problem however, so until it is resolved, please #save often. :)

meeble, I have to say this is a gr8 server, I play a 65 warrior name Papertank and I am not bored yet, :D
I hope this server becomes a great success.
Infact I was the 5th 65 on the server, hehe :twisted:

few complaints
 

First off Meeb let me compliment you on a terrific server. There is just one thing that bothers me. If I zone intto a zone that nobody else is in already, sometimes the game freezes while zoning.(I could let it sit there for hours and it would never zone). So I close down eq, and restart it. Try to log back in etc. It generally takes me 4-5 restarts of EQ to get my char logged back in, and I'm not sure what causes this.

Re: few complaints
 

Hi there, I'm glad you're enjoying the server. Hm, I'm not sure what is causing this, but I'm wondering if it's something that can be solved by having static zoneservers, which is probably something I'll set up very soon. :)

Re: few complaints
 

The server drops you because the zone (serverside) loads too slow. I think, anyway.

Re: few complaints
 

Ah right, so having static zservers would indeed solve this?

In other news, my entire server seems to be down at the moment. I'm not sure what's going on, because I can still ping it, but I can't connect to any websites hosted on it or indeed to my EQEmu server. I'm not sure if this is just a problem my end but various different people from different locations seem to be having the same problem.

I've emailed my provider to see what is going on, so please sit tight in the meantime. I'm very sorry about this!

Yes I am having problems too, I know its gone from server select now, but before, I kept selected it and keep pressing 'Play Everquest' and it doesn't do anything, I've tried different servers and they all work.

Okay, it should be back up now. My server had indeed crashed, but my provider just rebooted it for me and things should be running fine again now!

hi meeble!

My char got stuck in PoI yesterday, and I thought I'd maybe wait it out a day to see if it would resolve itself out. Was thinking maybe just a small server kink, and I'll just tough it out for a day. Logged in today, and the zone still does not load properly. I've tried several times (and on different comps), and I guess maybe my char is stuck within that zone. I was wondering if you could edit my char to warp me outta there to a working/available zone. Any feedback you can also give me on this problem would be great, thx!

Sounds like a case of loginbug, almost. o_O

The server is really great now you just about have to group to level you just can summon a Can O' Whoop asss and a BSD and go kill stuff in potime...Its a really great server every one should give it a try... :D

FTW

yea too bad those got Nerfed, HAHAHA :lol:

Damnit, its doing it again, =( o well, meebles probably working on it :)

I hope it isnt like this all the time... :cry:

Hmm, the server appears to have crashed again doesn't it? :/ I've contacted the provider once again for a reboot. The servers been running absolutely fine for a few weeks, so I am not sure what is causing it to crash now. All I can think of is that I've added extra zservers, which may be listening on certain ports they shouldn't be? Hmm. Well, when the server is back up I'll investigate.

Thanks for your patience everyone, and again, I'm sorry about this!


Edit: Situation update. Again, the provider very nicely rebooted the server for me within just minutes. Ahh, it's nice when you find good service, heh. They now have someone helping me examine the logs to see if they can find what's causing the server to go down. For now, I won't start up the EQEmu server until I find what the problem is. Please sit tight! :)

Now to go to back to bed. I woke up at 4.30am to check on the server (women's intuition, or just plain sad?!) and indeed it was down, lol. It's past 5am now, and I need sleeep. /incoherent babble.

Damn that sucks, untill then ill try to find another simi-ligit server...hope you get it fixed soon :)

FTW

Meeble. . just curious what is your hardware specs on the server?

We had a similar problem on our weak p3 1gig machine with 256 ram.

We finally scratched it and got a 2ghz athlon with 1gig of ram and it's been working great.

The issue we had was the machine completely locking up. Not responding to anything except for ping. They had to hardware reboot it numerous times for a few weeks before we gave up on it. I think it was the lack of ram was causing too much strain on the machine itself, causing it to overload.