I was pretty fond of Discordant Whisper myself (I make what I play after all), so why was it always empty? After two years we spiked to over 40 players and then the bulk of them left within weeks. It was too easy, and maybe leveling was too slow for most people.
I don't know, but the majority of the people I spoke with ignored the custom quests and just ran around grinding for random drops and whining about the melee pets.
I had a lot of code trying to mash the inflation of 16+ expansions into one meaningful world with a coherent progression and thought the last big update did that reasonably well. Still, nobody's there.
The Dungeon Crawl Test server was where I was actually testing the Dungeon Crawl idea, which was completely custom and never finished. It saw a lot of different things though because it was ultimately a test server and I do a lot of experimenting. Most of that work found its way into Discordant Whisper in one form or another.
It is so named because that's what it has always been and I didn't want existing players to have to hunt it down in the list after a name change. Oddly enough, Discordant Whisper was named for a PvP idea that never saw the light of day.
Also, just to be clear, DW wasn't taken down and replaced. Akkadius was kind enough to provide reliable hosting for the test server so I had them both up at the same time.
DW was taken down because it was perpetually empty or < 2 at peak times and I needed a test server.
DW was a spin on classic, it just ended up being too heavy-handed. This is also a spin on classic but instead of trying to manipulate the existing content into a particular idea, I wanted to make that existing content meaningful on its own. Have you looked at the quests svn lately? It's full of people's hard work and I doubt most of them see any action even on a server like p1999. We didn't have much use for them when I was on live at that time either.
I think it's nice to get some str gear and have a visible, if not minor, increase in my melee damage, or a single piece of int gear raising my necro's dots by a point or two. Getting the SBS off the trainer was more meaningful knowing that the shield AC was going toward bash damage, etc. There are a lot of mechanics at work that you're ignoring. It IS easier to solo because your stats do something, even in small amounts, and reasonable equipment is available at lower levels if you're diligent. The bonus loot adds diversity and is competitive with natural drops. Most of that depends on the expansion the mob existed in. I tried to balance the curve so that it worked with luclin bosses and classic bosses alike. The point is that we can't artificially inflate drops while trying to make old quests and items relevant.
I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but last I checked ball-bearings were pretty cool.
My suspicion is that you didn't play on the server long enough to really see how it worked. That's fine, maybe it's not your thing. I enjoy purely custom work as well as the nostalgia of classic. That's why DW went down, I'm still working on those ideas, but in the mean time I'm having fun with this server.
I don't really know what you're upset about at this point. Basically, I took down a server nobody was playing on so some friends and I could enjoy a new twist on classic EQ, hopefully with some like-minded strangers.
If I had a place to put DW, I would keep it up forever, and it's safely backed up, ready to be deployed the moment I start to miss it, but it was my first server and saw over 2 years of life.
I hate the idea of making all those characters unavailable for people, but there just wasn't enough interest.
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