Just wanted to mention that I have not forgot about this server since I took it down. I am in the process of re-factoring the combat system based on a few things:
A few things I realized when helping others:
Quote:
* One thing that bores people about EverQuest is the lack of content. Another thing that bores people about EQEmulator is lack of original content.
* The quality of gameplay is less important than making content, but not to the point where the gameplay is fully neglected.
* The quality of content does not matter, as long as it is not broken, and is convenient.
* People like hack-n-slash video games better than traditional MMORPGs.
* There is no sufficient way to combine the elements of the aforementioned, but there is a way to make it seem more hacky-slashy.
* Traditional EQ Elements were built on advancing your character through experience and the 'journey', not so much 'the reward'.
* The best gear is obtained not by raiding, or grouping, or soloing, but the difficulty of the encounter therein. Encounters should take as many people as needed to take it down; never design things around how many people it should take, rather, you should design content around the quality of people's gear obtained from content.
* It isn't so much about how many conveniences you have in the game. I recalled making a post where half the fun would be traveling to your corpse. I reconsidered my theory, and the fun is actually playing the game, not watching your character play the game.
* You cannot please everyone, but you can try to make a game as pleasant as possible for everyone.
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Mechanics wise, I realized :
Quote:
* The previous incarnation failed because of a level-less system. Sure, you might think that because of no levels everyone would be on an equal playing field. Wrong, it just adds another playing field for people to advance on. The only playing field that I have noticed is gear, by removing levels everything is dependant on another factor. If you remove gear, then you do not have an MMORPG anymore. Thus, my previous idea pretty much sucked.
* With level back in the fray, there should be a way to upgrade your character past max level, except once again, I did not want to use gear. I realized that you could make a game fun by adding semi-legit concepts (being god) to it. Why not add a system where you could reset your level, but keep the gear you have, but add a permanent addition to your character, aka maplestory reborn? This can be done with perl as seen in EZ Server, but I did not want to copy their system directly.
* Since level ended up being half of the math, giving people significantly higher gear would become a viable option at lower levels. The trick is to maintain balance but upgrade your character at the same time. Instead of doing a hackish fix, I decided to tackle the problem directly by adding a permanent damage modifier to characters that gets modified every time you complete a reborn. This multiplies your damage by 0.1% every time you finish a reborn, and has a cap of 100%. With this system I made, other statistics can be added easily, and maybe even a player will be able to choose which statistic they wish to upgrade at some point in time, rather than having it just damage. Eventually, all players will have the same modifiers, and there will be an equal playing field vastly divided by time invested. I personally don't like the time invested model of MMORPGs, but it seems like everyone is doing that these days. I suppose if you put time into a character, you deserve it.
* Everything else about the server is basically the same. Classes have an active role in the sense that you don't press one or two buttons to do DPS. There's always something you have to do to maximize it.
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These are my findings, and i've worked on and off on this source code while doing other projects and taken the best things from them and put them into one server source. If you are interested in tracking my development, there is a google code page at:
http://code.google.com/p/mythic-edgev/
This project will be finished when it's finished, it is currently a side project at the moment.