As I understand the situation, PEQ's purpose is to emulate the Live servers as closely as possible as they currently exist, but in order to maintain a modicum of balance and enjoyment, we move expansion by expansion in the order they were released so the people playing and testing can experience that content as if they were actual expansions just being relased. This allows us to encourage players to test the content as it comes instead of ignoring 'old' content in favor of 'new content' (IE releasing Velious and OoW at the same time would likely result in poor testing and play for Velious as people focused on getting the gear from OoW which would mean that Velious couldn't be tweaked properly). Each expansion is slowly being tuned up to its Live version circa its original tuning phase, and, in some cases its final tuning phase. This means then that we have to move slowly to ensure the project as closely resembles Live as possible. This means that we'll eventually be 100% Live, but at the moment we're sometimes forced to be 100% Live for the current expansion era. In some cases, as far as the database is concerned, we choose to make alterations to retain portions of EQ that no longer exist in their current condition (IE the database contains the code for Sleeper's v.1 and v.2 but the server runs v.2. Same with VP and I WISH PoM). The project attempts to 100% emulate Live, but it's a VERY slow process. The ultimate goal is to be 100% in-line with Live's final expansion, but at the moment we're hindered by the Titanium client (the current goal is to be 100% Titanium until someone can update our client and we can get a new sniffer). Until Sony ceases releasing expansions, we will not have a SET goal, but we will have an ideal goal. Were someone to take the upcoming expansion (4 weeks!) which contains all previous expansions and systems and update the EMU system to support it AND create a new sniffer that works with the new expansion AND can convert the information into a format that could easily be imported into the EMU and various databases, then things would go a lot faster... until then, though, we move as we can towards that good and final goal. I just hope we can complete the project before Sony makes the final move and pulls the last Live server some time in the future. We are, after all, on a time limit goverened by subscribing players. So... ya know... bribe your coder friends to update the client, the sniffer, and a packet converter.
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