Population

[ChaosSlayerZ]

Good write up Sunbeam!

And I agree with most of it, specially with "people won't come, unless the people are already there", which is a big problem for creating group oriented server.

I think I want to note however - non camping progression works for Baldurs Gates, because BG is a full scale RPG with a big evolving story-line. Moderns MMOS like WoW don't really have that. Yes there usually some central story line which mostly caters to high end raiders, but that's it - most of WoW consists of small time quest chains that go like this : "Investigate Village X - Kill 5 mobs - Investigate Y - kill 10 mobs - Kill local boss - Reward". I can produce those quests chain 20 an hour.
When playing WoW I found myself desperately running around doing these, and getting XP too fast to actually enjoy exploring what is obviously a beautiful scenery. I actually WANT to stay in zone for a WHILE - I want to camp/roam around that beautiful waterfall to spawn that rare named Z and kill it for some sweet random loot. But NO - the quest chain keeps pushing me forward to next location when I barely taking a look at the current one, and a handful of quest steps down the road I am ALREADY leaving the zone for the next.

What I ideally want from EMU server is some sort of middle ground between Hard Core EQ and modern MMO.
EQ was too hardcore and too slow - WoW too casual and too fast.
Crafting in EQ was painful and mostly meaningless with only goal to skill up to do a quest combine.
Crafting in WoW is boringly easy and just based on mats grinds.
EQ2 had perfect crafting system (which they dumbified few years later) that was both REASONABLY challenging AND REWARDING.

What I want from EMu is a server where SOlO exists for ALL classes, but groups/raids also exists, and no bots/boxes are allowed.

This would allow server to be acceptable to casual solo players, and when their number builds up - they could potentially form up pick groups or even guilds to take on harder tasks. It is OK not to make ALL content solo-able - let there be hard encounters that REQUIRE a full group (or hek even 2 for super boss fights) - yes you can't do this solo, so persuade others to join in!

[sunbeam]

Originally Posted by ChaosSlayerZ

What I want from EMu is a server where SOlO exists for ALL classes, but groups/raids also exists, and no bots/boxes are allowed.

This would allow server to be acceptable to casual solo players, and when their number builds up - they could potentially form up pick groups or even guilds to take on harder tasks. It is OK not to make ALL content solo-able - let there be hard encounters that REQUIRE a full group (or hek even 2 for super boss fights) - yes you can't do this solo, so persuade others to join in!

I've come to think that the problem is, at least up through PoP (which is where both the content and the player interest stops really), the problem is the inordinate amount of hp's on the raid mobs.

Look a good group can do LOTS of things. Find a way to get through Ssra Temple, kill past the butterflies in Temple of Veeshan (and deal with those roaming assassins that seem to sneak up on you as adds).

But then you hit the crazy hp's on the raid mobs you started to see in Velious.

A C-Heal chain is just not a viable thing to require for progression (and this among other things is a loot based game; you need the loot to progress).

Really Kunark is doable without adjusting too many things. There is a lot more knowledge out there, and the techniques are all worked out.

It's when you start hitting Vulak, Avatar, and all the rest that it becomes totally unworkable.

How many people did it take to do Lord Bob (you know Doljon-whatever in Velk's) back in the day? Think he is only around 100,000 hp's with some buddies to make it harder. If you have to have more than that, it's not happening.

Then there are the things like PoSky (the deathtouching mobs). You know that that zone was never soloed till people could eat those deathtouches in some fashion? Just saying that zone was never soloed till after the Avatar of War could be soloed in game.

If you need PoSky for a quest piece (like some epics, notably the mage one), you really have to have a lot, like 40 people at least to do it if the zone is like live. And people are going to die every 18 seconds or whatever, actually the youtube videos I've seen have it timed "death touch incoming, 5-4-3-2- Buffy is down, drag her corpse and have Beerswill click her back... deathtouch in 10 seconds..."

[ChaosSlayerZ]

Originally Posted by sunbeam

Look a good group can do LOTS of things. Find a way to get through Ssra Temple, kill past the butterflies in Temple of Veeshan (and deal with those roaming assassins that seem to sneak up on you as adds).

But then you hit the crazy hp's on the raid mobs you started to see in Velious.

Well essentially - you can't just take stock EQ DB adjust a few numbers and call it a new server - the ENTIRE WORLD has to be re-done from scratch
So lev 61 mob in Velious is NOT 4x times stronger than lev 60 mob in Kunark, but smoothly progresses to be slightly harder

Heck if anything the combat engine needs to be rewritten to be more straight forward rather than try to emulate LIFE's weird pre and post 40/50/60 difficulty spikes, hard/soft stat caps etc.

And yeah, DT fights were the stupidest of the all - it was essentially a challenge only to bring shit load of people to survive them, with no chance to play around them.
Good things they dropped this crap in all following expansions.