What are you looking for in a server?

[tdanger84]

Let people play through with a few bots. Most of us have some kind of life where we need to be able to casually play while being able to watch our kids or do other things. That is why so many of us push for a solo experience. That is why so many people box or go for bots/mercs. Grouping was fun back in the day but you also had to do it that way because there was such a huge population. None of these emu servers will ever see a population of that magnitude. Bots are better than boxing because boxing is tedious and a great deal of us(myself included) don't have the patience or the will to learn and use it. Anyone with half a brain can manage a few semi-autonomous bots. I also prefer having a few bots over just having everthing tuned for solo and giving everyone a ton of clickies. Let my cleric bot cure me, let my druid bot sow me, its cool as long as there is a decent ooc regen.

[kokey98]

I like servers that minimize the time sinks but not effort.

e.g. i don't want to kill "a blazing elemental" for 13 hours waiting for 1 of many item drops for a mage's epic quest. .: the difficulty should be killing the npc, not trying to stay awake.

e.g. i don't want to spend 15-30mins "running" somewhere when i have an hour or two to play. hitting autorun is not playing a video game, imo. if someone wants to take the long way, they can choose to do that if they enjoy it.

don't focus on "group think" b.s.

e.g. just because there's a consensus on these boards about any facet of the game, that is not a logical argument that it is right.

if people really preferred "classic" then you wouldn't see so many playing the live servers still.... and p99 has that market locked up. 1000+ people consistently. that contradicts what i said above slightly, but i don't believe it applies, because those that play p99 aren't looking for new servers to join, they are looking for a temporary break or window-shopping for the heck of it.

which is nothing negative about anyone or anything thing. However, if your making a server i don't think they are your target market nor a good focus group, for lack of a better way to explain.

I'm trying casual dreams. no custom spells and such. although the way that particular server is set up, it's almost a waste of time to play certain classes that i like... if you can get around that type of stuff, a solo-experience liek the previous post is similar to what i am looking for, too.

The biggest problem i see with the lower pop / short-run servers is a lack of consistency. they waffle or are unaware that their new idea or fix completely contradicts what they said they intended for the server - more power to them, but it's like taking the rug out from under someone from the user's standpoint. sure they can do whatever they want, and the user can go somewhere else when it happens - easy enough, but i don't think either party is gettign what they wanted so it can't be a good thing for either.

once you pick a path that makes sense well thought out, ignore the players, lol... generally speaking, i think that's the problem, btw, not the sysop acting on a whim -- suggestions from multiple and varied sources will create chaos compared to a well thought out plan/goal. Find a few "smarter" players/staff/whatever you can bounce ideas off or that you'll listen to about suggestions, but never take them from the peanut gallery, lol.

i tried to not say anything too specific for that reason about what kind of server you should make. hammer out some preferred concepts, map it out, then implement it after you've thought it through. maybe you want people to run 20minutes before they see an npc that's worthwhile to kill and its item only drops 1/100000 deaths :P